June Melody

June Melody has been a Stuart Hall PhD Scholar at the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London between 2017–20. Her research interests include psychoanalysis, social theory and qualitative social research.

Melody’s PhD research, entitled ‘Playboy Bunnies: An Archive of Feminist Possibility’, re-examines the place of the Bunny Girl in the history of feminism to explore possible horizons for feminist thought. This research interrogates the standard feminist critique of the Bunny as an exploitative and victimising social position, in order to produce a more complex account. Melody’s methodology engages auto-ethnographic accounts recorded in documentary film. It also connects histories of Playboy Bunnies to other historical archives of feminist possibility, wherein stories of female protest and empowerment are retold in the present as important drivers for change and transformation in the workplace.