Search

This paper engages a (post)feminist-aligned critical reading of women's gendered performances in Afrobeats music videos to highlight—in the visual culture of this popular African musical genre—the visibility of sexually assertive black African women who variously subvert heteropatriarchal moral public scripts about "respectable" African womanhood and expression of their sexualities in relation to black African men. In my considerations of postfeminist sensibilities, I align with Simidele Dosekun by regarding postfeminism as a transnational cultural sensibility with flexible contours that render it analytically applicable and valuable as a scholarly lens in an African popular cultural landscape. I deploy a multimodal discourse analysis of five Afrobeats music videos (derived from a larger corpus of videos from my PhD study), their storylines, plot progressions, and the accompanying lyrical contents, to advance my arguments. The article draws significantly on postfeminist literature and key perspectives from bodies of feminist critiques of popular culture to demonstrate inflections of feminine subjectivities that I theorise as "sexssertive," given their active constructions of counter-narratives in relation to conservative and restrictive meanings of black African womanhood. I conclude by considering the implications hereof for broader feminist efforts towards the just treatment of women across diverse African contexts in the domains of sexuality and sexual expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes a viral Twitter thread from October 2020 in which Marvel fans debated the quality and political significance of a scene from Avengers: Endgame that highlights a number of Marvel's female superheroes. Comments formed a complex reception matrix that used gender and affective reactions to the scene to construct political statements about the role of identity politics in popular culture. Many users framed supposedly rational, critical interpretations of the scene as inherently superior to emotional or affective responses, and posited that those fans who enjoyed the scene (often young people and women) were naïve and unintelligent. Some fans co-opted feminist language to criticize those fans who enjoyed the scene, which in effect framed fans of hegemonic identities (i.e., cishet white males) as the most proper and intelligent audience members. This paper uses theories of affect, gender, and feminist critique to analyze a sample of fan comments. This discussion shows how social media shapes both political discourses and fan identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages issues of complicated femininity and the representation of such in South African telenovela Gomora. Set in South African township Alexandra, Gomora tells the story of contemporary life in post-apartheid South Africa, where people are forced to engage issues of poverty, inequality, racism, and more. In particular, the paper engages one of the main characters in the program, Nomasonto Mildred Molefe. Mam' Sonto is the matriarch of her family who is also the head of an established hijacking syndicate. Throughout the first season of this show, audiences are able to engage with a complicated woman who is good and bad, kind and cruel. Moving away from a moral reading of the character, this paper unpacks how the character comes to be and how she asserts her own power and agency in engaging a deeply racist and sexist society in order to survive and provide for her family. Engaging works of Pumla Gqola, Sisonke Msimang, Roxanne Gay, and more, the paper presents a reading of this character that enables a clear argument for the need for such depictions of complicated womanhood as part of pushing the reified boundaries of patriarchy that women are forced to exist within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the movement of "item numbers" from mainstream Bollywood culture to the regional culture of Assam. Given the level of eroticism that is part of such songs, the paper will specifically explore the means of surveillance and control that these "non-normative" cultural texts are subjected to within a local spatial context. By deconstructing this inter-cultural movement of performance, the paper attempts to reveal whether and how cultural appropriation of the "mainstream" by the "periphery" functions to keep the power dynamics of gender and national/sub-national identities intact. Based on visual methodology and textual analysis of Assamese item songs and cringe pop songs, the paper will theorize the regulation of bodies in these spaces. Understanding the renewed relationship between music and bodies in a new context will situate the gendered nature of body-space politics through item numbers. While, on the one hand, the dancing body has the capability to subvert gender norms, on the other hand, the same dancing body is often controlled through hyper-nationalist imaginations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online misogyny is growing at an alarming rate, constituting a violent backlash against feminist activism for gender equality. In our paper, we analyze misogynistic discourses on Twitter generated by #MGTOW (men going their own way) using Thick Big Data. This mixed research method involved a quantitative analysis of 167,582 tweets with #MGTOW and #feminism, followed by a qualitative study of 1,000 tweets of both hashtags. Our study reveals that despite the official narrative of MGTOW as a separatist community of men "going their own way," #MGTOW's central goal is in fact the fight against gender equality. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the language, sentiment, tone, referred sources, and comparisons between #MGTOW and #feminism show that #MGTOW does not simply voice a separatist approach towards women but promotes violence against women and feminism. While feminist tweets are more oriented toward the creation of common identity by referring to shared values and having an internal focus, MGTOW tweets express opposition to "others" and emphasize an "us vs. them" mentality. Our study also shows that online misogyny is something larger than its common definition as a violent anti-women expression in digital environments. It is a defense of a patriarchal system that allows men to claim gender, race, and other kinds of privileges to which they feel entitled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the years of research scholars have undergone to discuss The Best Years of our Lives’ men, this paper takes a new approach and looks at the film’s women, their agency, and their sexuality. By understanding Millie (Myrna Loy), Peggy (Teresa Wright), Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell), and Marie (Virginia Mayo), their use of bedroom spaces, and the ways in which they remove military markers from, and apply civilian ones to, their men, I argue that these women make their respective partners into what they want them to be and resist the saint-like image of maternal postwar womanhood that has historically been attributed to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the popularity of the male antihero in U.S. television since the late 1990s, it is significant that these characters were not immediately accompanied by a proliferation of antiheroines. Through an analysis of the Lifetime drama UnREAL and the narrative construction of its antiheroine, Rachel Goldberg, this paper seeks to shed light on the obstacles that hinder the creation of antiheroines in television fiction. Our main argument is that due to complex gender politics, in which, women can't be flawed, manipulative, or unethical without receiving criticism for their attitudes, antiheroines carry a heavy gender burden that doesn't seem to apply to male antiheroes. The creation of antiheroines is a complicated process that negotiates with the antihero archetype but differs from it because of social and gender expectations placed upon these female characters. Here, we examine two important facets of this problem. First, whilst antiheroes are usually violent, antiheroines often express mental disorders. Second, we criticize the construction of antihero narratives as "universal," whereas antiheroine narratives are wrongfully reduced to limited and inadequately constructed categories as the "strong female drama." [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]

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]

Traditional conceptions of gender as a binary, man-or-woman categorization are being challenged in scholarship and in U.S. popular culture. Researchers across disciplines have rejected gender binarism; English dictionaries and style manuals have embraced the singular "they"; and social networking sites offer multiple gender options. These changes signal increased awareness that binary gender categorizations perpetuate structures of oppression that act on all people, but especially disadvantage transgender, non-binary, and intersex individuals. Mindful of this cultural shift, this paper explores how gender measurement is handled in recent scholarly publications in communication. Based on a qualitative content analysis of articles published in 2018–2019, it demonstrates that six leading U.S.-based communication journals published research that marginalizes non-cisnormative people through binary gender measurement. Arguing that it is the ethical responsibility of researchers to recognize the multiplicity of identities that are authentic to our informants, it concludes with recommendations for conceptualizing, measuring, and reporting gender beyond the binary, including a metric for gender that incorporates dual axes of gender identity and gender experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Female antagonists in animation often fit within the universal archetype of the monstrous mother, yet there is little scholarly research examining her role in Japanese animation. This paper examines the role of Yubaba as an exemplary model of the monstrous mother in Studio Ghibli's highly successful animated film Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) to reveal the ways in which female antagonists are locally and globally constructed through the transgression of sex, gender and cultural norms. Through an application of Japanese psychoanalytic theory and Barbara Creed's theory of the monstrous-feminine, this study finds that both universal and culturally specific sex-based stereotypes inform Japan's depiction of monstrous mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media are found to be racialized in framing immigration. Yet, little is known about how the media across regions are gendered in their framings of immigration as economic and cultural issues. Drawing from a representative sample of newspapers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the U.K., and the U.S., this paper conducts a framing analysis of over 1,700 news articles to examine the media's gendering of the economic and cultural consequences of immigration. This paper shows that the media identify migrant men at a higher rate than women when framing immigration as an economic issue and that the media identify migrant women at a higher rate when framing immigration as a cultural issue. However, the findings also suggest that the media do so subtly—the gender of immigrants is rarely revealed but implicitly suggested via stereotypes and cues. This paper provides empirical evidence supporting feminist theory and fills a gap in current literature by adding the intersectional dimensions taking gender and migrant status into account. It offers insight into how the media discursively construct migrant men and women are to illustrate the gendered division of their impact on the economy and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the change and reproduction of gender status in the motion picture industry by discussing patterns in protagonist choice and authorship of biographical films produced from 1900 to 2017. The results rely on a quantitative analysis of all 4,539 films on the IMDb platform labeled with the "Biography" tag that portray an individual main character in the selected years. We find that men-only filmmaking teams have been remarkably consistent from 1900 onward in their choice of male subjects, while mixed and women-only teams have driven an increase in the central representation of women as figures whose life is worthy of narration and remembrance. Therefore, the recently increased involvement of women as directors has significantly advanced the symbolic recognition of women in public cinematographic discourse. Our findings document the emergence of a transitional period in the biographical movie industry in which the reproduction of gender status asymmetries coexists with an increased participation of women in filmmaking. [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]

As femvertising, through "strong" and "realistic" portrayals of women, has been gaining momentum with brands, it is essential to determine whether it is considered "authentic" and "reformative" by women. As a primary step, this paper uses the Generational Cohort Theory to analyse and compare the perceptions of two distinct groups of women based on fixed parameters of empowerment, sexuality, and identifiability. These cohorts can be viewed as merely an example of a demographic variable to create/describe segments, but as is evident, it goes beyond that to unveil distinct emotions, interpretations, and perceptions based on unique values and social norms pertinent to the groups. Results obtained through focus groups exhibit that the essence of empowerment has shifted from a collective concept of social transformation to an individualistic concept of self-transformation. Contrary to popular belief, that the older cohort is threatened by the erosion of familiar traditional values due to the emergence of pervasive cultural changes through powerful imagery; femvertising was more accepted by Gen-X, than Gen-Y. It provides theoretical and practical implications by categorising the cohorts based on characteristics and decision-making patterns that can be useful to improve the understanding of the target audience and increase the persuasive power of the media images accordingly. [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]

This study brings together an interest in contemporary gambling advertising, national regulatory impacts on such advertising, and the ways in which gender, in combination with ethnicity, operate in such advertising. The paper's aim is to explore the interplay between state and self-regulations of gambling advertising and the concrete design of these advertisements in Sweden. More to the point, it explores how the "moderation" regulation in the Swedish Gambling Act (from 2019), as well as industry principles of non-stereotypical gender advertising, impact on the ways in which gambling ads are multimodally designed and organized. The results show that women are explicitly targeted by using both masculine and feminine semiotic strategies, albeit in a "moderate" way. The male market is addressed using stereotypically masculine framings, but without aggressively masculine or macho-like codes. The analysis further exposes that current regulations only partly cover other potential problems in ad design such as ethnic stereotyping. It is argued that the law's demand for moderation in advertising may backfire as a strategy to protect people from the harmful effects of gambling. This because it promotes moderate narratives and moderate gender representations that mimic ordinary practices, settings and lifestyles that appear highly normalised (and thus risk-free). [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]

This paper examines contemporary gender relations among young people by taking young men's experiences with and understandings of "sexting" as a case in point. Based on a focus group study with university undergraduate men in Melbourne, Australia, we analyse what is seen as having value and what is seen as constituting a risk when engaging in sexting, and how this is perceived as different for men and women. We demonstrate how value and risk are closely intertwined in the focus group discussions and how the body is central in the production and negotiation of both these dimensions. This is made particularly clear in the two 'figures' that participants described as embodying the perceived risks; "the creep" and "the slut". This paper illustrates the w ays gendered bodies and sexual value are central to the ways 'double standards' operate in sexting and persist in contemporary gender relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that stand-up comedy produces the places it uses in the city of Mumbai as "safe" for new middle-class women by excluding Dalit and working-class people who are deemed "dangerous." Such exclusion is achieved by mobilising places and infrastructure that are built to make Mumbai a "world-class" city, a process that requires the dispossession and exploitation of the masses from which the new middle-class benefits. In the context of the sexual harassment charges that hit the stand-up comedy scene in 2018 and the responses to those charges, I posit that stand-up comedy is a site where "appropriate" gender hierarchies are formulated in the pursuit of "global Indian-ness." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses journalistic coverage of Australian politician Barnaby Joyce's extramarital relationship with his one time employee, Vikki Campion. The paper suggests that it is productive to examine this coverage as constituting a media sex scandal. Media sex scandals are useful in terms of what they suggest about the gender politics of the society in which they unfold. The Joyce-Campion scandal is revealing because it suggests how the single woman who is involved in a relationship a married man continues to be demonized in a way that the man is not. This, in turn, demonstrates how marriage or rather, a particular, (hetero)sexist model of marriage continues to have a degree of social currency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a longitudinal, multi-method gender analysis of one of New Zealand's highest rating and longest running television programmes, Country Calendar. Content analysis findings show that over a 25-year period (1990–2015), women were much less likely to appear on or be quoted in Country Calendar, or to be the central focus of an individual episode. Yet interviews with production staff capture female directors' commitment to "making women the heroes", and a widespread belief that the show reflects the partnership approach of many farming families. Focus group data indicate that audiences perceive the show's depictions of gender to be fair and representative, and that women are presented positively, as "hard workers". This article interrogates these perceptions with reference to selected examples from Country Calendar, ideas of hegemonic masculinity and emphasised femininity, and work on subservient femininities and "real" farming women. The paper concludes with a consideration of why these tensions might still exist, some twenty years since they were previously documented, and calls for further research into this understudied area of feminist media inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As they are a privileged site for the (re)construction of the dominant gender order, media often contribute to naturalizing inequalities. This paper aims to critically discuss the way in which hegemonic meanings of gender have been accepted, resisted, and/or challenged in the Portuguese media context, both by professionals working in news magazines and by publics. This discussion revolves around three different topics: access, distribution, and participation in the media industries; reporting practices and media contents; and gender equality policies. The research is based on 11 focus-group discussions with 101 undergraduate students, as well as on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 15 media professionals. The collected data were subsequently submitted to a thematic analysis. The findings show that hegemonic meanings of gender were mostly (re)produced: gender asymmetries in the media industry were either taken as a non-issue, or attributed to individual-level factors. Additionally, gendered media representations, and the relationships between the male-biased news-making process and the neoliberal trends in political economy of communication were largely disregarded, as far as their impact is concerned; gender equality policies were dismissed as actions required to achieve equality, diversity, and social justice. Critical gender perspectives have rarely been endorsed by media professionals and publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I investigate Indian filmmaking that emerges from the encounter between urban experience and documentary practice to examine how Indian feminist critique responds to neoliberal discourses of urbanism and gender. I consider the analysis of urbanism in Sameera Jain's documentary My Own City (2011) which depicts how women become "out of place" in neoliberal cities by focusing on the gendering of urban temporality, mobility and belonging, in relation to which women's subjectivities and performances are mediated in the nation's capital New Delhi. In the second section, I conceptualize the use of a deliberate strategy of place-specific performance in the film as "emplacement" which enables a visible field of gender performances and observable mutations of both, subject and space. In contrast to documentary staging or re-enactment, conceptualized as emplacement, the audiovisual recording of complex relations of "becoming" allows place-specific ecologies of material, sensory and social environments to be considered together in the construction of gender. Following the film, the paper outlines provocations regarding critical ways of conceptualizing place in how cultural forms like documentary represent gender in relation to geographies and environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes an affective approach to theorizing the production and circulation of fitspiration media within a women's Instagram fitness community. In the context of fitness culture trends towards digitally networked, interactive, and quantified experiences, our study contributes to debates about the impacts of fitspiration media on women by investigating the expressions, feelings, and connections that arise through the self-presentation and circulation of "fit" body images on social media. We analyze 155 Instagram posts containing the hashtags #BBG, #thekaylamovement, #kaylasarmy, and #bbggirls to map the ways in which feelings are communicated by followers of a popular global fitness community led by celebrity influencer Kayla Itsines. In so doing, we reveal the ways in which intensities of feeling experienced in, through and about the body (i.e., pride, vulnerability, shame) work affectively to connect and compel exercising women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a study of women (n = 10) in game design and game development programs in Ontario, Canada. The study, described herein, is an investigation of the lived experiences of women in these programs, their own experiences with gaming culture, and the kinds of female video game characters they design. Here, we are interested in whether women in post-secondary game programs are producing more nuanced playable female game characters than those typically seen in commercial video games. Preliminary results of this study indicate that women are producing generally more nuanced depictions of women in their character designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the predominant U.S. race-based discourses surrounding the first five seasons of the South Asian American-led network television show, The Mindy Project. Through a textual analysis of the show, its news coverage, and live interviews with its showrunner Mindy Kaling, it reveals the subjectivation of Kaling as the "angry woman of colour" and exposes the profound anxieties that result when diasporic subjects challenge the boundaries between margin and centre. Drawing from feminist and postcolonial theories, this paper uncovers the relationship between "progressive" journalistic knowledge production and colonial-capitalist logics. It finds a reproduction of the "native-as-lack" cloaked within discourses of "diversity" and "reality" as well as an expectation that the diasporic showrunner shows her "authenticity" through the self-appropriation of her Otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contradicts interpretations of James Bond’s M, played by Judi Dench, as a feminist triumph. Through a focus on aging, it argues that the initially powerful M is ultimately reinscribed into patriarchy. In Dench’s eight films, M undergoes two processes of age-based reconfiguration: “post-sexualization” and “domestication.” Drawing on Mulvey’s and Butler’s psychoanalytic theories, this paper shows that, early on, M is post-sexualized as she is distanced from youthful femininity and aligned with phallic masculinity. Following this, and contrary to consensus that M’s domestication began in the Daniel Craig era, this paper contends that by the middle of the Pierce Brosnan era, M’s power is already exposed as a façade and she consequently enters the maternal realm. Expanding on Tasker’s writing on women in action films, this paper details how M’s authority not only shifts entirely into the maternal sphere but is also systematically stripped until she becomes a peculiar mother-child. Finally, this paper identifies an emerging pattern within popular media of turning Ma’ams to Moms to martyrs. Evidence is taken from Dench’s final Bond films and other contemporary action film series (Star Wars,The Hunger Games, andDivergent). This paper concludes that age has become a post-feminist strategy to neuter powerful women and return them to patriarchal and heteronormative frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how positive social media representations of aging Black female bodies problematize existing notions of aging as an almost uniformly negative phenomenon. Using the social media platform Tumblr, this study reveals that the framing of age, race, and gender is both complex and nuanced. Images which challenge deeply set historical notions of female beauty include those of celebrities, noncelebrities and comparisons between aging Black women and historically standardized representations of physical attractiveness. Findings illustrate that managing impressions vis-à-vis social media is a complex, sometimes messy performance in which images both challenge and substantiate problematic assumptions. Some images that framed Black women positively but did so at the expense of other women. This paper adds to the body of work that explores how social media is used as a vehicle for counter narrative messaging. These findings offer additional insight into how impression management theory is used to analyze social media content. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While critical analyses of media representations of lesbians continue to grow, less attention is paid to audience responses to those representations. This paper explores women’s experiences of viewing lesbians on screen, analysing qualitative data from focus groups with audiences of a women-only film season screened in a UK cinema: “Lesbians on Screen: How Far Have We Come?” We consider how the internalisation of the “male gaze” complicates some women’s viewing of lesbian characters and how women attempt to challenge and resist that gaze through their viewing practices and strategies. We discuss audience creativity in re-signifying representations of women, as well as other strategies including choosing to view privately or in women-only spaces. These acts of resistance disrupt the dominance of the male gaze, patriarchal cinema spaces, and reception of images on screen. By examining women’s reflections on the experience of being in a women-only audience, a unique cinema space that “felt free” of conventional constraints of heteronormativity and patriarchy, this paper also examines how the gendered cinema space affects audience experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The legal battle around the reform of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code brought the provisional decriminalization of homosexuality in 2009, which was overturned by the Supreme Court of India in 2013. Queer politics in India thus stands at a critical juncture regarding the goal to foster social acceptance of LGBT individuals. This paper offers an analysis of two recent media representations in India--a gay matrimonial ad and an online advertisement for an ethnic apparel brand featuring a lesbian couple--to demonstrate how the Indian family is emerging as an important arbiter of queer relationality. The negotiation of same-sex relations within the familial is premised on bourgeois notions of class, caste and gender, an ideological normativity that queer of color critique and queer theory have foundationally put up resistance to. This paper goes beyond the queer and feminist critiques of gender and class normativity to suggest that queer visibility in the Indian context is being negotiated not in opposition to, but through, the mandates of the familial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since public access to the Internet in Mainland China increased in the early 2000s, pop-cultural (re)productions and imaginings that interrogate the rigid boundaries of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and other sociocultural registers have thrived and diversified. As an introductory piece to the special issue of Feminist Media Studies, "Queer Pop in Post-2000 China," this paper explores this "queer pop" phenomenon as a proliferation of non-normatively gendered and/or sexualized narratives, performances, cultural productions, inventions, interpretations, artistic expressions, gestures, sociocultural relations, imaginations, and significations, especially in China's mainstream media and public spaces. By mapping out various manifestations of this phenomenon in this digital, globalist age, as well as its potential and the challenges it faces, the case studies presented in this special issue, such as those that address queer fandom, livestreaming, online video and digital documentary making, cross-cultural translation, and the making and broadcasting of online TV programs, excavate its substantial norm-defying power. The essays reveal the negotiative spaces made possible by the development and transformation of media cultures and practices by and for gender, sexual, and sociocultural minorities in an authoritarian, heteropatriarchal society where media portrayals of LGBTQ groups and lives have been subject to ambiguous, yet persistent, censorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AMC's The Walking Dead and Syfy's Z Nation present post-apocalyptic zombie worlds reflective of both gender and racial politics. In this paper, I argue via a feminist textual analysis that Z Nation serves as a critique of TWD as it tends to intertextually parody TWD's conservative politics which are deeply entrenched in post-feminist and postracial ideologies. I analyze the multicultural casts, the images of the "strong black woman," and the featured white male leaders with police/military backgrounds in each of the series. In short, Z Nation's incorporation of these elements becomes a playful irony that works to critically deconstruct the racial and gendered politics within TWD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The #MeToo campaign has reminded us that male sexual violence, harassment, and abuse towards women is not a new phenomenon. But alongside the visibility of the perpetrators and experiences of myriad women, this recent campaign raises a set of questions as to how this type of violence towards women is normalised and legitimated. Our focus here is on the ways in which male sexual violence towards women is normalised and legitimated through the use of humour. Existing research on responses to, and discussions of, rape jokes and rape culture have primarily focussed on online discourses or television coverage of rape joke controversies. The focus in this paper is if, and how, serious newspaper discourse contributes to the normalisation of male sexual violence towards women. In order to evaluate this, we undertake a thematic analysis of UK newspaper coverage of rape jokes. While there is the potential for the telling of rape jokes to be emancipatory, our findings suggest that news coverage of rape jokes does the ideological work of strengthening rather than challenging gendered power relations. We argue that news coverage of rape jokes in the UK predominantly reinforces and normalises male sexual violence towards women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much attention has been given to critiquing sexism and stereotyping in advertising texts, less weight is afforded to examining the gendered opinions and worldviews of the practitioners who create such texts and even less focus on such attitudes as held by advertising students—the next generation of advertisers. This paper is concerned with exploring advertising students' attitudes towards representations of the sexes in adverts, and how this may reflect their gendered opinions more generally. Analysing individual, semi-structured student interviews (n = 12) reveals that, while there was widespread acknowledgement that sexual objectification of women in advertising remains prevalent, there was a discursive turn towards a concern for men and boys, and assertions that misandry has emerged as a concerning and unwelcome trend in advertising imagery and texts. This was bolstered by a less prevalent theme; one which lauds the figure of the "tomboy" and thereby serves to privilege the male experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Through a content analysis of 532 programs screened on various national television networks in Colombia, this paper examines in the country's narconovelas, fictional series derived from the telenovela genre that resonate forcefully with the public. We do so in order to gain a better understanding of their role in representing gender in Colombia. Relevant topics include: the widespread violence against women in a traditional, patriarchal country, the ineffectiveness of policies targeting gender discrimination, and ideologies of machismo and Marianismo. These practices are discussed as factors that may prevent women's social empowerment and participation in the workforce and politics of the country. Our results show that, as per Colombia's prevailing social relations, narconovelas demonstrate a gendered power imbalance and mestizo heteronormativity via macho plots that glamorize violence against women. Women are rarely key characters in narconovelas, and when they appear, they are dependent on men, and attain status through men or their families. In addition, the genre represents continuous verbal and physical aggression against women, especially if they belong to ethnic or racial minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will focus primarily on how women in leadership roles are represented in the media using a feminist critical discourse approach (FCDA). There is a tendency amongst some feminist media analysts to homogenise all media as sexist, but contradictory tendencies are evident, especially with the rise of new media platforms. On the one hand, the news value of “unexpectedness” affords women in prominent leadership roles relatively high media capital. On the other hand, even ostensibly positive coverage can help to reinforce the limited and limiting perceptions of women that circulate in the mediatised public sphere. For instance, the hybridised gendered interactional and rhetorical styles favoured by many women in public sphere roles have led to them being evaluated as inauthentic by mainstream media institutions. This paper will investigate these contradictory tendencies through a focus on case study evidence of dominant media constructions of British, Irish, and US female political leaders. The paper will conclude by considering briefly the use of Twitter, blogs, and other new media platforms by high profile women in politics in order to bypass the persistent interpretative control exercised by some mainstream media institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the widespread use of victim tropes in contemporary Anglo-American culture by using cultural theory to analyse key social media memes circulating on Facebook in 2015. Since the growth of social media, victim stories have been proliferating; victim narratives are rhetorical, they are designed to elicit pity and shame the perpetrator. They are deployed to stimulate political debate and activism, often to appeal to an all-purpose humanitarianism. Victimology has its origins in Law and Criminology, but this paper opens up the field more broadly to think about the cultural politics of victimhood, to consider how the victim-figure can be appropriated by/ for different purposes, particularly racial and gender politics, including in the case of Rachel Dolezal. In formulating an ethical response to the lived experience of victims, we need to consider the different kinds of critical intimacies elicited by such media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a sector of professional amateur work for women in the digital industry for adult entertainment known as “adult webcam modeling” (AWM). Through a selection of narratives, this paper explores the gendered meanings of AWM and the values women derive from their “amateur” sexual content creation. I draw particular attention to the complex union of professional and amateur roles and relations in the strategies women adopt to succeed in these spaces. On one level, they describe the technical skills and institutionalized knowledge needed to successfully perform professionalized duties of hosting and animating site users’ sexual and emotional fantasies. Still, they do not solely view their work in professional terms, highlighting the usefulness of enacting their amateurism by performing authenticity and developing ongoing friendships with site users for succeeding in this line of work. Framing this work as reliant on both “professional” and “amateur” strategies builds ambiguity into the AWM persona, which has implications for social and historical constructions of sexuality and gender. It also demands rethinking conceptual frameworks that create dualities between professional/amateur, public/private, and commercial/authentic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper compares the gender politics expressed in Ringu and The Ring, paying particular attention to specific and noteworthy distinctions and crucial underlying cultural differences that structure and shape the gender politics articulated in the two films. While highlighting the divergences in the films' narratives and examining how their depictions of female characters reveal the fundamental historical, cultural, social and ideological forces that structure Eastern and Western views of femininity, women, and their roles in society, this paper argues that although both films reflect a misogynist patriarchal perspective in their depiction of evil, violent, destructive females, it is the American remake that is ultimately more conservative and reactionary in its simplistic alignment of women, the feminine and maternity with evil and monstrosity. In comparison, the Japanese original offers a more ambiguous treatment of a key female character, the mysterious and deadly Sadako, allowing her to emerge as a potential figure of resistance against conservative patriarchy, an element that is distinctly absent in the American remake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much literature on girls and video games offers games for girls as presenting an empowerment through the possibility f or girls of active engagement and the possibility of honing skills to win, this paper argues that things are not so simple. Based on a study of children between the ages of 8 and 11 playing video games in after school clubs in Sydney, Australia, the paper argues that most video games are one site for the production of contemporary masculinity. On this basis it is argued that girls playing games have to negotiate complex performances which demand qualities traditionally ascribed to masculinity alongside those ascribed to femininity. This produces difficulties for girls in competing to win while at the same time displaying sensitivity, caring, and co-operation. This is discussed by analysing what happens when some girls play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

House Hunters Internationalinvites viewers in the United States to temporarily and vicariously escape their daily lives through the stories of those fellow citizens and the occasional foreign nationals fortunate enough to buy homes abroad, including vacation homes in the tropics. Of course, other people, including viewers with access to the show, actually live their daily lives in those vacation paradises. The actors are presented as seeking an “authentic” experience away from the local population that is often tokenized and seen as static or invisible. In many instances, women and people of color who are a part of the visual landscape represent these places. This paper considers the ways the show frames mobility as entertainment, which ignores the politics of gender, race, and class that enables such mobility in the first place. This article concludes by considering María Lugones’ conceptualization of “traveling worlds” in order to propose a different way to articulate international house hunting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines 3,144 comments in a March 2012Huffington Postforum about an online Belvedere vodka advertisement that was widely interpreted to depict sexualized violence. The study applies critical textual analysis, relating discourse to context to illuminate recurring themes and clues to the strategies and resources influencing how comments were constructed. Four major recurring themes emerge from within a wide range of topics: (1) speculations on advertising strategy; (2) contested perceptions of sexual assault; (3) links between gender politics and party politics; and (4) media literacy lessons. Cutting across themes is an apparent awareness of context, including the site’s reward system, its predominantly left-leaning politics, and the potential consequences of participant commentary being exploited by Belvedere to increase brand recognition. Comments often invoke personal or professional authority by articulating qualifications presumed relevant to the advertisement’s deconstruction. The study suggests that forum participants can be understood as members of productive communities, who construct responses structured by shared contextual constraints and/or relevant common experience. The study also suggests that online forum participation offers mixed prospects for lay critics of media misogyny in that their commentary vies for attention alongside missives calculated to be provocative. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the particularly restrictive context of patriarchal culture against the backdrop of the political dictatorship in Portugal in the middle of the twentieth century, in terms of its moral hegemony and the rigid boundaries that it imposed on gender roles. It is within this context that media reception was forced to find a space for interaction with everyday life. Based on biographic interviews with women born in the first decades of the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933–1974), some modes of receiving radio and television are discussed, along with the extent to which they constituted an adaptation of the then “new media” to deeply internalised censorship regimes of female and male behaviours and relationships between the genders. Further to the institutional censorship that strictly filtered content in the media in accordance with the regime’s official ideology, there was also, on the reception side, a system of stipulated, conditioned, and supervised practices that were marked by social and symbolic censorship producing what we call “gender-based censorship.” The analysis provides a new way of understanding the contexts inherited in the formation of our current identities, in terms of potential for women’s emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As more of our lives are spent online, often in environments in which we interact with others through virtual characters (“avatars”), there remains a gulf between how player practices are documented and theorized, and the complex gendered identity work players actually carry out. This paper draws on a mixed-methods study of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), with a sample of 359 players and 659 avatars that compares male and female players with regards to two practices: selecting opposite-sexed avatars and customizing avatar appearance. Unlike other studies of MMORPG players that focus on players' customization and use of one particular avatar, this analysis is driven by a consideration of players' multiple avatars. In so doing, we demonstrate how MMORPG play is characterized by gendered practices far more nuanced than can be revealed through a “one-to-one” understanding of the identificatory practices of players and their avatars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although women influence nearly 85 percent of new car sales, their experience at automotive dealerships differs significantly from that of men. Not only are women subject to sexist and patronizing behavior from automotive personnel, but they also often wind up paying considerably more for a vehicle than a male customer. In the past two decades, the Internet has evolved as a significant source of automotive information and advice. While the majority of car advice websites offer guidance to the general public, a handful address the automotive concerns of the female driver. These sites are significant not only for the information they make accessible to female visitors, but for what women gain—as drivers, consumers, and political actors—by reading them. This paper examines four popular websites that cater specifically to the woman driver. Calling upon feminist epistemologies, it demonstrates how such online locations empower women to become more informed drivers and consumers through the accumulation and distribution of women's automotive knowledge. Not only does this automotive knowledge aid women as negotiators, but it also provides them with the tools necessary to radically transform the hostile auto dealership culture, ultimately benefiting all in the market for an automobile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After over a decade of scholarly research and well-documented harassment, sexism, and other forms of exclusion and marginalization, digital games culture is currently the object of heightened attention and discourse related to diversity and inclusion. This paper considers the context of this shift with a particular focus on the relationship between gender-focused inclusivity-based action in the form of women-in-games incubators, post-feminist discourse, and the neoliberal context of digital games production. As opposed to rife anti-feminism and similar “backlash” sentiments, articulations of post-feminism within the digital game industry provide insights into the tensions inherent in introducing action for change within a conservative culture of production, particularly for women in the industry. At the same time, the contradictions and tensions of the post-feminist ethos allow for actions that function through this logic while subverting it. Through a brief consideration of three exemplary post-feminist articulations by visible female figures in the North American digital games community, this article explores the challenges and opportunities presented by the gaps and contradictions of post-feminism in games culture and production. It concludes with equal measures of caution and optimism, indicating future directions for study and activism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gender meaning construction and interpretation, which suggest women's inferiority to men, is deeply rooted in social-cultural signs and codes drawn from traditional contexts. In Uganda, girls start to face this reality at an early age. Among low income earning families, very few are enrolled in school, thus as they grow up they suffer from invisibility created by low education and income levels. This paper notes how such gender realities in the media have been investigated in other parts of the world and that the general thesis has been that the media have “marginalized women in the public sphere.” Turning to the position of women as both sources and reporters, in Uganda this area of inquiry has been given little scholarly attention. To fill that gap, this essay draws upon feminist media theory to help contextualize findings obtained through content analysis (N = 671) data drawn from two Ugandan newspapers. Using climate change as a coverage issue, since 56 percent of women in Uganda are farmers, the results of this study show that the gender gap in Uganda is highly pronounced, with women as sources ranked third in importance after men and anonymous sources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]