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When #MeToo reached Sweden in the fall of 2017, it gave rise to nearly 80 industry-specific petitions that demanded a stop to sexual misconduct in the workplace, some with their own hashtags. This article examines the discourse of #MeToo on Twitter in Sweden in relation to these petition hashtags. Focusing on how #MeToo, petition hashtags, and other hashtags are co-articulated in Tweets, it maps the emergent network of hashtags using SNA and explores the resulting interpretative frames using discourse analysis. By co-articulating the MeToo and petition hashtags with hashtags related to Swedish politics and feminism, and by utilising the @-mention function to call out responsible politicians and industry executives, Twitter users extended the initial #MeToo frame beyond individualised problems and solutions common in connective action networks. We suggest that Twitter users utilise platform affordances to perform framing work in relation to political hashtags, not unlike framing work performed in traditional social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women endure the most severe and sustained forms of harassment on the internet. In response, activists around the world are mobilizing against conduct that endangers women online. At a time when feminist discourses are both popular and contested, this research explores the extent to which feminist ideas are influencing activism against online harassment. This research centers on a network of activists located in the United States who seek to combat one form of online sexual harassment: non-consensual pornography. Using reflexive thematic analysis, this research asks: how do activists relate to feminist perspectives, issues and approaches? Data analysis reveals among activists a flexible feminist politics that structures the scope and scale of their work. Ultimately, their caring, expansive and institutionally focused approach has enabled these activists to successfully address non-consensual pornography at the legislative and regulatory level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an increasing presence of 'femvertising' in the media; an advertising style that highlights women's talents, centers themes on pro-woman messaging and counters stereotyping. However, no systematic attempt has been made to establish the reasons leading to its increasing social acceptance. This article identifies the major factors leading to femvertising: (1) growing activism around the better representation of women in advertising; (2) brand activism and conscious capitalism; (3) the criticism of corporate and commodity feminism; (4) increasing awareness of gender stereotyping; (5) and increasing scrutiny by regulatory bodies on gender role representations in advertising. We conclude that femvertising is a phenomenon resulting from the combined effect of the five factors above. We propose that future studies in femvertising should address the remaining issues of lack of authenticity, dilution of feminist discourse, interconnection with social movements as well as linkages to increased representation of women in advertising, both to construct a full picture of the current state of femvertising and to understand its future configuration in a shifting social and ideological environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are contemporary post/feminisms like Body Positivity constituted in and through digital media cultures, and what are the consequences for diverse movement participants? This article analyzes tensions within the Body Positive Movement in North America through a discourse analysis of two sets of prominent blog articles from 2014 and 2016. We identify the coexistence of four social movement frames, termed Mainstream Body Positivity, Fat Positivity = Body Positivity, Radical Body Positivity, and Body Neutrality. Key differences between these frames often arise due to intersecting experiences of privilege and oppression within the movement, as well as disagreements between activists about whether the movement should focus on individualized, psychological issues such as body image or structural concerns such as size discrimination. Our findings reveal the coterminous existence and blurring of boundaries of various feminisms within Body Positivity, including forms that align with as well as those that challenge postfeminist sensibilities. This study 1) illustrates how feminist organizing in digital spaces continues to be shaped by unequal power dynamics and 2) deepens our understanding of the complex and multivocal nature of online feminist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial introduction explains that in conceiving of this special issue, we were particularly interested in how mediated practices intersect with political contexts within a transnational frame. We set out to explore how gender-based social movements are currently circulating via transnational media, and thus afford diverse kinds of interventions in issues of social justice. Each article in this issue starts from a specific location and traces the trajectory of media texts and gendered collective subjects as they both move within and across national boundaries. Differences within specific uses of "transnationality", located within grounded feminist critiques, emerge from reading these cases together. While the articles in the special issue do not deal centrally with the topic of the global COVID-19 pandemic, their critiques of the role of gender in transnational media—in various contexts—all point to the pressing need to think beyond the politically limiting optics of national histories and the boundaries of the nation-state, which we would argue is needed now more than ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hashtag feminism, a form of activism that appropriates Twitter's metadata tags for organizing posts to draw visibility to a cause, has become a central component of the feminist media repertoire. Much discourse about hashtag feminism revolves around whether or not Twitter is an effective tool for activism. This instrumentalist approach leaves activists' strategies for juggling both the affordances and limitations of hashtag feminism under-theorized. Taking up a case study of the #MeToo movement, I consider practitioners' perspectives on hashtag feminism and highlight the processes through which activists develop tactics while working within particular sociotechnical constraints. Through an analysis of a meta-tweets, or tweets about the campaign, I argue that hashtag feminism is a contentious performance in which activists make the personal political by making it visible, bridging the individual with the collective and illustrating the systemic nature of social injustice. As #MeToo demonstrates, however, making the personal visible on a globally networked stage opens activists up to a variety of risks. To address these limitations, #MeToo participants developed performance maintenance strategies, through which they evaluated the campaign's shortcomings and advanced solutions. Their reflexivity points toward hashtag feminism as a complex recursive process aimed at achieving a transformative politics of visibility. [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]

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]

In the article, the author discusses the modalities of data colonialism and its effects on hashtag activism in South Asian countries like India. Also cited are how Reliance Industries' Mukesh Ambani compared data colonization to previous forms of colonization, the call for data protection laws, and the relationship between data extractivism and commodification and anti-caste, feminist and other social movements.

The Media Action Research Group (MARG) is an antiauthoritarian, profeminist (antiracist, anticolonial, queer, trans and anti-capitalist) group of activist-researchers both inside and outside the university, studying autonomous social movement media activism in Canada and beyond. In this article we map a taxonomy of activist-research, illustrating how MARG brings together five specific methodologies—activist-led issue-based research, militant participatory ethnography, feminist community research, prefigurative antiauthoritarian feminist participatory action research (PAFPAR), and autonomous media research—to study how women, people of colour, queer and trans people, and Indigenous people in antiauthoritarian or anarchist-leaning social movements are using grassroots media to support and report on these movements. We find that although MARG set out to create an antiauthoritarian research-activist collective, we are restricted in some ways by the intensification of neoliberalism in the university institution. Nonetheless we are able to conduct transgressive research at the intersection between antiauthoritarian activism and the academy, producing three direct and immediate impacts: within social movements, within media activism, and within the university. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hashtag feminism, or feminist activism that unfolds through Twitter hashtags, has become a powerful tactic for fighting gender inequities around the world. Feminist media research, however, has yet to grasp the implications of this new form and social movement research has yet to model the conditions under which activists successfully mobilize online. This article builds on research regarding the potential and limitations of hashtag feminism to consider a question that remains understudied: what is the process through which a feminist hashtag develops into a highly visible protest? Through a case study of #WhyIStayed, which arose in response to a 2014 NFL domestic violence controversy, I frame hashtag feminism as an extension of the movement’s historically rooted discursive tactics. Hashtag feminism’s narrative form implies that the conditions for a successful online feminist protest parallel the elements of an effective dramatic performance. Using data collected from Twitter and news media, I identify the dramatic elements that propelled #WhyIStayed tweets from online personal expressions to online collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Racist and imperialist narratives have long underpinned White and “Northern”/“Western” feminists’ representations of people of color and of Africans. Through textual analysis, this essay places Bring Back Our Girls—the recent campaign to locate and return 276 abducted Nigerian students—in the context of this troubled history. Within the Global North, both the appropriation and abandonment of Bring Back Our Girls fundamentally relied upon a conceptual framework rooted in imperialist and racist histories. By revealing the imbrication of the international campaign in existing power relations, this project challenges the assertion that digital campaigns are technologically determined or “outside” history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent democratic movements in the Middle East, especially in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and Syria, put forward a new kind of political activism accelerated by social media. Whereas in these countries the social media created opportunities for the social movement referred to as the “Arab Spring,” this paper looks at the neighboring country of Turkey and the role of social media in Turkish women's activism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the narrative use of popular music in the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) in order to open the primary television text to feminist analysis. Perhaps in no other way are the implications and contradictions of presenting BtVS's feminist narrative on television more obvious than that revealed in the analysis of the popular music soundtrack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Disney Channel hit show, Hannah Montana, constructs contemporary US girlhood and notions of femininity in relation to celebrity, such that its primary girl characters, Hannah Montana, Miley Stewart, and Lilly Truscott, as well as star Miley Cyrus, are positioned as particularly post-feminist subjects. In such a context, each of these girls can be understood as having chosen to perform a femininity that finds its locus in the maintenance and control of the body, as an illustration of her power as a girl, though without reference to feminist gains or "empowerment" rhetoric. Via discursive, narrative, and ideological textual analysis, this project explores the circulation of a post-feminist sensibility, as Rosalind Gill refers to it, and its iterations and ramifications for constructions of girlhood in contemporary media foregrounding girls and attracting young female audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper accounts for the rise of a monolithic contemporary post-feminist pregnant bridal identity that is upheld and sold as the "ultimate" pleasure of femininity in Australia, the US, and the UK. I shall critically analyse the enfranchisement of the contemporary pregnant bride as a "new" consumer identity using the purchase of a maternity wedding dress as a key example. I argue that as pregnancy is already an experience deeply embedded in the marketplace, with this comes the added pressure for pregnant women to use bridal maternity clothing to conform to normative feminine bodily ideals. This claim is supported by interviews with a sample of Australian pregnant brides as part of a longitudinal qualitative study of pregnancy and body image. I conclude that as much as the pregnant bride challenges convention, in many ways, paradigms of femininity, in this context, remain ultimately unchanged and unchallenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist film criticism is widely thought to have started in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the “Images of Woman” debate associated with critics such as Marjorie Rosen provided the foundation for later developments in feminist film theory. Antonia Lant has recently claimed the immediate post-1950 period to be a barren time for female-authored publications on film and cinema. This article argues that, contrary to received wisdom, the post-war period (1945–1959) in Britain was a time when women's film criticism flourished, with writers such as Dilys Powell, C.A. Lejeune, Catherine de la Roche and E. Arnot Robertson enjoying high-profile careers. Moving beyond a simple recovery of women's “hidden histories,” this article highlights the points of connection between the post-war period and later film criticism informed by second wave feminism. Through a case study of de la Roche and Robertson this article explores how women critics in this period were similarly preoccupied with screen representations of women and women's roles within the film industry, anticipating the later concerns of Rosen and others. I argue that a cross-media focus is a productive method for generating insights into women's critical agency at this time, and conclude that women's film criticism demonstrates something of the wider shifts taking place in gender relations in British society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From their initial appearance on US broadcast network television in the mid-1970s to their feature film incarnations in 2000 and 2003, the characters known as Charlie's Angels have been at the center of American popular culture's negotiations over feminism, femininity, and the relationship between the two. This article analyzes the “remaking” of Charlie's Angels over the past 30 years as a means of considering the “remaking” of discourses of feminism and femininity in a changing historical context. In addition to considering the original television series, this analysis also examines attempts to “clone” the series in late 1970s TV, parodies of and homages to the series in 1990s television and film, and the twenty-first-century feature films. I argue that analyzing the various re-imaginings and remakes of Charlie's Angels can be a means of revealing how post-feminism, as a series of cultural responses to feminism, has wound its way through American popular culture over the past 30 years, achieving an increasingly naturalized, and thereby more hegemonically entrenched, position over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a notable cultural trend in which feminist concerns are conveyed through many popular culture texts in South Korea since the early 1990s. Many different social groups and organizations have been engaged in the formation of feminist discourse in popular culture, among them the mainstream media. To broadly address the role of media in incorporating feminist discourse within the dominant ideology in specific socio-economic contexts, the research sought to identify the ways in which feminist discourse was generated and/or assimilated into the dominant ideology in newspaper content about the messages in the two television dramas Lovers (1996) and The Woman Next Door (2003) and other socio-cultural phenomena surrounding the dramas. Newspaper content became more favorable to the sexually liberated female characters and acknowledged changing gender roles as a current socio-cultural trend. However, it never questioned the nuclear family system itself—which occupies the hegemonic realm in patriarchal capitalist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents commentaries and criticisms related to feminism in the media industry. An essay on the status of methodology within feminist media studies are presented, followed by discussion on the analysis of media texts, forms, and practices. It is mentioned that from ideological critique has left feminist media studies methodologically fatigued. Deleuze's concept of affect provided new methodology in research areas for feminist media and cultural studies. A study on the relevance of Internet use in propagating feminist media studies are also presented. It is mentioned that online use takes place along with cultural anxiety in real life.

This article investigates the television reform activism of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in the early 1970s in the United States. In particular, it focuses on NOW's petitions-to-deny license renewal of television stations. Like other social justice groups of the period, NOW drew on a recent court case, Office of Communication of United Church of Christ v. Federal Communications Commission (1966), which enabled the broadcasting public to participate in the license renewal process. NOW used its petitions to pressure broadcasters to improve representations of women, to hire more women, and to recognize women as part of the broadcasting public. For NOW, the symbolic and material spheres were deeply intertwined, and television in particular played a crucial role in perpetuating the very problems that the organization sought to solve. In this vein, NOW was in line with other activist groups that believed that to realize social change in a mass-mediated world required a focus on media reform. In addition, this article argues that NOW's purpose was not only to reform the practices and programming of television stations, but also to claim women's membership in the civic body, here predicated on their position as members of the broadcasting public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the post-feminist, neo-liberal construction of "risk" and "security" in a recent set of post-9/11 training manuals for non-embedded journalists who prepare to work in what security texts call "hostile environments." It investigates the ways these training documents translate ideas about risk and reporting, through the language of choice, into sexed and gendered prescriptive cues about securing professional comportment in the field. While the documents present the potential risks of hostile environments in terms of a kind of "sexual equity of risk," this article argues that security training texts re-sex journalism through photographs and diagrams which put the man back into the war zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An exploration of the discursive production of cosmetic surgery on the television shows Extreme Makeover and Nip/Tuck illustrates that these programmes contribute to and reflect the processes through which cosmetic surgery has become domesticated within increasingly globalised contexts. I demonstrate that across a range of cultural sites, including some feminist scholarship, the press, and surgical television, post-feminist frames have displaced feminist frames for comprehending cosmetic surgery, enabling the culture's surgical turn. Feminist attention to risk, oppressive standards for appearance, and the cultural and discursive location of suffering around the deviant body is displaced by the post-feminist celebration of physical transformation as the route to happiness and personal empowerment. It is this logic that is played out through Extreme Makeover's rendering of surgery as the solution for personal suffering and a meting out of justice to the "moral" individual. Extreme Makeover explicitly domesticates cosmetic surgery by publicising its benefits and undoing the former imperative to hide surgery rather than be viewed as "inauthentic." As a corollary, the show promotes a system of visual eugenics where "unaesthetic" raced and gendered facial and bodily features are erased. Nip/Tuck gestures toward feminist responses to surgical culture through making its violent interventions into the body explicit, by including a feminist character, and through incorporating plot lines which critique the narcissism and gendered cruelty of surgical appearance work. However, these gestures serve as dramatic devices, the political potential of which is curtailed by the requirements of the melodrama to favour sensational story arcs and to retain a degree of sympathy for the surgeon leads. Thus, both shows contribute to a post-feminist mediascape which renders the inevitability of the culture's surgical turn, providing limited frames for viewers negotiating their own responses to the meanings of cosmetic surgery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a feminist critical approach capable of responding to the uniquely pessimistic portrayal of female friendship in Crush (Alison Maclean 1992, NZ). Crush questions the possibility of supportive or empathetic relationships, disclosing instead a powerful feminist "need" for violence, between women. This poses a challenge for feminist theory which has yet to be fully understood (it is the first aim of this article to remedy this). Secondly, the article uncovers the same pessimism at the centre of Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic theories of idealisation, demonstrating the "negativity" of Klein's work and its value for feminist approaches to cinema spectatorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The final series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was produced and aired in 2002/03 during the run up to and weeks following the US/UK invasion of Iraq. This article argues that in this new context Buffy's once polysemic representational cycle was shifted, creating explicit, and unpleasurable, ideological signification. Working with Lawrence Grossberg's argument that since the mid-twentieth century affect and ideology have become disarticulated and that affect is “a-signifying,” I suggest that in the programme's earlier series Buffy's affective cycle between “certainty” and “uncertainty” allows for pleasurable ideologically open viewing experiences. Pleasure is, however, undermined in the programme's final series where Buffy's fighting and rhetoric start to signify ideologically as a result of the newly felt “real contradiction” between leadership and democracy. In this context, feminism-as-mood—as the “quality” of affect—fails in its previous ability to secure Buffy's superhero physical strength as an empowerment metaphor. A temporary resolution is struck in the final episode using allusions to the collectivism of the “Women's Movement” to create the re-articulation between representation, ideology, and affect necessary for Buffy's power, once more, to feel both like feminist empowerment and utopian human possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that the dominance of men in war news production, as writers, sources, and subjects of the news, and the concomitant absence of women, resulted in news discourse on the Iraq war that was excessively "masculinist" in its form. Some of the elements of masculinism in war news include, a reverence for power, whether right or wrong, a focus on strategy rather than on morality, a lack of interest in, or pursuit of the points of view of the less powerful, a tendency to talk about the war in the language of other highly gendered pursuits such as sports, games, and hunting, and a representation of women that follows a tightly constrained and conventionalized pattern.

We are now at the center of another grand transformation... One of the principal technologies of this new mode of production and social organization is the Internet. (Dorothy Kidd 2002) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a series of possible conceptual frames for engaging with what has come to be known as post-feminism. Post-feminism refers to an active process by which feminist gains of the 1970s and 1980s come to be undermined. It proposes that through an array of machinations, elements of contemporary popular culture are perniciously effective in regard to this undoing of feminism, while simultaneously appearing to be engaging in a well-informed and even well-intended response to feminism.

The Internet represents both a meta-network of uniquely purposed spaces, and a set of linked technologies and practices. Moreover, it is particularly significant as a contemporary site of cultural transformation, identification and community participation, as well as a means of access to and production of capital. In this article, the author presents an exploratory investigation into the significance of Internet technologies and communities for the production, mediatization, and narrativization of queer, lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgendered women's relations, identificatory practices, desires, community participation, and opportunities for building a wide array of competencies and knowledge.

This article introduces the topics featured in the November 2004 issue of "Feminist Media Studies." Author Mary Bryson focuses on a site, the Internet, that is often touted by advertisers and scholars alike as a space where bodies and identities can be left virtually behind. The subject of Bryson's research, however, is on the significance of Internet technologies and communities for the construction of queer identity. Another topic provides an incisive analysis of a space that is often associated with the expansion of freedom, choice, and diversity, in this case, the cultural space of post-feminism. In this piece, the author aims to complicate the notion of a feminist backlash.

This article traces the development of feminist television criticism as a dynamic and independent area of study and argues that its theoretical complexity can be traced to the incorporation of multiple intellectual influences including feminist film criticism, British cultural studies, and feminist-inflected mass communication research. The approaches and methods central to feminist television criticism illuminate factors related to the theoretization of institutions and industry, neither of which has occupied a persistently central place in U.S. feminist film studies.