Hannah’s research work is located within Critical Femininity Studies
Critical Femininity Studies aims to give serious attention to the study of femininities, and to redress myths, stereotypes and failures of theory, to more fully account for embodiments and experiences associated with femininity. Critical Femininity Studies centres feminist, queer, and intersectional considerations.
All of Hannah’s research is also primarily concerned with questions around gender, sexuality, and identity. See more details on Hannah’s various research projects below
Beauty culture and salons
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This project aims to investigate the role that hair and beauty workers play in providing informal social and emotional support for their clients and provide solutions for best practice in connecting community services with salon workers, to address crucial social issues such as family violence, mental health, and social isolation. This research project has implications for both the hair and beauty industry and for how we think about and theorise beauty practices in relation to wellbeing and identity.
See the project website www.beautysalon.com for all outputs and media.
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The Pandemic Sensory Archive (PSA) was created with Dr William Tullett (Anglia Ruskin University, UK). The aim of the PSA is to explore bodies and senses through a digital platform, in light of experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Via interviews with sensory experts ranging from hairdressers and charity workers to chefs and urban planners the website aims to promote a conversation about sensory worlds in a post-pandemic world.
Hannah’s entry into this project was primarily through her interest in touch as informed by her beauty and hair salon work.
See our project website www.archiveofintimacy.com for all of the outputs including interviews with sensory experts
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(2023) McCann, Hannah, “No Salon, No Sanctuary: Beauty Under Lockdown.” Gender, Place and Culture
(2022) Tullett, William & McCann, Hannah, “Sensing the Pandemic: Revolution, Revelation, and Acceleration.” Senses and Society, 17(2): 170-184
(2022) McCann, Hannah, “‘Very unsure of what's to come’: Salon worker experiences of COVID-19 in Australia during 2020.” Current Sociology (online first)
(2022) McCann, Hannah, “‘Helps Me Feel More Like Myself’: Navigating Queer Precarity via the Beauty Salon.” Gender, Place and Culture (online first)
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(2020) ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards (DECRA). Project: “Beyond Skin-Deep: Social and Emotional Work in the Beauty Industry” ($389,408)
(2020) British Academy Seed Funding (with Dr William Tullett (Anglia Ruskin University)). Project: “Future Intimacies: Bodies, Touch, and Co-Presence in a Digital World” (£2170)
(2018) Research Agreement, Eastern Domestic Violence Service (EDVOS). Project: “Supporting Hairdressers as Champions of Change: Gender-Based Violence and Responding in the Salon Context” ($7000)
(2016) Faculty Research Grant Scheme, University of Melbourne. Project: The Cost of "Getting Ready": Femininity and Aesthetic Labour in the Beauty Industry ($5026)
Sexualities and queer theory
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Queer Theory Now (2020) is a textbook offering an introduction to queer theory, co-authored with Dr Whitney Monaghan (Monash) and available via Bloomsbury. QTN has been widely adopted in Queer and Gender Studies courses across the world, and a second edition has been commissioned for completion in 2024.
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Flowing from her work on queer and feminist theory, and studies of queer femininities, Hannah has noted the general lacuna in theorising bisexuality in these arenas. Her work engaging with questions of bisexuality is informed by lived experience.
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(2023) McCann, Hannah, “Queerstralia: resistance, resilience, and the gaps that remain”, History Australia (online first)
(2022) McCann, Hannah, “Navigating ‘Normativity’: Kinship and Biphobia in Times of Crisis.” Journal of Autoethnography, 3(2): 212-216
(2022) McCann, Hannah, “The Refusal to Refuse: Bisexuality Trouble and the Hegemony of Monosexuality.” Journal of Bisexuality, 22(1): 71-89
(2022) Campbell, Alyson, Cohen, Meta, Farrier, Stephen, & McCann, Hannah. “Embracing Feral Pedagogies: Queer Feminist Education Through Queer Performance.” Gender in an Era of Post-truth Populism: Pedagogies, Challenges and Strategies, Penny Jane Burke, Julia Coffey, Rosalind Gill & Akane Kanai (Eds.), London: Bloomsbury
(2020) McCann, Hannah & Monaghan, Whitney, Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures. London: Bloomsbury
(2016) McCann, Hannah, “Epistemology of the Subject: Queer Theory’s Challenge to Feminist Sociology.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 44(3&4): 224-243.
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(2019) University of Melbourne's Creativity and Wellbeing Research Initiative (CAWRI) (with A/Prof Alyson Campbell (University of Melbourne), Dr Jennifer Audsley (Doherty Institute)) and Dr Stephen Farrier (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama)). Project: “The importance of queer performance for queer communities: using ‘feral pedagogies’ to explore why it is so vital and what impacts it has on individual and community wellbeing” ($13,000)
Femininities in feminist theory
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Hannah’s first research monograph Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation (2018) available with Routledge, is based on her PhD research on queer femininities completed at the Australian National University in 2015.
This work involved examining the limits of popular feminist approaches to femininity, as well as the gaps in attending to queer femininity in much feminist critique. Several chapters of this work are dedicated to analysing interviews with queer femmes in Australia, caught in the intersections of feminist debates about femininity and feelings of femme invisibility in the queer community.
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Femininity has long been the subject of feminist critique in the West. Yet there remains much to be said about how to theorise femininity through a queer feminist lens.
Within feminist debates of femininity, queer femininities have often been ignored, while trans femininities have been openly derided. These issues have come to a head in recent years under the auspice of the so-called “gender wars” around who counts as a woman.
Hannah’s work aims to attend to feminine gender expression and/or the desire for gender without assuming femininity is a purely patriarchal construct.
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(2022) McCann, Hannah, “Is There Anything Toxic About Femininity? The Rigid Femininities That Keep Us Locked In.” Psychology and Sexuality, 13(1): 9-22
(2020) McCann, Hannah, “‘The Free-Flying Natural Woman Boobs of Yore’? The Body Beyond Representation in Feminist Accounts of Objectification.” Feminist Review, 126 (1): 74-88
(2018) McCann, Hannah, Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation, New York: Routledge (Feminism, Femininity and Female Sexuality Series)
(2018) McCann, Hannah, “Beyond the Visible: Rethinking Femininity through the Femme Assemblage”, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 25(3): 278-292
(2015) McCann, Hannah, “Pantomime Dames: Queer Femininity Versus ‘Natural Beauty’ in Snog, Marry, Avoid.” Australian Feminist Studies, 30(85): 238-251
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(2019) The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) funding (with Dr Kythera Watson-Bonnice (Deakin) and Dr Akane Kanai (Monash)). Project: “Rethinking Femininity: Femininities, Feelings and Feminist Practices” ($1,998)
(2019) Australian Women and Gender Studies Association (AWGSA) feminist event grant (with Dr Akane Kanai (Monash)). Project: “Rethinking Femininity: Femininities, Feelings and Feminist Practices” ($500)
(2016) Feminist Theory Workshop International Travel Award to attend the Annual Feminist Theory Workshop at Duke University, Durham ($1000)
Gender and sexuality in fandom
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In 2018 Hannah commenced work with Dr Clare Southerton (LaTrobe) to investigate queer fandom practices in digital space. The “Shipping Larry: Intimacies, Relationships and Community in Online Fan Spaces” project focuses on the case study of One Direction fangirls involved in the Larry fandom subgroup.
Through digital ethnography this project examined digital queer fandom as an affective community that offers a sense of queer belonging without the usual requisites of identity politics. This project also engages in questions around queerbaiting and similar debates within fandom studies.
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(2021) McCann, Hannah, & Southerton, Clare, “Boy Crazy, but Not in a Straight Way: The ‘Truth’ About Larry in the One Direction Fandom.” Journal of Fandom Studies, 9(2): 143-159
(2019) McCann, Hannah & Southerton, Clare, “Repetitions of Desire: Queering the One Direction Fangirl.” Girlhood Studies, 12(1): 49-65
(2019) Southerton, Clare, & McCann, Hannah, “Queerbaiting and Real Person Slash: The Case of Larry Stylinson.” Queerbaiting, Joseph Brennan (Ed.), University of Iowa Press (Fandom & Culture Series)
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To date there is no funding associated with this project.