Chicks,Dicks, and Contradictions

This essay examines Playgirl as a rich, yet overlooked, archive in the history of American pornography. Although the magazine often is dismissed as the token attempt of a masculinist industry to equalize its representational politics, I argue instead that a significant synergy exists between Playgirl and entwined debates over pornography, gender, and commercialized sexuality in 1970s America. Employing established conventions of the women's magazine, Playgirl utilized that form toward granting women access to explicit images. Yet given its “better lifestyling” advice on how the sexually liberated woman might find empowerment by viewing male nudes, Playgirl's reluctance to display full-frontal nudity until the midpoint of its first year fashioned an initially compromised aesthetic. Not only were women interpolated as untutored viewers within this regime of genital obstruction, but models also were all but emasculated. Consequently, the degree of male exposure that could be handled by both viewers and models was questioned, critiqued, and debated across Playgirl's letters to the editor section, aptly entitled “In-ter-course.” As an artifact of sexual media history, Playgirl is invaluable because readers are able to trace throughout its pages the ways in which changing tides of gendered power began to problematize pornography's routine dichotomy between masculine subjectivity and female objectification.     

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.     

Spare Rib,Second-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Consumption

This article examines the significance of representations of both consumer culture and consumption practices in the British feminist magazine Spare Rib during its initial years of publication from 1972 to 1974. The analysis identifies how the magazine combined an established feminist critique of consumer culture with guidance on responsible consumption practices. The dispositions towards consumption that are recommended to readers are shaped by four key values: these are health, the natural, economy and craft production. These values underpin a politics of consumption during a period in which Spare Rib attempted to negotiate a feminist identity. However, once this feminist identity was established, content centred around consumption rapidly diminished as it was apparently not “feminist” enough. The article questions how a “conventional” position was established against both consumer culture and consumption practices within second-wave feminism and raises questions about the impact of this position on feminism's relationship to both consumer culture and consumption practices today.     

“The Consummate Material Girl?”

This paper examines one facet of the media persona of high profile South African liberation struggle figure, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela: how English-language media represented her conspicuous consumption during a monumental decade in the country's history, the 1990s. In the framework of theories of post-coloniality and intersectionality, the paper analyses the discourses in a corpus of thematically coherent media texts featuring Winnie's lifestyle and consumption practices. Media narratives of Winnie's taste for “diamonds,” “champagne,” “mansions,” and “expensive clothes” are deconstructed as ideologically loaded and influenced by racialized and gendered power struggles. The extent to which Winnie is presented as having “sold out” on the liberation struggle and having “bought in” to neoliberal values is theorized in the context of the politics of wealth and poverty in a newly liberated society.     

Pleasurable critiques: feminist viewership and criticism in Feminist Frequency,Jezebel, and Rosie Recaps

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

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.     

“All the same thing”: liberating reproductive politics for a mediated “gay community”

Analyzing the logic by which the Boston-based, national newspaper, the Gay Community News (GCN), intervened in mid-1980s battles over abortion and foster-parenting, this case study confirms and complicates recent critiques of ahistorical and silo-ed “alternative” media theory. The GCN’s radical collective strategically mixed, dismissed, crossed, re-defined, and ignored historically and geographically specific rhetorical resources to link abortion and lesbian/gay parenting as an “all the same thing” argument for its feminist “gay liberation” politics. At once premised on and adapting an opposition between logics of liberation and of “private” choice, the GCN’s equivalence rhetoric challenges distinctions between social movement media. The case also demonstrates how, considered in their own contexts, media projects may both disrupt oppressive codes and representations, whether promulgated by the state or other activists, and reinforce or legitimize domination and privilege. Although flawed and unavoidably contingent, this creative “same thing” imagining of a feminist “gay” reproductive liberation politics, and its limits, speak powerfully still, or again, to the radical, self-interrogating, and embodied social justice solidarities urgently needed today.     

The Japanese Women's Liberation Movement and the United Red Army

This article examines how the Japanese women's liberation movement responded to the news coverage of the United Red Army Incidents in 1972. The United Red Army was considered to be Japan's most violent domestic revolutionary sect. The United Red Army's misguided use of “revolutionary violence” in 1972 was devastating for Japanese leftist radicalism. The Japanese women's liberation movement was a political formation that emerged in 1970 in the wake of the Anti-Vietnam War and student movements of the late 1960s. In contrast to how the United Red Army received condemnation from across the political spectrum, from the right to the far-left, I focus on how these activists supported and identified with the women of the URA as an expression of their feminist politics. Through my analysis of the alternative media produced by these Japanese feminists and their multi-faceted support for the women in the URA, I argue that their intervention constituted a feminist praxis of critical solidarity and provides an illuminating feminist response to political violence.     

Living in Freedom and Hope: Editors' Introduction

Have radical discourses about children's sexual liberation/empowerment become normative technologies of neoliberal governmentality? How do we see sexualised representations of girls and what does the sexualised child look like? A contemporary consensus between media narratives and radical cultural critiques about the dangerous intolerance of child sexual abuse (CSA) moral panics suggests that the CSA moral panic discourse is caught up in the neoliberal “regulation of intolerance” (Brown 2006) through the governance of the gaze. Focusing on the 2008 Australian media event that erupted over Bill Henson's “art” photographs of naked girls, this article analyses how a perception that the images sexualised children was governed by experts as a reactionary and perverse CSA moral panic gaze. I argue that this form of governance depends on the exclusion of the political gaze of the survivor, a gaze that has been vital to a feminist critique of hetero-normative paedophilia. Re-claiming an affective feminist gaze involves thinking beyond the upwardly mobile discourse of CSA moral panic and through the occluded question of the sexual politics of paedophilia.     

Discursive manoeuvres and hegemonic recuperations in New Zealand documentary representations of domestic violence

This article examines the production and promotion of A&;E's Rollergirls (2006), a US docu-soap featuring the Texas Roller Derby Lonestar Rollergirls (TXRD), the league that revived roller derby as a sport for female amateurs. Focusing on the representation of TXRD skaters in Rollergirls, as well as A&;E's promotional campaign for the series, this analysis is contextualized in relation to the role of female athleticism in contemporary US commercial culture. Relying on practices long used to trivialize women sports figures, Rollergirls' portrayals of TXRD skaters suggest ambivalence towards female athleticism as well as a desire to contain the gender-bent and sexually agential performances at the heart of women's roller derby. In addition to revealing the challenges television producers face in the representation of female athletes and other nonconformist women, the research offered here hopes to expand feminist television criticism beyond its conventional focus on fictional texts while also broadening feminist studies of sports media, which have centered primarily on news coverage.     

Patriarchy,Power, and Female Masculinity

ABSTRACT

This article examines the place of “butch” within the women's movement. The political potentials of butch in both her refusal of patriarchal constructs of femininity and her transmutation of masculinity will be explored. It will be argued that the butch lesbian threatens male power by severing the naturalized connection between masculinity and male bodies, by causing masculinity to appear “queer,” and by usurping men's roles. However, for “butch” to truly have feminist potential, it also needs to be accompanied by a feminist awareness and a rejection of aspects of masculinity that are oppressive to women. Hence, “butch feminist” need not be an oxymoron, but a strategy for challenging male domination and power.     

The quiver is full: metonymy and affiliation in 19 Kids and Counting’s depiction of pregnancy loss in advanced maternal age

Abstract

This investigation into the cultural dynamics of gendered, aging bodies attends to a mediated representation of what contemporary biomedicine defines as pregnancy in “advanced maternal age” (AMA). We offer a feminist rhetorical analysis of an episode of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting entitled “A Duggar Loss,” where 45-year-old matriarch Michelle Duggar experiences pregnancy loss. In the episode, age is reconfigured in discussions of AMA pregnancy through a metonymic substitution and slippage of risk discourses, pre-natal self-care, and technological interaction. Moreover, “A Duggar Loss” mobilizes strategies of expansive affiliation around and through reproductive choice, which appears to align with feminist principles of reproductive autonomy despite the family’s ties to the Quiverfull Movement. This work contributes to feminist studies of aging bodies by suggesting that representations of advanced maternal age pregnancy remain a central, yet undertheorized subject in formulating powerful trans-ideological affiliations that can undermine progressive reproductive politics.     

Crossover Fatigue: The Persistence of Gender at Motown Records

This article examines the cultural politics of “crossover” at Motown Records, focussing on the relationship between genre, gender, and career longevity. Beginning with the Supremes' covers albums in the mid-1960s, the article links notions of musical originality to commercial logics of publishing, gendered divisions of labour, and racialised channels of record distribution. It also traces the rise of the celebrity songwriter-producer in soul, including artists like Isaac Hayes, Norman Whitfield, and Stevie Wonder, who fit a new mould of artistic authenticity that clashed with the carefully manicured performances of 1960s “girl pop.” The professional mobility afforded to men in both rock and r&b should prompt media scholars to consider the temporal dimensions of artist trajectories in the music industry, and taking the constraints on girl group singers seriously allows for reflection on (gendered) music industry knowledge about which audiences matter and for how long.     

The Postfeminist User

This paper is part of a preliminary investigation toward a postfeminist analysis of “the user.” It critically examines the pervasive liberatory rhetoric of interactivity through situating it within a widespread cultural context also rife with liberatory rhetoric: postfeminism. Two media properties, heavily marketed for interactivity, are examined: the first three films of the Final Destination film series and the reality television program Big Brother (US). I situate each as postfeminist texts, and then analyze their interactivity through this lens, demonstrating the utility of applying postfeminism to technology study. Following the feminist method of analyzing popular texts as modes of understanding feminine ideals, thereby articulating contours of a feminine subject position, I argue that analyses of postfeminist culture are productive broadly applied to cultural products, such as interactive media, augmenting feminist media theory. To understand ideals of technological usership, one must understand the culture in which they are embedded. Therefore, articulating the contours of the user as a subject position benefits from understanding postfeminist cultural sensibilities. Through this analysis, I describe the user, contrary to much new media theorizing, as exhibiting an illusory rhetoric of agency, hyperembodiment suffused with temporality and mobility, and an interactivity better understood as ongoing assessment and adjustment.     

Female Friendship,Idealisation and the “Need” For Violence In Crush

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.     

White Feminist Stories

The last decade has witnessed an increased visibility of grassroots feminist activism in Britain. This article concerns the representation of such activism in the left-leaning newspaper The Guardian, and focuses on issues related to race and whiteness. Drawing on anti-racist critiques of “white feminism,” the article presents a close reading of three articles which have appeared in recent years. Combining a content and narrative analysis, the article unpicks underlying assumptions about British feminism, and identifies three specific narrative techniques which are problematic in relation to race. These construct contemporary feminist activism as: (1) a continuation of a white feminist legacy; (2) a unified movement of “like-minded” individuals; and (3) “diverse” and “happy.” Presented as common sense, these narratives erase power differences between women, as well as a multitude of feminist organising in Britain, including black British feminism. While anti-racist feminists repeatedly challenge such representations, including occasionally on The Guardian's own blog, this appears to have little effect on the dominant constructions of feminism in the more prominent news and feature articles. This resistance to change highlights the continued unequal power relations between white feminists and feminists of colour, and the persistence of whiteness in defining feminism within mainstream liberal media.     

Discriminating taste: maintaining gendered social hierarchy in a cross-demographic fandom

To explore the role of hierarchical taste culture discourses in cross-gender media fandoms, this article considers “Bronies,” the adult, largely male fandom of girls’ animated series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. This fandom’s presence has often been identified as a significant gender taste norm violation with positive feminist implications. The authors’ open-ended qualitative survey of 2915 Bronies reveals this fandom extensively uses discourses of “quality” and hierarchical value to legitimate their interest in the series, and that in articulating its value, the fan culture reinscribes taste and gender hierarchies. Our findings show that by deploying masculinized taste norms, Bronies maintain traditional taste hierarchies within their gender-atypical fandom and marginalize the very audience and viewing culture from which My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic originated. Rather than indicating an open-minded, stereotype-defying attitude toward girls’ media culture more broadly, fans often articulate the series’ value by denigrating other girls’ media texts. While unexpected fandoms may support cross-demographic viewing, we argue that these fandoms can nonetheless maintain gendered taste hierarchies that have marginalized women and are not as feminist as they appear at first glance.     

Germaine Greer's Adaptable Celebrity

There is little doubt that Germaine Greer is the West's, and especially Britain's, most well-known feminist. This article, looking at her more recent public appearances, argues that Germaine Greer has proven adept at adapting her feminist celebrity, especially through various (and often comedic) performances on quiz and lifestyle programmes on British television. In particular, she exemplifies what has been called an “unruly woman”; that is, she is a transgressive figure who uses the space provided by these new entertainment formats not simply to reinforce her celebrity but to circulate (and perform) a particular feminism. Her celebrity, and her relationship to the mainstream media in Britain especially, has shifted and evolved over time and therefore provides an important case study into the complicated operations of celebrity as well as the feminism–media nexus itself. As an instance of gendered celebrity—and that of a feminist especially—that comes to at once trouble and buttress certain celebrity logics, Greer illuminates the political importance of this ground for feminism and helps to underscore that feminist celebrity is a distinct, and developing, mode of public subjectivity which celebrity studies and feminist media studies have thus far failed to significantly address.