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This paper employs digital ethnographic methods to explore the Facebook fan group for the popular podcast My Favorite Murder. We argue that the My Favorite Murder podcast and Facebook group, while providing a potentially unique feminist online space for its members in its early days, quickly devolved into a toxic space rife with conflict and ultimately destroyed by white-centred feminism and white supremacy. We explore failed gatekeeping practices in relation to other Facebook podcast fan groups that have met a similar demise. Finally, we question whether truly inclusive anti-racist feminist spaces can exist in capitalistic models of media production and consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that existing accounts of the 'post-feminist' gender regime place excessive emphasis on modes of repudiation of feminism, at the expense of analysing possibilities for the affirmation of feminism in the mainstream media. I argue that this oversight may be rectified by an assessment of the ways in which feminism is affirmed, contested and spoken about in the pages of the quality press. Consequently, the bulk of the paper consists of an analysis of articles specifically about feminism and gender in two British quality newspapers with divergent political orientations. These are The Guardian, which is left-leaning and broadly pro-feminist, and The Times, which is more conservative and ambivalent towards feminism. In so doing, the paper introduces the notion of feminist 'domestication' as central to constructions of feminism in The Guardian, and to a lesser extent in The Times. Domestication refers to the explicit or implicit affirmation of a safe, unthreatening form of feminism via a disavowal of a more radical feminist position. Strategies of domestication thus constitute an acceptable space for feminism to reside, whilst at the same time curtailing its more radical political dimensions. Introducing the notion of 'domestication' gives us a better understanding of the conditions under which feminism can be affirmed within mainstream public discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caste in the South Asian context is a deeply felt phenomenon, practised through bodily and sensory regimentation, and the prescriptive social organization of bodies in space. These relationships between caste and embodiment have historically been closely regulated in norms around the partaking, sharing and cooking of food, and meat in particular. This paper examines how these gastronomic prescriptions endure and take on new meanings in digital food media, which disrupts physical space and food's relationships to the body and sensory experience. Drawing on two years of ethnography with creators who produce home-cooking content in the emerging Indian "creator economy," this paper considers how caste is embodied, articulated and remediated online during a time of violent Hindu nationalist food politics in India. How is caste articulated even when it is not explicitly named by creators in their posts? How are caste-based disgust and humiliation, and conversely, caste intimacy elicited by creators as they labor for the creator economy? Bringing together feminist and anti-caste theories of experience, articulation and embodiment, the paper theorizes caste as affect, and in doing so, illuminates how it comes to have a digital life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alcohol and Other Drug Facilitated Sexual Violence (AODFSV), known as "drink-spiking," is the administration of alcohol or other drugs to someone without their consent, with the intent to harm them. Investigation into portrayals of AODFSV in the Australian news media is needed. Using feminist critical discourse analysis, this paper investigated the portrayal of AODFSV in the Australian news media in the past ten years. 226 articles were included for analysis and three themes were identified. Firstly, "how the media constructs the drink spiking narrative," uses the "cautionary tale" that warns women about the dangers of the night-time economy and reinforces and perpetuates victim-blaming and rape myths. Secondly, "how the media normalises the drink spiking discourse" focuses on the substances used in drink spiking, the settings, the construction of the perpetrator and the victim as well as the depictions of sexual violence. Thirdly, "how the media shapes responses from emergency services" including police and hospital staff. This paper highlights the way the media creates and reinforces drink-spiking discourse, which constructs drink-spiking as individual behaviour rather than a culturally embedded issue. Such ideology perpetuates victim blaming and rape myths. We argue for critical and thoughtful reporting on AODFSV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to reflect on the ways in which a non-metropolitan academic feminist community engages with digital media to reimagine the discipline of Women’s Studies, and consequently feminist politics. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Women’s Studies Centre at a university in Tamil Nadu, India, this paper moves away from the framework of the digital as simply enabling or empowering, and instead seeks to examine these digital cultures as shaped by the particularities of their geographic coordinates, and as part of a larger media environment which is characterised as much by continuities as it is by innovations. In doing so, it attempts to understand feminisms as media phenomena that are actively shaped by and shaping media technologies and discourses. It argues that Women’s Studies scholars in these locations, operating from hybrid geographical and digital places, enable the possibility of decentring feminist scholarship and thus allow for a reframing of the digital. To do this, it focuses on three distinct areas of engagement—the co-creation of knowledge in Tamil language Wikipedia, interactions on social media platforms, and their engagements with little magazines in their online avatars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how documentary cinema in war contexts can challenge gender representations. To do so, we adopt a feminist and postcolonial approach to analyze the work of Catalan non-fiction filmmaker Alba Sotorra in Kurdistan, Afghanistan and Catalonia. In her films, Sotorra positions herself close to a series of subjects absorbed by wars and armed conflicts that (re)define their identities while acting beyond gender stereotypes. In particular, the paper analyzes the modes of production and representational strategies of two of Sotorra's latest feature films, Game Over and Commander Arian, documentaries with which the filmmaker aims at overcoming the visual exploitation of alterity. After an introduction to Sotorra, and a brief revision of the theory of postcolonial feminist cinema, our argument unfolds in four parts. Firstly, we reflect on cinematic representations of women and men at war; secondly, we introduce our methodology, based on in-depth interviews with the director to support our film analysis; thirdly, we contrast our hypotheses by means of close-readings of the films; lastly, we reflect on how the filmmaker aligns herself with intersectional feminism by using empathy and solidarity towards her subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to understand the "accented" documentary practice of Mizgin Müjde Arslan, a contemporary Kurdish female filmmaker who was born in Turkey but lives in diaspora. I will discuss her filmmaking through the features of accented cinema, developed by Hamid Naficy and furthered by Asuman Suner. These features are multi-perspectivity, liminality, being the subject and the storyteller simultaneously, deconstructing the borders, replacing the history with a new memory, and cyclicity. As Naficy's model lacks the gender dimension in its imagery of nation, identity and belonging, I will discuss his model from a broader perspective by adapting Suner's approach, adding the gender dimension into my discussions. For this purpose, I will use the principles of "accented feminism", a term I develop within the paper and draw the concept of "accented feminist cinema" from. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the inventive everyday digital practices that Cubans have put into place to surf the waves of digital scarcity. The paper itself is an experiment in what Donna Haraway calls SF stories (Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation or Speculative Feminism). We will engage in a process of speculative narrative exploring stories about digital practices in Cuba by connecting them to the animal world. Through the use of metaphors belonging to the world of aquatic creatures emerging in our collaborators' stories, we will address everyday digital practices as symbiotic assemblages. We argue that the speculative mixture of fabulation and aquatic metaphors can function as an antidote to simple dualistic reductions, perhaps offering a critical understanding of the meaning of digital technologies outside Western deterministic and dualistic categories. Part of a larger project on digital culture in Cuba, this paper aims to present a speculative work of fabulation where the animal world meets technology, creative writing and situated stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2021, a girl named Du Meizhu revealed on Weibo (Chinese Twitter) of having been emotionally and sexually abused by the top-tier idol Kris Wu. The incident gained publicity over the month and climaxed in mid-July, when netizens started the hashtag #girls help girls# on Weibo. Rapidly topping the trending list, this incident led to heated discussions around the case and women's social status in contemporary Chinese patriarchy. Yet unlike its #MeToo counterpart, the hashtag had been taken down hastily within hours, cutting its practitioners off from further engagements. In this paper we nonetheless propose a more positive interpretation of the incident. Combining Massumi's affect theory with Foucault's heterotopia, we argue that Weibo users constructed themselves an affective heterotopia in the hashtag #girls help girls#. Through an affective textual analysis of the posts in the hashtag, we argue that while vulnerable to censorship, the affective force in this heterotopia is ultimately untameable to the discursive regime, potentially leading to concrete feminist ends. In so doing, we offer methodological insight for understanding online feminist discussions in the particular context of contemporary China, adding to scholarship that transcends the global North orientation in feminist theory and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-WWII United States, Maidenform’s “I dreamed I went shopping in my Maidenform bra” campaign (1949–1969) was seen as a prime example of the psychoanalytical sell: the ads seemed to tap into the repressed psyche of the 1950s housewife, directly pulling the levers of deep-seated sexual desires. This remarkable account has carried over into more recent analyses with little interrogation as to its soundness, and non-Freudian variants have equally re-iterated a “duped housewives” narrative. These accounts, however, tend miss out on the humor that characterized both the ads and the audience’s responses to them. The Dreams might have led to purchase, but they were also reimagined across popular culture in the form of plugs, puns, spoofs, jokes, pranks, parodies, fancy dress, and college floats. In this paper, I explore how Maidenform’s message migrated from the company’s control to a fixture in consumer culture. I argue that humor enabled audiences to mull over the implications of ads’ message and articulate the tensions and discomforts around the depiction of women’s bodies and mental aspirations. This study highlights how consumer responses can complicate dominant narratives in the history of advertising to women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how social media and internet memes transformed public discourse on domestic abuse in Hungary during 2012–13, and how they have been used to mobilise protests and articulate a much wider social feeling against the issue than had previously been thought to exist. More closely, it discusses these anti-domestic abuse protests through Bennett and Segerberg's connective action analytical framework, and studies internet memes as acts of personalised bottom-up political opinion-expressing that enabled netizens to connect to a feminist movement goal, that of standing up to domestic abuse, in flexible ways, which was important in a country that had traditionally been seen as sharing strong negative sentiments about feminism. It also argues that feminist digital mobilisation and large-scale meme circulation, both articulated primarily through Facebook and against the existing governmental discourse on domestic abuse, worked in tandem as bottom-up pressure on the government to introduce a new policy tool, a law, against domestic abuse. The paper also discusses the contribution of these protests to rebooting various stages of the legislation process of Hungary's Law on Domestic Abuse, entering into force in July 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that the postfeminist performance of contemporary Chinese advertising deflects attention away from the feminist call for gender equality. First, I explain why Chinese feminist development leads to "femininity melancholia." I then examine the postfeminist heroes and heroines—that is the ideals of masculinity and femininity that inspire audience imitation—in contemporary Chinese advertising campaigns and femvertising vlogs (recent advertising with a focus on empowered women). In unveiling the pressures of young Chinese men's idealized masculinity, I suggest Chinese men dread female individuation and desire to preserve women's dependence and domesticity. Such pressures are intensified by idealized masculinity in advertising to men's ambivalence towards femininity via Judith Butler's gender melancholia. Engaging with Angela McRobbie's ideas about postfeminist heroines trapped in performing perfectly balanced femininity, I propose that the postfeminist performance by Chinese female vloggers indicates that young women have maintained a sense of self-definition without abandoning their femininity in the face of intense scrutiny from social and cultural gazes. My analysis of the interplay between the "femininity melancholia" shown in contemporary Chinese advertising and Chinese people's feminist consciousness contributes to the postfeminist debate about the relationship between feminism and femininity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a case study of the online media practices of the neo-Nazi organisation, the Nordic Resistance Movement, conducted in the context of an ongoing project on contemporary forms of violent extremism in Sweden. Focusing on the activities of female "online influencers", the paper explores the contradictory discourses around the role of women as "race warriors" and "Nordic wives" as this is articulated both by the women in the organisation themselves and in the online universe of the organisation more generally. On the one hand, women's positions are determined and heavily policed by men in an organisation that openly propagates women's subordination to men and their natural and biological role in the realm of homemaking. On the other, the discourses produced by these women are saturated by ideas of female empowerment, sisterhood, emancipation and the importance of women in the reproduction of the white race. The content analysis of online propaganda produced by female activists about the role of women positions these contradictory pulls of "White femininity" inherent to the white supremacist movements at the current political juncture in which the extreme right is growing and actively looking to recruit women as part of a broader strategy to "mainstream" in Sweden and mobilise internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering intersectional feminism as a reference, the aim of this paper is to examine the discursive powers of the movie Aquarius for the representation of women. The emphasis is on Clara who is the protagonist of the plot. The study here seeks to understand how the cinematographic language represents Clara and how it interferes in the construction of this character. The methodology of this qualitative research consisted of both a bibliographic study and a movie analysis. The results show that the representation of the movie's main character does not resort to stereotypes commonly associated with women, nor with elderly women. From the perspective of intersectional feminism, the main character defines her place of speech as an empowered woman who is committed to progressive ideals. Despite being represented this way, the protagonist also succumbs to issues of hierarchy and power in her relationship with her maid, Ladjane. The discriminations and oppressions that permeate the experiences of these women mainly have to do with issues of gender, social class, and race. This shows the permanence of historical problems which intertwine in the representation of women in the movie Aquarius. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video activism is among the predominant forms of contemporary digital activism. In networked cultures dominated by social media platforms, video activism has seen various transformations. This paper investigates the role of video activism within the feminist movements in Turkey in the context of digital culture. In-depth interviews have been conducted to explore the tactics of feminist video activists. In particular, the tactics of feminist video activists have been analysed at four levels: video production, video distribution, video ethics and video archiving. The results show how networked video activism contributes to the feminist movements at three levels: the creation of feminist media as an alternative to patriarchal narratives, the organisation of affect and solidarity among women and finally, self-reflexivity and subjectification for activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Western societies, feminisms are being taken up in new and exciting ways. We are seeing a range of feminisms being expressed in the mainstream media and through alternative sites. A unique aspect of contemporary Western feminism is the take up by men, particularly those with profiles in public life and the media, and how this can build male feminist capital. This "bloke turn" has been welcomed by some as sign of the building of alliances for the feminist project; however, it has also been criticised as an encroachment on women's spaces by men. Through case studies of three high-profile men occupying media spaces—Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Australian television host Karl Stefanovic, and British actor Benedict Cumberbatch—this paper examines how men who identify as feminism-friendly are positioning themselves in this emerging terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how issues related to abortion have been portrayed in American television from 2005 to 2021 through a feminist analysis of the melodramatic series Grey's Anatomy. Using a comparative analysis between two female characters facing accidental pregnancies, this work examines how they are portrayed when pondering over the possibility of terminating their pregnancies and investigates male behavior regarding women's decisions. In addition, it scrutinizes how shifts in contemporary feminism might have influenced these depictions. Drawing from an interdisciplinary approach on feminist television scholarship, this paper encompasses theoretical works related to motherhood, abortion, postfeminism, and popular feminism. It also investigates how the polysemic meaning intertwines patriarchal and feminist readings in a mass-culture product, and how the transition from postfeminism to popular feminism into mainstream texts has affected the display of women's bodily autonomy by depicting these plots in a less punitive way towards women than before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The women's pages of a newspaper have often been dismissed as fluff, playing at most a subsidiary role, while the real news of a paper is in the malestream pages: the domestic news or leader pages. Yet historically, these pages are often key in constructing women, and men, politically, socially and economically; in terms of generating revenue within the paper; and in terms of how the paper constructs itself in relation to its readers. Further, they have been important in bringing women into newsrooms, and allowing them to construct themselves as journalists with specialist expertise and independence from the male editorial hierarchy. In Malaysia, however, the women's pages of the Malay-language press played a key role in the 1996 campaign for a Domestic Violence Act. Informed both by feminist critical discourse analysis and oral histories with female journalists working at the time, this article sheds light on the gendered nature of Malaysian newsrooms, with implications for how feminist media activists can negotiate feminist coverage, even in an environment hostile to feminism. There are further implications for the importance of understanding processes of both negotiation within newsrooms and identity formation as journalists, both of which impact upon the news produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the works of six of the various local and multicultural, emerging and established feminist artists at the Abolish Article 153 exhibition held on 27 April 2019, in Kuwait. The show marks fifteen years of women gaining political rights in Kuwait. Article 153 of Kuwait's Penal Code sourced from Article 324 of the old French Penal Code (Napoleonic Law) provides relative exemption to a man who commits murder in an honour-related occurrence. It specifies penalties to women for misconducts that range from acts of passion and desire or even interaction. This article explores ways in which the artists' strategic undertakings consider art a catalyst for dialogue and civic engagement. They attempt to make a difference either through autobiographical expressions or by emulating the sets of persistent histories of patriarchal cultures in the Middle Eastern region and worldwide. It demonstrates how their collaborative efforts stage diverse creations that generate a cultural space for engagement, reflection and action while recognising the constellation of differences and multiplicities amongst feminisms. It demonstrates how the grassroots initiative is a collective non-hierarchical working model that questions and seeks to overcome colonial and patriarchal narratives within inner and outer spaces, and individual and worldwide feminisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine online audience discourse surrounding the superhero film Birds of Prey, a new addition to the wave of female-centric films within the genre. Numerous studies have focused on the gendered industry politics surrounding the production of such films, as well as their representations of women and women's narratives. This study turns to the film's audience on Twitter, understanding their negotiation of cinematic feminisms through the conceptual lens of postfeminism. Through a mixed methods analysis of public tweets, we unpack how the film facilitates contentious practices of postfeminist audiencing. We argue that audience discussions surrounding the film are organized around overlapping frames of feminist affirmation and cinematic politicisation. These dual discursive processes of postfeminist media consumption comprise audience constructions of Birds of Prey's feminism as raging, calibrated, overbearing, or immaterial. Taken together, these constructions of cinematic feminism depart from dichotomous views of postfeminist advances in media representation encountering misogynistic backlash. Instead, we observe a multipolar discursive landscape in which audiences may perform diverse forms of postfeminist and anti-feminist solidarity and conflict. However, we also underscore that these diverse appraisals remain circumscribed within overarching neoliberal logics which tie commercial value to collective performances of gendered subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to add to the underrepresented scholarship on feminist critique in Taiwanese cinema by investigating the ways in which female power has been represented in the female-centred Taiwanese film, The Bold, the Corrupt and the Beautiful (BCB). Through a postfeminist reading, this study attempts to challenge the dichotomy of Asian versus Western values in order to engage Taiwanese films into the global debate of feminism. By revealing the problematization of representations of the seemingly powerful female characters in BCB produced by male filmmakers, we unveil the hidden contradiction of feminism and anti-feminism in order to gain a profound understanding of women's power relations and the socio-cultural perception of them in the Taiwanese context. We categorise the three leading female characters into significations of "dominant feminism", "passive feminism", and "recessive feminism", and show how their power is exercised through scheming, seduction and detainment, respectively. Therefore, we argue that these seemingly powerful female images in BCB are all represented as stigmatic which attempts to equalize female power to negativity thereby essentially disavowing feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though one of the aims of critical discourse analysis (CDA) is to demonstrate how social inequality, power abuse and discriminatory practices can be resisted, most studies have centered on the deconstruction of oppression and ideologically driven discrimination rather than the reconstruction of resistance. To fill this lacuna, the present paper examines the blogposts of Ghanaian feminists using feminist critical discourse analysis as an analytic framework. It analyzes resistance strategies utilized in the blogposts to criticize systematic gendering of privilege and inequality, and to foreground the voice and agency of Ghanaian/African women. Three resistance strategies were identified: (1) critiquing patriarchy, traditional gender norms and gender oppression, (2) resisting gender stereotypes and rewriting demeaning gender narratives, (3) calling out sexist attitudes and applauding women who resist such behavior. I argue that these strategies contribute to a feminist political critique of gendered social practices and relations aimed at effecting social emancipation and transformation. The paper ends by highlighting how the emancipatory discourse promoted by the blogs can be enhanced as part of a continuous striving for social justice for Ghanaian/African women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Study of the cultural discourse around women's paid work in Israel is limited, and until now research has ignored its early periods and dynamics. This paper focuses on Israel's third decade, 1967–1977, when women, including mothers, were for the first time encouraged to work outside the home. Using feminist critical discourse analysis, I examine La'isha (For the woman), Israel's veteran commercial women's magazine, which has self-declared its nationalist role. Mainly dedicated to traditional feminine subjects directed at middle-class women, La'isha has followed the pattern of most popular women's magazines. However, it critically problematized the issue of women's employment in a wide social context, emphasizing gender and class inequality and expressing a complex of hegemonic liberal feminism and socialist feminism. In examining this radical discourse, the paper looks at the cultural and civic roles of popular women's magazines and the characteristics of this journalistic genre, and considers historical macro and micro explanations. The study demonstrates the value of women's magazines as a historical source and highlights the potential of popular women's magazines to take on oppositional power and play a transformative role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how women filmmakers are using installation in gallery spaces to find alternative ways of telling feminist stories. Focusing on the exhibition "Astro Noise" by Laura Poitras, best known for her documentaries on Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, the paper considers how technology and surveillance operate in Poitras' exhibition to produce a form of "drone feminism" that visualises spectatorial engagement and embodiment in the digital age. Might a form of drone feminism applied to migrations from cinema to installation spaces enable us to consider spectatorial interactivity as a kind of looping or entanglement within practices of feminist storytelling? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the convergence between the Chilean feminist and student movements through the use of public, feminist Facebook websites administrated by Chilean high school students. The article explores the ways in which these feminist students participate and interact with others on these websites while producing their gender/political subjectivities. Using narrative analysis, the paper presents their processes of subjectification as part of emerging social movement stories. I argue that these websites provide the necessary conditions for students to engage in political actions and produce their collective gender/political subjectivities as the protagonists in the feminist student social movement narratives. This process is co-constructed by the visitors to the sites, who sometimes police the students, using hegemonic discourses regarding female minors. The paper amplifies a body of research on online feminism by exploring gender and political subjectivity production through social media in a Latin American context, and calls attention to digital social movement actions as a form of political engagement in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media reports of female American football coaches frequently laud them as being the "first," a demonstrable indication of the lack of awareness of the long history of women in this role. This paper utilises feminist media theory to examine the language of newspaper coverage of female American football coaches from 1908 to 1960. The article identifies 26 female coaches; newspapers stated that eight of these women were the first-ever, and one was the state's first. In all cases, the newspapers were inaccurate. The analysis demonstrates that newspaper reports sometimes emphasised women's domestic roles and their desirable femininity and heterosexuality. While some journalists were horrified, most were not; many women found widespread support for their role, especially when schools employed them due to the absence of men during wartime. The lack of outrage about women's involvement in a sport (and role) strongly aligned with masculinity is significant and demonstrates that women have found acceptance in the sport for far longer than academics have previously explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the representation of second wave feminism in two mainstream comedy shows starring male comedians. Scott On ... (BBC 1964–74) and a sketch narrative which featured in the 1980 season of The Two Ronnies (BBC 1971–1986) brought feminism into family living rooms. While these shows make fun of feminism they also represent key aspects of the second wave, often echoing debates taking place in the women's liberation movement. Despite their conservative politics Scott On ... and The Two Ronnies put feminist ideas on screen in the 1970s and early 1980s; they represent a mainstream resistance and response to the second wave activism which was changing the British social and political landscape. Such shows make fun of feminist politics, yet in doing so they register and refract feminist debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese digital feminism has attracted increasing public and scholarly attention, and yet men's participation remains understudied. Drawing on interviews with male supporters and textual analysis of online archives, this paper examines how men empathize with women's experiences and interact with the broader context of Chinese digital feminism. To map out male empathy, the article proposes a two-dimensional framework that differentiates emotional and cognitive empathy on the one hand and draws from Megan Boler's view on passive and transformative empathy on the other. The political implications of male empathy in digital feminism are discussed. The author argues that although male empathy displays unarguable potentials to subvert patriarchal society, it also succumbs to the pitfall of exonerating men from the obligation to change, hence obscuring structural gender inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper I define Mona Eltahawy's viral Twitter campaigns, #DearSister (2017) and #MosqueMeToo (2018), and her broad journalistic activism as a novel form of Islamic feminism, "adversarial Islamic feminism." Provocative, angry, and highly performative, it is found on social media platforms, representing a new chapter in the articulations of the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of the Muslim female body, often caught between the Scylla of liberal and colonial fantasies of empowerment and emancipation, and the Charybdis of religiously ordained submission to patriarchy. I discuss adversarial Islamic feminism first as a novel intervention in academic and specialized debates within Islamic feminism, and second, I place it within the framework of a transnational, highly mediatized, feminist Western-Islamic public sphere, which is precarious, experimental and utopian. Eltahawy's utopian project has its radical horizon: the concept of global feminist uprising, visible and orchestrated on social media, led by Muslim women and women of color but articulated in universal language relevant to women everywhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superhero comics books' reliance on revision has been discussed but the role of gender in relation to these concepts in such comics is yet to be explored. This paper examines the first story arc of Kelly Sue DeConnick's acclaimed comic book series Captain Marvel (2012) through the interrogative lens of postfeminist culture, considering how past and present collided within the relaunching of the popular Marvel comics superheroine Ms. Marvel (Carol Danvers) into Captain Marvel. Simultaneously a postmodern pastiche and a contemporary mediation of popular feminism, the story takes Danvers back, via time travel, to periods before the western second-wave feminist movement took hold. The article thus considers how this Captain Marvel storyline engages with contemporary feminist issues such as the proliferation of female superheroes in Marvel comics as well as the retroactive insertion of feminist discourses into an ostensibly prefeminist setting, questioning what, if any, radical interventions in dominant modes of women's representations in superhero narratives these stories might offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have established social media as intrinsic to fourth wave feminism. However, even as social media has created a platform for many feminist theorists to share their work, it has also created trolls who perpetuate gender discrimination and gender-biased language. Feminist Twitter users have attempted to push back on discriminatory language, but are often attacked. The Twitter user @manwhohasitall addresses gendered language by using satire, Tweeting from a fictional world where gender stereotypes are reversed. This approach, discussed through a discourse analysis of a corpus of 528 Tweets from the calendar year 2017, illustrates how @manwhohasitall engages with satire, invention, and illustration to address and critique gendered language. This study reveals five major themes that illuminate the media's gender biases—and identifies a model to humorously address gendered language: Reparative Tweeting. This paper suggests that other forms of Reparative Tweeting or advocacy that relies on satire and community discourse may allow feminists to discuss gender bias without immediate pushback, and offer a model for showing, rather than telling, the story of gender discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of datafication, social networking, and globalization, "digital citizenship" has become an increasingly relevant and popular concept employed by diverse societal actors to promote digital capacity, literacy, and participation. To date, however, limited scholarly attention has been paid to the role of gender power relations in digital citizenship discourses, theories, or practices. In this paper, we conceptualize digital citizenship as a status (what it means to be a citizen), a practice (what it means to act as a citizen), and an intersubjective experience (what it means to occupy the outside, inside, or liminal space of citizenship). We argue that an intersectional, multi-layered, feminist approach to digital citizenship offers a valuable way to first analyze gender subordination and exclusionary practices in digital societies, and second to guide action that promotes a feminist democratic project of transformation and empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual violence reporting is a site where issues of visibility, publicity, privacy, algorithms, and intelligibility all converge, and where the language of digital "space" is married to metaphors of "going public." Using Google search results of Emma Sulkowicz and Chanel Miller's stories of sexual violence as a springboard, this theoretical paper explores how all of these metaphors—public spaces, going public, being seen—are both prevalent and entirely inadequate for describing the realities of being covered by journalists in today's contemporary technoculture. Stories of sexual violence in the media operate within a capitalist system of visibility in which they are repackaged, distributed, and made profitable for both news outlets and digital platforms. Rather than a neutral "public space," stories of sexual violence and survivorship travel in what I call a public stage, or the eternal, infinite, and (often) intensely misogynist space of the internet. I conclude that the visibility economy of digital space, in which everything is treated as public and visible forever, has only intensified rather than abated the skepticism with which survivors are treated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The banning of the Formula 1 (F1) "grid girls" in January 2018 produced a contentious debate on women's autonomy and sexual capital in the British media. This debate is symbolic of a wider trend towards post-feminist ideology, in which sexualised displays of the female body have come to be perceived as liberating self-sufficient choices which emphasise agency and serve to benefit women. This paper draws upon post-feminist responses to the banning of the F1 grid girls and implements a discursive analysis of a variety of news sites in order to identify the reoccurring themes that characterise post-feminist debate in this area. The dominant themes identified include [dis]empowerment, freedom of choice, and disputed understandings of feminism which are discussed from a critical feminist perspective. This paper thus contributes towards perceptions of the parameters of sexism in British popular culture and analyses continued transformations in feminist thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The #Metoo movement spread globally to include women in India who were employing social media platforms to discuss their experiences in sexual abuse and harassment. This paper investigates through literature review and data collection, why #MeTooIndia demonstrates a non-inclusivity towards marginalized, and gendered bodies and narratives on the Twitter platform. This exclusion is primarily the product of increased attention to issues of sexual abuse among the Indian elite including Bollywood celebrities, journalists, politicians, and well-known media personalities who employ Twitter as a space for "coming-out." Secondly, non-inclusivity is evidenced through lack of discussion on the question of sexual abuse, and harassment in the daily lives of Dalit, trans women, women of lower caste and class, and other marginalized and gendered communities that have vastly different experiences of sexual abuse than the elite, urban woman. Finally, exclusion is exposed through the sparsity of personal narratives under the same hashtags owing to masculine toxicity as well as the creation of unsafe spaces for gendered minorities to recount their experiences. This research employs theory of intersectionality to ultimately rethink how to design and organize feminist movements online in order to create safer, more inclusive, and intersectional spaces for feminist activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Initiated in October 2017 by a group of Muslim women in Turkey, the activism of Women in Mosques aims to increase public awareness regarding the gendered organization of the religious space. Turkey's patriarchal religious and cultural dynamics exhibit a gender-segregated organization of the mosque area, which treats men as the primary religious audience while isolating women in limited spaces. Using online tools such as their website and social media pages, Women in Mosques encourages women to participate in their digital campaign to reveal experiences of marginalization in mosques through testimonials. In addition to exposing the gendered and spatial ideology of the mosque that subordinates women, Women in Mosques also endeavors to employ potential means of resistance by fostering digital solidarity. This paper aims to analyze the bodily and digital strategies of women resisting the spatial organization of the religious space as a field of power. In this regard, the mapping of religious spaces through the representation of ideological spatiality and cartography constitutes the major strategies applied by activists to tackle the patriarchal making of the religious space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the issue of gender, particularly women's (under)representation in the video game industry, is framed in US and Finnish media. Building on the notion of stigma surrounding feminism, the article examines discourse practices as acts of managing the image of feminism. The findings illustrate five stigma management strategies that offer the possibility of maintaining socially accepted ways of discussing gender inequality and portraying women in mainstream media. Using critical discourse analysis, the paper addresses how the use of these stigma management strategies connects with different contemporary feminisms. The strategies used and their ideological backgrounds vary between the two cultural contexts. This article contributes to the understanding of the ongoing discussions between postfeminism and neoliberal feminism in contemporary society and organizations by demonstrating how the expression of feminist ideas is managed in different cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Released in 2014 and 2015, respectively, the American indie films Obvious Child and Grandma each feature a central protagonist who is dealing with an unplanned pregnancy and is pursuing an abortion. These pro-choice narratives not only challenge Hollywood cinema's repetitive depiction of unplanned pregnancies that result in motherhood, but they critique the dominant political and societal discourses surrounding abortion and women who choose to terminate pregnancies. Tracing the history of cinematic portrayals of unplanned pregnancy, and reflecting upon how post-feminist culture has positioned the notion of choice, this paper notes the significance of Obvious Child and Grandma as films that not only feature abortion as a central theme, but utilize comedy in their navigation of a controversial subject. Furthermore, this paper argues that in their frank and positive engagement with termination as a potential resolution to an unplanned pregnancy, these films offer important attempts to destigmatize the subject of abortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates how rape culture is represented in "Chapter Three: Body Double" of Riverdale through an examination of how it operates through issues of feminism and sisterhood. This case study illustrates the complex ways in which teen television addresses rape culture with increased attention to intersectionality by examining an episode depicting how girls respond to features of rape culture—namely, slut-shaming. Through an intersectional feminist close reading, as well as attending to conceptual frameworks including the "feminist snap" and understandings of sisterhood, I argue that while young women of colour do important work via their feminist snaps, Riverdale's feminism and sometimes sisterhood are whitewashed, weakening resistance to the local rape culture. This episode represents how Riverdale—to some extent—problematizes understandings of rape culture but ultimately falls short. Furthermore, it gestures towards how popular media such as teen television both clumsily and critically wrangle with storying feminist politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a case study of a leading Chinese feminist group, the Gender Watch Women’s Voice (GWWV), this paper examines the ways in which this feminist group has perceived misogyny and used its social media platforms to respond in the Chinese context. Drawing on a two-phase ethnographic study of the GWWV’s online communities, this study specifically reveals the GWWV’s changing attitudes towards the hostile messages they often confront online. It also aims to identify the innovative strategies that have been deployed by the GWWV to address the Chinese backlash against feminism. This paper argues that, in the Chinese context, what digital feminist activism has brought about is not social change but the increasing problem of misogyny online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the fetish of the click through a technofeminist history of the computer mouse as vulva. It argues that this material turn is a necessary corrective to abstractions of the click in con-temporary media studies and the long history of phallic technological practices. Drawing from anthropological, Marxist, and psychoanalytic approaches to fetish, this paper enables a rethinking of the computer mouse in the materiality of what it is and does within its broader cultural formation. This interpretation of the computer mouse serves as a feminist claim to ubiquitous computing technology. Further, the argument connects the computer mouse's supposed obsolescence to the new and emerging technologies of touch pads and screens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an introduction to her webseries Tropes vs Women in Video Games, critic Anita Sarkeesian makes a disclaimer: "This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters," she says "but remember that it's both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects." Sarkeesian's statement preempts a common complaint made of feminist criticism: namely, that it inhibits the consumer's pleasure in her or his favourite texts. In this paper, I argue that feminist criticism is in fact intrinsic to many viewers' enjoyment in popular culture. Surveying texts such as Feminist Frequency, Jezebel, and the television recap series Rosie Recaps, I develop the concept of pleasurable criticism as a way of describing the increasingly visible modes of feminist enjoyment discernible in the broader culture. By identifying pleasurable criticism as a viewing practice, this paper demonstrates how feminist criticism can be constitutive of rather than extrinsic to pleasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the ideological profile of the Spanish online-only press regarding feminist and LGBT issues. We perform a content analysis of opinion columns sampled from the most popular Spanish online-only newspapers. The analysis focuses diachronically in two moments: May 2011 and June 2016. The coding sheet includes feminist and sexual identity-related categories such as the mention of women and women's rights, abortion, traditional family, LGBT identities, or the role of Catholicism. The Spanish press' conservatism or progressiveness is measured by computing frequencies of mentions and their positive/neutral/negative valuation. Results indicate a more plural scenario regarding the traditional conservatism of Spanish digital media, with online-only opinion paying more attention to women and non-normative sexualities. Findings are discussed and contextualized pertaining to the current wave of feminist activism in Spain, and the emergence of left-leaning online-only newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist scholarship has richly critiqued the burgeoning of popular feminism across multiple media platforms in recent years. Representing a particular visibility of popular feminism, celebrity feminism has re-ignited questions about what constitutes a "legitimate" feminist. But what might the mediated visibility of celebrity feminism mean and make possible for media audiences? Observing the dearth of audience studies, several scholars highlight the need to investigate audience meanings of mediated feminisms. Given that young celebrities such as Amandla Stenberg often (re)present the popular "fresh face" of feminism and that media provide a key resource for girls to learn about feminism, such investigation is particularly salient for teenage girls. This paper draws on research with young feminists to explore ways they make sense of celebrity feminism in relation to their own understandings of feminism and feminist subjectivity. Analyses show how celebrity feminism functions as a discursive tool for girls' negotiation of the borders that constitute self and others as feminist subjects (or not). Although girls constructed celebrity feminists as potentially useful in drawing people into feminism, they also critiqued celebrity feminism as "trendy", apolitical and "basic", offering little more than a rhetoric of equal rights, devoid of intersectional values and lacking political activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2017, millions of people shared public testimonials of sexual abuse and harassment in an expression of global vulnerability using the hashtag #MeToo. While #MeToo was triggered by Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano, the phrase can be traced back a decade earlier to when African-American activist Tarana Burke said "me too" in a private exchange of solidarity with young black girls who were survivors of sexual assault. This study examines over 200,000 tweets from the first three days of #MeToo to understand how the meaning and narratives of the feminist hashtag were discursively negotiated. Combining social network analysis and discourse analysis, the paper draws attention to the exclusivity of popular and networked feminism and elevates the voices of the multiply marginalised survivors who were erased from the dominant narratives of #MeToo. It is a call to white feminist researchers and activists to be mindful of the voices that are excluded when examining popular feminist actions. The study contributes an understanding of the power dynamics within digital feminist networks that reproduce colonial violence and oppression within mainstream neoliberal feminism and academia, and extends support to the existing research that documents how digital networks do not empower marginalised voices equitably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts a diffractive analysis that reads Bruce Beresford’s Australian populist filmPuberty Blues(1981) through the more recent (2012) Channel 10 eight-part series television of the same title. The purpose of this experimental analysis is tonoticeways both of these filmic artefacts re/enact gendered semblances performatively, co-creating binary gender relations through Baradian intra-actionswitha virtual audience (in the perpetual present). This paper is not a historical account of the texts and/or a review of the substantial literature connected to either text or television/film production in Australia. It attempts to conduct a non-representational analysis as a reading through of the texts with each other. What is significant is the process of examining “how different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter” (Karen Barad 2007, 30) during inter-action with filmic text and viewer. This manoeuvre posits that by re/turning events as iterative interactions visibility of materiality in the making may be rendered visible. By understanding intra-active processes educators may be able to frustrate delimiting accounts of girlhood as just the way itisand rather utilise these texts to open up other imaginaries of affirmative difference. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes benefits of the entanglement of feminist new materialist theory with post-phenomenology. The paper focuses on an empirical study of interviews using photo-elicitation with four young women to document their lived experiences producing self-images to share via social media. Drawing on post-phenomenology, the cellphone is discussed as a multi-stable technology wherein the selfie is experienced at once as a mirror, a camera, and a window to social media platforms. But this paper also draws on glitch feminism, which, via metaphors of technological failure, challenges ossified conceptual boundaries between the body, desire, and technology. Through this coupling the paper suggests that what are identified as corporeal, photographic, and performative glitches by the participants are worked out, thereby erasing any experiential delineation between mirror, camera, and cellphone. Whereas post-phenomenology often refrains from examining the complex power dynamics that shape technological–human relations, this paper argues that such dynamics are crucial when examining gendered technological phenomena like selfies. Contributing empirical data to recent post-phenomenological work on cellphones, this paper details the gendered material-discursive dimensions of the selfie via the work of contemporary feminist new materialist thinkers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite increasing scholarship on Indonesian women, issues on girlhood, continues to be unrecognized. When they enter the frame of discussion, Indonesian girls are discussed as targets of development projects or at-risk subjects. This article asks: Why are girls studies overlooked in Indonesia? What potentials do the Indonesian girls have for the feminist scholarship and girls studies? How can we be mindful of making knowledge about Indonesian girls? It pays attention to the kind of knowledge girls make and their representations in media, while taking into account the power dynamics shaping the knowledge. We propose a new framework of knowledge production about girls. Through three case studies of Awkarin, Voice of Baceprot, and Peduli Jilbab, the article demonstrates that the female youth in Indonesia are contradictory yet prolific and influential socio-political actors. We propose the idea of "knowing responsibly" as a step towards decolonizing knowledge production of these girls. This paper aims to critique and contribute to the growing but often Western-centric Girls' Studies and Indonesian feminist studies. It also serves as a refusal to the ignorant, protective, and controlling way of knowing about girls and a commitment to applying decolonial frameworks which allow us to alter our way of knowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of liberalisation and globalisation on the construction of the gendered self within the space of Indian English-language television newsrooms. Using the lived knowledge of women journalists, the paper seeks to map the intersections of ageism, sexism, and capitalism in these neoliberal newsroom settings. It posits that the weakening of journalists’ unions, the expansion of women workers in newsrooms, and the evolution of a mythical, celebratory post-feminist narrative in journalism are intrinsically interlinked. The object of this paper is to analyse how young female journalists working in Indian English-language television newsrooms negotiate feminism in relation to their profession. Has post-feminism, using the words of “choice” and “empowerment,” made its subjects apolitical by feeding them the image of a socio-economically and sexually empowered woman who does not need feminism, as equality is seen as a goal that has already been achieved? As part of this enquiry it discusses the various ways in which young female journalists deal with issues of sexism, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment at work. What are the different ways of “doing” discrimination and how are they changing? Following from this, the article asks: how does age become an important criterion for difference among women in the newsroom; and what does this mean for both “young” and “old” journalists? The article concludes by considering the newer assertions of dignity and modes of protest in this space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]