Innocent victims,creepy boys: discursive framings of sexuality in online news coverage of the celebrity nude photo hack

Following the hack, theft, and digital dissemination of hundreds of nude celebrity photographs—colloquially referred to as “The Fappening”—in August 2014, online news sites filled with speculation about and commentary upon the actions of both the hackers and the celebrities. Through a critical discourse analysis of coverage of the female celebrities and hackers in six online news outlets this project presents “The Fappening” as a case study for better understanding the ways in which the media produces discourses about sexuality, particularly sexual deviancy and victimhood. The discourse surrounding this incident was inflected with feminist ideals. The celebrities were constructed as victims not only of the hack but of broader structural issues around women’s bodies, while the hackers and posters of the photos were derided as perverted, lonely thieves. Overall, the feminist leanings of the discourse around “The Fappening” indicate that the actions of the celebrities—that is, taking and privately sharing nude photographs—can be integrated into dominant understandings of sexuality, while the online communities that stole and shared their photos must be rejected. However, the coverage indicates that celebrities who use their sexual allure for publicity deserve their victimization, undermining the apparently progressive focus of the discourse.     

Uncovered and disrespected. A qualitative study of Jordanian women’s experience of privacy in birth

BackgroundPrivacy is related to a person’s sense of self and the need to be respected and it is a key factor that contributes to women’s satisfaction with their birth experiences.AimTo examine the meaning of privacy for Jordanian women during labour and birth.MethodA qualitative interpretive design was used. Data were collected through face-to-face semi-structured interviews with 27 Jordanian women. Of these women, 20 were living in Jordan while seven were living in Australia (with birthing experience in both Jordan and Australia). Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data.ResultsThe phrase ‘there is no privacy’ captured women’s experience of birth in Jordanian public hospitals and in some private hospital settings. Women in public hospitals in Jordan had to share a room during their labour with no screening. This experience meant that they were, “lying there for everyone to see”, “not even covered by a sheet” and with doctors and others coming in and out of their room. This experience contrasted with birth experienced in Australia.ConclusionsThis study explicates the meaning of privacy to Jordanian women and demonstrates the impact of the lack of privacy during labour and birth. Seeking a birth in a private hospital in Jordan was one of the strategies that women used to gain privacy, although this was not always achieved. Some strategies were identified to facilitate privacy, such as being covered by a sheet; however, even simple practices are difficult to change in a patriarchal, medically dominated maternity system.     

“But we still try”: affective labor in the corporate mommy blog

This article studies three “mommy blogs,” online platforms catering to (in these cases) American mothers of various sub-demographics, through an affective labor framework. Using digital labor and Althusserian subject formation to inform my reading of the common rhetorical gestures made in these blogs, I ask how they conceive of their readership and contributors. I argue that mommy blogs should be understood as sites of digital labor because of the ways in which their publishing conditions and rhetorics establish labored expectations of the “mommy” subject. Contestations of the nature of affective labor in motherhood are reflected by anxieties around digital labor, which play out via ideological conflicts that manifest rhetorically in the blogs under discussion. This analysis is informed by affect theory, Althusser and Butler’s work on subject formation, and the existing feminist literature on digital labor and the mommy blog.     

Working it: the professionalization of amateurism in digital adult entertainment

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.     

Beyond the Dichotomy: Six Religious Views of Homosexuality

Using published theological and scholarly evidence, this article disrupts the stereotypical “born gay”/“sinful choice” dichotomy widely assumed to characterize religious views of homosexuality in the United States. It argues that we need to keep moral questions separate from questions about the fixity or fluidity of sexual orientation. Rather than two, American Christian and Jewish views of homosexuality can been seen on a range from the “God Hates Fags” view through “Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin,” “We Don’t Talk About That,” “They Can’t Help It,” “God’s Good Gift,” and a queer-theological view of the “Godly Calling.”     

Taking time between g-string changes to educate ourselves: Sinéad O’Connor,Miley Cyrus,and celebrity feminism

This article examines the feminist response to a 2013 online “feud” between singers Miley Cyrus and Sinéad O’Connor that began when Cyrus connected the video for her single “Wrecking Ball” to O’Connor’s video for “Nothing Compares 2 U.” O’Connor’s response criticised Cyrus’ sexualised image, and the exchanges that followed sparked debate among feminists over the limits of sexual “agency,” and the sexual politics of feminism. This took place within a wider media context that has seen an apparent increase in female celebrities explicitly identifying themselves as feminist. Critics of this “celebrity feminism” argue that the sexualised star systems of its proponents are at odds with the aims of feminist politics. This article draws on post-structuralist feminist theory to question the positioning of celebrity feminism as exterior to an imagined “feminist movement.” Using the Cyrus/O’Connor feud, I argue that such a binary potentially reaffirms the structures of power that feminism seeks to oppose, and ignores the ways celebrity culture and contemporary media practice might combine to produce new understandings of the field of feminism.     

Beyond the “digital divide”: the “computer girls” of Seelampur

In the last decade, India’s position as a global information economy has aided its status as the poster child for Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD) initiatives in the global South. Policy discourse emphasizes that crossing of the “digital divide” through access to technology will bring a leveling of economic and social hierarchies. Based on sustained ethnographic observations and interviews in Seelampur in New Delhi, my paper critically examines the promise of inclusion in the information society for low income “Muslim women.” In following the lives of the “computer girls” of Seelampur, I argue that access to computer training contradictorily reproduced and reified interconnected divisions of gender, class, caste, and religion. Ethnographic research reveals the complexities of everyday lived experiences among Seelampur women. The space of the ICT center was rigidly stratified and the center primarily attracted women from relatively higher class and caste positions within Seelampur. However, I argue that the women had contradictory experiences related to their status as India’s “middle-class” that restricted their economic and social mobility outside the ICT center. Their experiences testified to structural disempowerment that disrupted deterministic assumptions about ICT and mobility.     

Rhetoric and Etiological Beliefs About Sexuality: Reader Responses to Cynthia Nixon’s New York Times Interview

In 2012, the U.S. actress Cynthia Nixon was quoted in the New York Times Magazine as having stated that “for me, it [being gay] is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me.” The interview attracted international media attention and public criticism by lesbian and gay activists. This article suggests a rhetorical approach to understanding etiological beliefs and provides a discursive analysis of 198 online comments by readers of Pink News, a gay news Web site that reported on Nixon’s controversial interview. This article explores common arguments used in readers’ comments about Nixon and examines the rhetorical construction of sexuality. The analysis examines three themes within the data. First, biological essentialism was treated by many readers as common knowledge; second, readers suggested that only bisexuals have “choice”; and, third, it was suggested by both Nixon’s critics and her supporters that counterarguments colluded with homophobia. The article suggests that there is an ideological dilemma whereby both “born-this-way” and “choice” arguments can be understood as colluding with anti-gay prejudice.     

Underneath we’re angry: feminism and media politics in Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s

In the late 1970s, a billboard advertisement for Gigi underwear was installed at street level in various British cities. It depicted a woman in a trench coat walking on the street at night and looking defiantly at the camera. A second image portrays her unbuttoning her coat and revealing her underwear. A caption reads “Underneath they’re all Lovable.” This billboard evoked a wave of feminist opposition exemplified by Rosalind Coward’s essay “Underneath we’re angry” attacking the Gigi advertisement for being an invitation to rape women as well as photographic works by The Polysnappers condemning the ad. This article contextualizes the passionate resistance to the Gigi advert within the time’s feminist debates, which characterized media images as oppressive towards women, the discourse around the ideological functioning of advertisements, debates on “the sexual politics of representation,” the political role of photography, social historical events, and the political significance of the street.     

Posing as art: the ambiguities of feminist body art and the misclassification of Natacha Merritt’s pornographic photographs

At the launch of the twenty-first century, the online pornographic photographs of Natacha Merritt, a young American woman (23 years old at the time), were categorised as art in two publications by art publisher Taschen, precipitating a critical acceptance of her work as such. This particular foray of pornography into an art context was briefly contested by one art critic; however, this relatively rare example of misclassification warrants further investigation in order to better understand the role played by what had, by the late twentieth century, become a pervasive post-feminist culture. Drawing on feminist media studies writing that analyses post-feminist modes of “self exploration,” and feminist art criticism on the ambiguities of feminist body art, this paper argues that Merritt’s “adult-oriented” online digital photographs are more persuasively situated within the increasingly prevalent online genres of the intimate blog and amateur porn. Acknowledging the risk of “collusion” inherent in feminist artworks that focus on the objectified female body, this paper concludes that a compelling critique of a post-feminist (pornified) culture resides in the reactivation of a politics of female sexual pleasure.     

Ökonomischer Liberalismus, postmodernes Diversity Management in Unternehmen und der Geist des Kapitalismus

The present article introduces the concept of Diversity Management, which has its roots in the USA. The latter regards the workforce’s diversity, inequality, differentness and individuality as an essential contribution to a company’s success. Against the backdrop of the hegemonial waves in the world system and the related cultural cycles, the argument is being launched that an organizational change from fordism to post-fordism has taken place in the framework of the USA’s hegemonial downturn and the emergence of post-modernism as a cultural pattern. In this context, “diversity” has been able to make its way as an issue. On the one hand, this development attempts to carry out even more the “modern” ideas of “individualism” and “social equality of opportunities” also on an entrepreneurial level; on the other hand, the industrial-capitalist differentiation of labor, person and lifeworld is being demarcated in a “post-modernistic” way and is even more strongly tied into the logic of capital.     

“Kind of like making porn of yourself”: understanding sexting through pornography

This article contributes to the existing literature on sexting and the “sexualisation of culture” by examining how women make sense of their sexting practices by thinking through pornography frames. In doing so, it draws on interview material collected for a study on adult women’s experiences of using digital technology in their romantic and/or sexual relationships. To the women in this study, their private sexual images—as created for the purpose of sexting—were acts of communication that could be both not-pornography and pornography depending on the private and/or public contexts in which they were shared and consumed. They did not distinguish between sexting and pornography based on the content of the images, but based on where they occur and who consumes them. Indeed, they argued that the same private sexual image could take on different meanings, as the predominant conventions within the given context of display and consumption guide the audience’s interpretation. A key argument put forward in this article is thus that, in aiming to understand complex social phenomena like sexting and pornography, we should look to how different types of sexual representations gain meaning within particular contexts as marked by certain conventions.     

In-migration,customary land tenure,and complexity: exploring the relationship between changing land tenure norms and differentiated migrant livelihoods in Brong Ahafo,Ghana

This article focuses on the relationship between in-migration from Northern Ghana and changing land tenure norms in Ghana’s central “transition zone” in Brong Ahafo Region. Using the complex adaptive systems (CAS) theoretical framework, it theorizes this relationship as part of a wider set of “co-evolving” social and environmental conditions across Brong Ahafo. It presents new qualitative research findings which show differentiated livelihood trajectories for Northern Ghanaian migrant farmers in Brong Ahafo in three case study sites in different districts and links these to migrants’ diverse land tenure arrangements under customary tenure regimes in Brong Ahafo. I argue that differentiated outcomes for migrants at rural destinations have implications for the extent to which out-migration from environmentally marginal regions such as Northern Ghana can be viewed as a form of “adaptation” to environmental change.     

Redoing feminism: digital activism,body politics,and neoliberalism

Abstract

This article investigates the renewed feminist politics that emerge from the interface of digital platforms and activism today, examining the role of digital media in affecting the particular ways that contemporary feminist protests make meaning and are understood transnationally, nationally, and locally. I consider the political investments of digital feminisms in the context of what Angela McRobbie has termed the “undoing of feminism” in neoliberal societies, where discourses of choice, empowerment, and individualism have made feminism seem both second nature and unnecessary. Within this context, I describe a range of recent feminist protest actions that are in a sense redoing feminism for a neoliberal age. A key component of this redoing is the way recent protest actions play out central tensions within historical and contemporary feminist discourse; crucial here is the interrelationship between body politics experienced locally and feminist actions whose efficacy relies on their translocal and transnational articulation. My discussion focuses on three case studies: SlutWalk Berlin, Peaches’ “Free Pussy Riot!” video, and the Twitter campaigns #Aufschrei and #YesAllWomen. My analysis ultimately calls attention to the precarity of digital feminisms, which reflect both the oppressive nature of neoliberalism and the possibilities it offers for new subjectivities and social formations.     

Sex/love skirmishes: “swinging,” “polyamory,” and the politics of naming

The contested definitions of “swinging” and “polyamory” reveal profound inconsistencies in the logics of sex, love, commitment, and coupledom. In this article, I use a number of non-monogamy blogs and online glossaries as examples of the way these two words are often deployed against each other in an effort to position the speaker in relation to mononormative practices of sex and love. Leaving aside questions of the accuracy of particular definitions, I map a range of definitions against two existing scholarly/activist tools for describing relationship styles, specifically Gayle Rubin’s “Charmed Circle” and Meg-John Barker’s sex/love continuums. This exercise is doubly fruitful: first, the tools reveal the political stakes of the definitional debates; second, the definitions demonstrate that the distinctions we commonly use to distinguish between types of relationships—including types of non-monogamous relationships—in fact rely on mononormative assumptions about sex, love, and friendship. If “mononormativity” is defined as the system of ideas, institutions, and practical orientations that provide the backdrop against which the idea of monogamy as coherent, common, natural, and right congeals, the sex/love skirmishes of “swinging” and “polyamory” remind us that its logics are both pervasive and deeply fractured.     

Mysterium tremendum und mysterium fascinans

The history of Western modernity must not only be regarded as a linear process of secularisation: even the “classics” of sociology like Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel have dealt with the ambiguities of the modern age, thereby referring to both the “disenchantment” and the “re-enchantment”. Worldly replacements such as science and political movements partly took over the function and the meaning of traditional religions. Political ‘religions’ not only adopted, transformed and amalgamated the contents of Christian texts and imaginations and used Christian rites and symbols, but also fulfilled special functions for their “believers”. One of the most important functions both of traditional religions and political ‘religion’ is to evoke emotions and to give opportunities to act on emotions. The article deals with the relationship between traditional ‘religions’ and political ‘religions’ with regard to emotions. In this context, the political ‘religion’ of Soviet communism until Stalin’s death is examined.     

“Allow access to location?”: Digital feminist geographies

Abstract

This article looks at the impacts ongoing processes of digitization have on feminist politics of location. It argues that, rather than being borderless by nature, the digital has to be understood as producing different kinds of borders, demanding different kinds of politics of location. New potentialities arise with the challenge of creating a politics fitting to the current mode in which locations become slippery. Discussing the emergence of cyberfeminism in the early 1990s and a more recent example of digital feminism—the #SolitarityIsForWhiteWomen hashtag—this article thinks through the following questions: what does the “cyborg” as a posthuman (and postgender) category have to offer for those who have been (and are) excluded from the notion of the “human”? More specifically, how can we understand and conceptualize the “cyborg” beyond triumphalist narratives of being beyond difference?     

Kübra Gümüşay,Muslim digital feminism and the politics of visuality in Germany

abstract

Muslim women’s digital activism exists in complexly racialized visual contexts. This is exemplified in the journalism and activism of Kübra Gümü?ay, who first gained public attention as the purportedly first “hijabi columnist” in Germany. This essay draws on her series “50 Thoughts” as an entry point into her digital activism. I suggest that Gümü?ay uses this series to reveal the larger visual dilemmas with which she engages. Her digital activism functions by taking the risk to both expose and reconfigure the very conditions under which she is visible and comprehensible to her publics. In particular, I consider her activism as using digital spaces for self-poiesis (an imaginative remaking of self) as well as teleopoiesis (an imaginative reaching out to the other). This latter move functions both to gesture to an anti-racist community as well as to alliances among multiple feminisms.     

The Well-Being of the Canadian Arctic Inuit: The Relevant Weight of Economy in the Happiness Equations

Which of the three dimensions of Allardt’s model, “having, loving, and being”, best predicts the incidence of subjective feeling of well-being among the Canadian Arctic Inuit adults? To answer this question, two logistic regression equations have been constructed, one based on a negative assessment of well-being (feeling of despair), and the other on a positive assessment (satisfaction with life in the community). Each of them took first the form of a global model, and then of three scale models, one for each dimension of the Allardt’s model. The equations are likely to be more effective for predicting the incidence of Inuit’s feeling of satisfaction than for anticipating their feeling of despair. Furthermore, the “being” scale model is the one that will have contributed most to the predictive performance of the global model. In other words, what the Inuit “ARE” contributes more to the incidence of their satisfaction with life than what they “HAVE” or what they “LOVE”.