LLOYD, Fran

PERSONAL:

Female. Education: Manchester University, M.A.; Ph.D. studies (in British sculpture).

ADDRESSES:

Home—England. Office—Kingston University, Knights Park, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT12QJ, England. E-mail—f.lloyd@Kingston.ac.uk.

CAREER:

Educator, editor. Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, England, School of Arts and Design History, head of department.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Deconstructing Madonna, B. T. Batsford (London, England), 1993.

(Editor) Contemporary Arab Women's Art: Dialogues of the Present, WAL (London, England), 1999.

(With Catherine O'Brien) Secret Spaces, Forbidden Places, Berghahn Books (New York, NY), 2000.

(Editor) Displacement and Difference: Contemporary Arab Visual Culture in the Diaspora, Saffron Books (London, England), 2000.

(Editor) Consuming Bodies: Sex and Contemporary Japanese Art, Reaktion Books (London, England), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

Fran Lloyd, an English academic, has researched and written extensively on contemporary visual culture, issues of gender, sexuality, and the body. She has also edited a handful of books that deal with similar themes. Her first book, Deconstructing Madonna, examined the rock star as an icon of contemporary culture. The collection of essays looks not only at the arc of Madonna's career, but also at the music industry of the 1980s and 1990s, and then investigates issues of sexuality and control that the singer raises on her records and videos. Noting how far such cultural studies have come in the university, Peter Aspden, writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, observed that "the rock star and the hip academic have grown old together, and a book like Deconstructing Madonna scarcely causes a ripple of unease."

With the 1999 Contemporary Arab Women's Art: Dialogues of the Present, Lloyd edits a gathering of essays on the occasion of a touring exhibition of eighteen Arab women artists, while in Secret Spaces, Forbidden Places, edited with Catherine O'Brien, she turns her attention to taboo in art and literature. In the year 2000 Displacement and Difference: Contemporary Arab Visual Culture in the Diaspora, Lloyd gathers the writing of scholars, critics, curators, and artists to look at how Arab artists in exile and immigration in Britain and the United States express Arab identities.

Lloyd examines sexuality in Japan in her 2002 gathering of eight writings, Consuming Bodies: Sex and Contemporary Japanese Art. David McClelland, writing in Library Journal, called the collection a "careful, thoughtful compendium … by eight different Japanese and Western authors examining the sexual history of Tokyo, the life of sex works, the interplay between sex and consumerism," and other topics. Artists discussed included BuBu, Mariko Moil, Hiroshi Masuyama, Yoshido Shimada, and Takashi Murakami, in a discussion of art works from Edo period wood-blocks to contemporary fiberglass sculptures and the manga cartoon tradition. Steven Poole, writing for the Guardian Online, found this a "beautifully produced book." Poole further thought that the study was "fascinating." Susan J. Napier, writing in Persimmon Magazine Online, summed up the same title as a "rich discussion of sex, consumerism, and art in relation to Japanese culture." Napier thought the volume "should appeal both to those interested in the visual arts and performance art and to anyone concerned about the state of contemporary Japanese society." Lloyd contributed the third chapter to the collection; it is an introduction to seven contemporary Japanese artists who display in their work either a "radical critique of consumerism," according to Napier, or "a mining of popular folkloric elements." For Napier, the book "deserves a wide audience."