Feminine Sexualities in the Chick Genre

This paper foregrounds the voices of women who read chick lit or watch contemporary chick flicks or both, and who, to date, have been absent in the scholarship on representations of women's sexuality in this genre. It is informed by an empirical study of responses from forty-one Australian women to an anonymous Internet survey that asked, “How do you think women's experiences of sex are portrayed in the chick genre?” and “If you were a writer of the chick genre, how else would you portray women's sexual experiences?” Following the works of Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, and Joke Hermes on “interpretive repertoires,” the data reveal that most readers draw on two repertoires to interpret representations of women's sexuality—one, as “passive or asexual,” and the other as “perfect with Mr Right”—both of which are situated within a wider “romantic love” frame of reference. Participants are, predominantly, critical of the way women's sexuality is represented in the chick genre. The findings, that also show that most readers have a preference for texts that show a broader range of sexual representations for women, are discussed in the light of current theorizing about postfeminist texts.     

“Sexy” And “Laddish” Girls

Unpacking ideologies at work within contemporary popular media discourses about young womanhood can be challenging when the terrain of their representation is often presented in a kind of binary-oppositional fashion. There is concern that in contemporary popular culture traditional gender roles are becoming even more entrenched, with femininity increasingly defined around notions of (hyper, hetero-normative) “sexiness.” At the same time, it seems that certain aspects of masculinity, namely sexual hedonism and social, drinking-centred hedonism, have conditionally opened up to young women. The panics that exist around both the figures of the “sexy girl” and the “laddish girl” lead me to unpack here how it is that concerns about women's excessive “sexiness,” and the gendered reinforcement of the sex-object role, relate to discourses of gender “transgression” that often circulate around the figure of the “ladette,” and the supposedly new-found freedoms she is exercising. I suggest that while the figures of the “sexy girl” and the “laddish girl” are both to some extent deplored and constructed as “excessive” and “transgressive” in recent media discourses, they are also both normalised and publicly imag(in)ed through such discourses as central post-feminist paradigms of young womanhood. I go on to explore a possible ideological function of the co-existence of “sexy” and “laddish” girls as normative figures within contemporary media culture.     

After September 11

A major question in studying the relationship between mass media and society is whether mass media are agents of social change or reinforcers of the status quo. This study examined media portrayal of women to explore the relationship between the media and society within the Chinese context. Through a content analysis of 352 cover pictures of Women of China, China's official English women's magazine for foreign publicity, the authors investigated whether and how the media portrayal of Chinese women relates to China's social changes. Our findings show that the image of Chinese women presented by the covers of Women of China is to a large extent influenced by the socio-economic and political-ideological changes in China. Rather than a literal portrayal of the “reality,” it is a symbolic representation of the Chinese women created through the interaction of party ideology, editorial policy, and readers' taste as well as the changing reality of Chinese women's life and work. The interlocking of party control and societal influences has determined the typical images of “Chinese Women” suited to particular periods of time in the contemporary Chinese history.     

The Politician,The Wife,The Citizen,and her Newspaper

Recent dramatic rises in the number of women elected to British parliaments have renewed critical interest in the significance of gender, and ways of theorising and researching women's political representation. However, the central role played by the media in contemporary politics is often neglected in feminist political scholarship. At the same time, the spaces occupied by women in political news journalism and the body politic remain under-explored by media theorists. This article argues that if we are to fully understand the politics of representation and what fairer representation for women might mean, we need to address these neglected dimensions. To make the case, I present an analysis of press coverage of the 1997 British General Election campaign. This seeks to draw together conventionally disparate strands of feminist, political and media theorising in order to highlight the gendered politics of newspaper imag(in)ing, storytelling, and commentary. Improving women's presence in media(ted) political discourse, I conclude, might be one means of strengthening women's symbolic and substantive representation.     

Politics of Sex Appeal in Advertising

This article is an ethnographic exploration of how gender ideologies were negotiated in the South Korea of the 2000s, in advertising texts and in advertising workplaces. Advertising has been criticized for reproducing gender stereotypes, and it is easy to assume that it is men within advertising agencies who are responsible for the objectifying and sexualizing portrayals of women. Yet behind some of the raciest South Korean advertising campaigns were ambitious women, who not only eagerly repeated the marketing adage that “sex sells” but also, provocatively, attempted to obliterate the lingering patriarchal norms and double sexual standards—with sexualized advertising. This article examines the politics of sex appeal in contemporary South Korean advertising by drawing on participant observation at an advertising agency, interviews, and public discourse analysis. Having situated the women's interventions within the cultural–historical context of South Korea, I, first, show how women's embrace of the sex-appeal aesthetic was a strategy to succeed in a male-dominated work environment and, second, detail how fighting gender discrimination with sex-appeal advertising was a profoundly contradictory project. I suggest that the politics of sex appeal in advertising was symptomatic of how women's struggles for equality were collapsing into neoliberal post-feminist sensibility.     

“Be Patient,Dear Mother … Wait For Me”

In social reality, illness and death occur in myriad ways, yet Hollywood films have historically preferred spectacular, violent death over realist depictions of the terminal stages of life. Yet an ever-growing number of popular films, which I term neo-infirmity films, incorporate episodes of women characters debilitated by illness or injury. Operating at the intersection of melodrama and realism, the scenes are instrumental in staging contemporary cinema's gender politics. I argue that women's deathbed and hospital-bed scenes in contemporary cinema validate anew the maternal role and the figure of the mother, transporting the woman-centered discursive space of melodrama into narrative terrain often hostile to women's presence. Through this relocation, the films emphasize her importance to sons in particular (and less often to daughters, husbands, and the larger family unit). Many such scenes simultaneously undermine women's agency, reducing mothers to principally symbolic, literally immobile roles. Ailing women can become catalysts for male psychological transformation occurring through grief, action, or both in combination. In all, such scenes speak to continued ambivalence surrounding women's representation in popular cinema, and to continued patrolling of the boundaries of female power. This essay compares selected texts from contemporary Hollywood cinema, alongside three parallel discourses that also deploy melodramatic modes of articulation: nonfiction amateur video as relayed via television news programs, international art cinema, and US independent cinema. Arguing for homologies across multiple fields of textual production, I seek through this comparison to generate insights into the cultural work done by filmic representation.     

Schröder versus Schwarzer?

This article attempts to map the discursive terrain that marks contemporary engagements with feminism in Germany. In particular, the article explores a 2010 interview with Germany's family minister, Kristina Schröder, and its coverage in the media. Based on a discourse analysis, the article traces four discursive themes that characterise contemporary negotiations of feminism: a repudiation of the figure of the “feminist-as-lesbian”; a postfeminist sensibility; an individualist and neoliberal outlook; and a limited engagement with differences amongst women. By theorising these discursive strands, the article places the German context into wider debates. More specifically, it makes contributions to existing research by demonstrating how particular stereotypes—e.g., feminists are against heterosexual sex—attach to feminism through reiteration. In addition, it intervenes in current debates about gender politics by demonstrating how statements about “western” women's emancipation work in tandem with problematic discourses about “other,” allegedly oppressed women, to construct the western, autonomous, feminine subject.     

Boys will be boys

While lad's magazines such as FHM and Loaded have been subject to critical attention with respect to the way they represent and negotiate models of masculinity, there has been a significant absence of work that addresses the representation of women in these and other publications, such as Zoo and Nuts. In this paper I argue that these magazines normalise pornography through an invocation of the “real,” by encouraging reader action and interaction, and through alignment with women's magazines. The construction and representation of the “real” is difficult to reconcile with the claims of irony used to excuse representation of women as sexual objects. Such claims are indefensible and are symptomatic of hegemonic gender norms in which women are not yet recognised as human.     

Fat Monica,Fat Suits,and Friends

This paper examines narratives about fatness that are represented and reproduced by the character of “Fat Monica” played by Courteney Cox in a fat suit on the sitcom Friends. By drawing on David T. Mitchell's framework for analyzing “narrative prosthesis,” I examine how Fat Monica's narratives on Friends represent complex intersections of identities. I argue that fat suits often evoke fatness to support limited and clichéd narratives; however, fat suits may also enable new means of representing and understanding fatness. Through an analysis of the ways in which Fat Monica is represented in the episodes she appears in, three key uses of Fat Monica's fatness are discussed. Firstly, I examine the comic uses of Fat Monica and their relationship between fatness and humour. Next, I examine how Fat Monica storylines represent interlocking narratives of fatness, femininity, and sexual desire. Lastly, I consider how Fat Monica represents the construction of the normative body and claims about fatness and authenticity. Ultimately, Fat Monica illustrates how fatness relates to understandings of humour, gender, social class, and heterosexuality.     

Chinese Immigrant Women Workers' Mediated Negotiations With Constraints On Their Cultural Identities

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this study examines the cultural identities of Chinese immigrant women workers in American society, that is, how the women negotiate with white supremacist cultural values that seek to interpellate them through their everyday use of media. I argue that through certain Chinese ethnic newspapers' cultural discourses, white supremacist cultural values penetrate the women's private lives and regulate their daily matters as minute as the color of their socks. Yet, the women's responses to these mediated discourses reveal that mainstream cultural values are only part of a more complex cultural quandary, which results from a number of constraints facing the women everyday: material difficulty, racial-cultural marginalization, and ethnic patriarchal control. In our group and individual interviews, my participants critically interpreted and negotiated with this cultural quandary. Their negotiation has great value, since it attests to their heightened cultural consciousness. From another perspective, however, their heightened consciousness has yet to develop into a strategic bicultural or multicultural identity, the “mestiza identity” in Anzaldua's words, as a result of the financial, racial, patriarchal, cultural, and psychological constraints in their lives. This situation leads us to reflect more on how we can help to lift these constraints, so that these women can strategically incorporate both Chinese and American cultural practices to improve their quality of life.     

Reporting The Women's Movement

This article examines and compares how four British and American newspapers reported the second-wave feminist movement during its most active political period, 1968–1982. Through the use of both content analysis and critical discourse analysis, this study reveals that despite socio-political differences, both US (The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune) and UK (The Times, Daily Mirror) newspapers used a similar range of discourses when addressing the women's movement and its members. While coverage overall can best be described as fragmented and contradictory, I argue that on the surface, there was significantly more “positive” or supportive articles on the women's movement than previous scholars have noted. However, these news stories rarely addressed the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy oppress women as a group, and often created a demarcation between “legitimate” and “de-legitimate” feminists, the latter being anyone who deviates from traditional feminine norms. Such constructions therefore were not only politically incapable of challenging women's oppression, but helped construct feminism as a dirty word, a connotation which still exists today. This paper will also address the emergence and eventual dominance of oppositional discourses, examining the patriarchal and capitalist ideologies used in both countries to rebuff the movement, its members and their goals.     

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.     

Feminism and women's film criticism in post-war Britain, 1945–1959

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.     

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.     

“It's Up to the Women”

In 1932, Ladies' Home Journal (LHJ) ran an extensive campaign, orchestrated by public relations pioneer Edward Bernays, to persuade American women to end the Great Depression through consumer purchases. Although the campaign failed, it is historically significant, illustrating how PR and magazines worked together to prescribe women's roles—a point little explored by feminist historians. While some women read the campaign hegemonically, others resisted its message, even adapting campaign language to suggest alternative plans. Foremost among these, I argue, was Eleanor Roosevelt (ER), whose 1933 book title, It's Up to the Women, is identical to the campaign's slogan. Attributed to ER alone, the slogan has been reprised in twenty-first-century Democratic presidential campaigns and used elsewhere. Patriotic shopping has also reemerged in recent crises. Although less important to feminists, FDR's (Franklin D. Roosevelt) famous “fear” line from his First Inaugural address resembles language in LHJ's campaign. Thus, the campaign can be seen not only as a site where the contested nature of women's roles was played out but one that illustrates how media language can be repurposed to shape changing cultural and political messages.     

Drinking as a Feminine Practice: Post-Feminist images of women's drinking in Swedish women's magazines

Previous feminist analyses have pointed out how the news media demonize women who drink, labelling them as irresponsible, disturbing or behaving “like men.” Popular media such as women's magazines, however, construct alternative representations, that frame women's drinking encouragingly and as part of a successful and “modern” femininity. This study carries out an analysis of fashion reports from six Swedish women's magazines, published between 1984 and 2008. It concludes that despite the fact that women's magazines create an alternative to problematizing portrayals of women who drink, this does not necessarily make them unproblematic from a feminist point of view. While the prevalence of positive and encouraging images may be interpreted as indicating a change towards more gender equal or gender neutral depictions of drinking; this article argues instead that these images should be regarded as parts of a discourse that celebrates stereotypical femininity and reproduces gender difference. As such, the present article brings new perspectives to the complex discourses that give shape to ideas about gender and alcohol in general, and women's drinking in particular.     

Women's Responsibilities,Freedoms, and Pleasures

In the building of the Swedish welfare state, men and women have been seen as equal in their roles as parents, breadwinners, and citizens. This conception is not confirmed by the images produced by advertising. The article presents an analysis of alcohol-related advertisements published in Swedish women's magazines from the 1960s to the 2000s. The advertisements are approached as representations of gendered performances in which gender is made visible “here and now” by placing women in particular subject positions that are related to private or public spheres and associated with specific kinds of gender norms reflecting women's shifting responsibilities, freedoms, and pleasures. The article asks what kind of drinking-related subject positions have been portrayed as desirable in women's magazine advertisements over the past few decades and how those positions have changed as we move closer to the present day. The analysis reveals both continuity and variability in alcohol-related subject positions in Swedish women's magazine advertisements. It shows how women's responsibilities, freedoms, and pleasures have expanded from the traditional domain of the private sphere to multiple new areas as Sweden has developed from a modern welfare state to a late-modern competition state. However, this does not mean that the traditional gender norms have disintegrated and been replaced by equal gender norms. Rather, it seems that traditional gender norms continue to be reproduced in alcohol-related advertising.     

Monstrous schoolteachers: women educators in popular cultural texts

From the drooling Mrs Green in the children’s picture book, The Teacher from the Black Lagoon to the best scarer of all time, Dean Hardscrabble from Monsters University, monstrous female teachers leap out from around the corners and under the desks of popular imaginings of school. In this paper, I focus on the figure of the female monster teacher in popular cultural texts and media produced for and/or consumed by North American youth, including picture books, television, film, and other cultural texts. Although these monster teacher narratives are produced for children and youth, they also work as a form of popular pedagogy for adults. The stakes of these representations are many, including the misogynistic representation of women in power as monstrous, the devaluing of teaching as “women’s work” or “child care,” and, the figuring of boys as “in crisis” in relationship to a predominately female workforce. I argue that, the female monster educator in popular cultural texts offers a corporeal curriculum that seeks to discipline the body of the teacher and to obfuscate the radical potential of teachers as professional women.     

“Dynamic Infertility”

Critical content analysis of eight years' of newspaper coverage of advanced reproductive technologies in Israel demonstrates that the public debate over assisted reproduction is largely characterized by personal narratives that accentuate, on the surface, a discourse of individualism. However, this study claims that beneath the surface, these women's “personal dreams,” are in fact realization of the “national dream” that promotes particular social values and demographic goals. The news coverage was found to promote a process we name “dynamic infertility,” in which women are encouraged not to accept physiological infertility but rather undergo as many fertility treatments as necessary, for as long as it takes, ultimately to bring their genetically related children into the world.