Professor Ruth Holliday

Profile

I have been working at the University of Leeds since 2002, becoming Professor of Gender and Culture in 2006. I have been Director of Studies (2002-2004) and Director (2004-2011) for the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies and later served as Director of Research and Innovation and Director of Recruitment and Admissions. Before Leeds I worked at Staffordshire University and Birmingham City University. I have also been a Visiting Professor at UTS in Sydney.

Research interests

I have (co-) written or edited 7 books and around 50 articles and book chapters and am best known for my work on the (cultural) sociology of the body and material culture, particularly in the areas of Kitsch and Cosmetic Surgery. This work is rooted in the intersections of gender, class and sexuality and in countries such as the UK, China and South Korea. I have worked in many different areas of sociology – employment relations, organisation studies, cultural studies, media studies, gender studies, for example, and these came together to inform my last funded project on cosmetic medical tourism. The reearch explored cosmetic surgery tourism from the UK, China and Australia, to Eastern Europe, East Asia and North Africa focussing not only on the experiences of patients, but also on the structure and regulation of the industry. The book from the project (co-written with Meredith Jones and David Bell)  Beautyscapes, won the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize in 2020. I am currently working on the impacts of low fertility cultures on gender relations and identities, especially in East Asia.

My earlier work on cosmetic surgery considers the way it is experienced by women and men of different classes, ethnicities, nationalities and sexualities.

Related to the cosmetic surgery research, I have a broader theoretical interest in beauty and taste and consumption as applied to both things and people. My co-written book (with Tracey Potts) Kitsch! Cultural Politics and Taste draws on Kant, Bourdieu and Ranciere to explore the construction of popular taste in opposition to art and was also published with Manchester University Press. The book examines the cultural politics of kitsch, specifically the ways in which it has been classed, gendered and racialised as ‘bad taste’ or the taste of ‘the other’. It argues that two ‘taste structures’ – camp and cool – allow kitsch to be reclaimed, but that camp and cool have profoundly different orientations to kitsch in their use of irony. Whilst Camp is ‘tender feeling’, Cool masks distance from kitsch.

In addition to these substantive themes I also have a strong international reputation for my work on methodologies, especially visual methods. This, and my interests in sexualities, emerged initially from a research project examining the identity performances of queer subjects, using video diaries. From this research the importance of the body and material culture, as well as ‘comfort’, emerged as major factors in the construction of identities. I was also Co-I on the ESRC project ‘Building Capacity in Visual Research’.

• Aesthetic Surgery and Symbolic Capital in South Korea

Qualifications

• PhD Sociology
• BA Electronics and Management Science

Professional memberships

• Member of the British Sociological Association

Student education

I am currently teach on the following modules.

• Theorising Gender (MA)
• Contested Bodies (MA)
• Gend, Technologies and the Body (Level 2)
• Central Problems in Sociology (Level 2)
• Dissertations (Level 3 and MA)

I also supervise PhD studnts exploring the body, love and intimacy, and low fertility.

Current postgraduate researchers

• Sel Lee
• Xingyi Li
• Luna Yihan Fu