Branding the self as an “authentic feminist”: negotiating feminist values in post-feminist digital cultural production

Freelancers who produce creative content online work in an increasingly precarious neoliberal economy, which requires self-branding, self-promotion, and constant audience engagement to succeed. Creating feminist content in a digital environment thus requires the negotiation of individual self-branding and promotional activities alongside the advancement of collective feminist politics. In this study, interviews with 11 feminist online writers reveal that they reconcile the individualistic undertakings required to succeed in the digital economy and their collective feminist values in three ways. Firstly, they incorporate “authentic feminism” into their personal branding endeavors; secondly, they redefine feminism to more closely match the values of post-feminism; and, thirdly, they advance peripheral collective goals in their creative communities. It is through these strategies that feminist values are negotiated and reworked, enabling producers to succeed as feminists in a digital economy that is more closely aligned with post-feminism.     

How (not) to “Hollaback”: towards a transnational debate on the “Red Zora” and militant tactics in the feminist struggle against gender-based violence

Abstract

The Red Zora was formed in the mid-1970s as a subgroup within the militant leftist network Revolutionary Cells. Like other militant leftist groups in West Germany, the Red Zora deemed the use of physical force against property, and in some cases people, to be a necessary part of national and international political interventions. But the group had a radical feminist philosophy. Between 1977 and 1995, the Red Zora carried out dozens of attacks with an explicitly feminist agenda. This paper gives a brief overview of the activities of the Red Zora and of feminist responses to the group. Against the background of Germany’s fascist past and political violence in the FRG, feminist activists in Germany were understandably reluctant to discuss ideas and activities that could associate the women’s movement with left-wing “terrorism.” This article shows that “Hollaback!,” #aufschrei and other recent campaigns by feminist activists in Germany have reinforced rather than challenged the feminist silence on the Red Zora. While German feminists have only begun to document the history of the group, activists in other countries show that one does not have to agree with the tactics of the Red Zora to productively engage with the activities of this group.     

“Hope in a hashtag”: the discursive activism of #WhyIStayed

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.     

A Case for “Reverse One-Child” Policies in Japan and South Korea? Examining the Link Between Education Costs and Lowest-Low Fertility

Household spending on children’s pre-tertiary education is exceptionally high in Japan and South Korea, and has been cited as a cause of low fertility. Previous research attributes this high spending to a cultural emphasis on education in East Asian countries. In this paper, we argue that institutional factors, namely higher education and labor market systems, play an important role in reinforcing the pressure on parents to invest in their children’s education. We review evidence showing that graduating from a prestigious university has very high economic and social returns in Japan and South Korea, and examine the implications for fertility within the framework of quantity–quality models. Finally, we put forward ‘reverse one-child’ policies that directly address the unintended consequences of these institutional factors on fertility. These policies have the additional virtues of having very low fiscal requirements and reducing social inequality.     

Should a Second Demographic Transition Follow the First? Demographic Contrasts: Canada and South Korea

Social Indicators Research -     

Religious Attendance,Stress, and Happiness in South Korea: Do Gender and Religious Affiliation Matter?

Is religious attendance positively associated with happiness in South Korea? If yes, can religious attendance buffer against the harmful effect of stress on happiness? Moreover, do gender and religious affiliation modify these associations? This study addresses these questions with data from 2009 Korean General Social Survey which is a nationally representative survey (N = 1,599). Ordinal least square regression analyses reveal that although the effect size is relatively small, religious attendance is associated with a higher level of happiness in South Korea. However, this positive effect holds only for women and only for Protestants. In addition, an interaction effect between religious attendance and stress is observed for women only; the negative association between stress and happiness is weakened among those women who report more frequent church attendance. In this regard, a high level of church attendance buffers against the deleterious effects of stress on happiness for women. I discuss the implications of the findings with regard to theories about religion, mental health, and gender in South Korean context.     

Performing the “quing of berlin”: transnational digital interfaces in queer feminist protest culture

Abstract

This paper employs the figure of the “interface” to explore the work of German feminist rapper and spoken-word performer Sookee (Nora Hantzsch), who constitutes an ideal case-study for examining the interface between digital technologies, transnational feminisms, and local activism. Sookee is an underground hip-hop artist and queer political activist in Berlin, a location which features in her work as a site of subcultural dissent and contested identities. Sookee is also an academic; a youth outreach worker; a significant online presence; and an international creative collaborator. As such, she navigates the interfaces between multiple social groups, media, discourses, and cultural contexts—regional, national, and transnational. This article focuses on the digital circulations of Sookee’s material against the backdrop of her local performative and activist work. Her transnational collaborations with women MCs and poets from South Africa and America, as well as Europe, celebrate cultural, linguistic, racial, and ethnic difference by bringing in a diverse range of feminist voices to the German context.     

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.     

Family Structure and Child Well-Being in a Non-western Context: The Role of Parent–Child Relations and Parental Conflict in South Korea

Population Research and Policy Review - Research suggests that children who live with two biological married parents are less likely to exhibit behavioral problems than children who do not. While...     

“Sober encounters”: the neoliberal logics of human rights documentary and Indian feminist documentary filmmakers

“Sober encounters” examines the market-defined encounters between Indian feminist documentary filmmakers and global humanitarian and media commissioning and funding agencies. Drawing from interviews conducted with Indian filmmakers, the essay looks closely at the seemingly sober aesthetic and ethical imperatives of these agencies and their impact on the production and distribution of rights-based feminist documentary film in India. Further, I present the figure of the “transient subject” and posit that it is one apprehended by market-friendly representational regimes to legitimate a neoliberal rights discourse. I argue for a deeper examination of these representational regimes and their attempts to de-radicalize the visual cultures of women’s rights.     

“The devil destroyed us”: Satanism and gender violence in South Africa

In October 2011, a young South African woman named Kirsty Theologo was set on fire and left for dead by a group of her high school contemporaries in Linmeyer, Johannesburg. The killing was defined as a “Satanist murder,” leading to media, judicial, and religious interventions aimed at countering the apparent Satanic threat. This article examines press material surrounding Kirsty Theologo’s death and the subsequent arrest and trial of her killers. It argues that the ongoing moral panic around Satanism in contemporary South Africa has obscured the often gendered nature of so-called satanic violence, showing the way in which the murder was instead placed within a familiar framework of Satanic panic in an act of collective displacement that elided the structural and historical contexts of acts of extreme violence perpetrated by young South African men on the bodies of young South African women.     

Critical feminist hope: the encounter of neoliberalism and popular feminism in WWE 24: Women’s Evolution

Scholarship has pointed to contemporary feminism’s popularity and cultural “luminosity.” While this research has highlighted the limitations of feminist politics in a context of neoliberal individualism, this paper seeks to ask what possibilities for critiques and transformation of gender inequalities might be enabled by feminism’s visibility in neoliberalism. Using a framework of critical feminist hope, we highlight that capitalism’s embrace of feminism inarguably limits its political scope, but it may also open up opportunities for new forms of representation. To illustrate this, the paper analyses WWE 24: Women’s Evolution, a “brandcasting” documentary made to mark the rebrand of the sport entertainment promotion’s women’s division in 2016. While never naming it directly, the documentary draws heavily upon the signifiers of popular feminism. Although this mobilisation is often highly limited, a critically hopeful feminist reading allows us to move beyond dismissing this text as an example of feminism’s “co-optation” by neoliberalism. We highlight the documentary’s scathing critique of past failings in the representation and treatment of women performers, and, more importantly, the way feminism is used to make the case for corporate re-structure and change.     

Do Social Workers Apply “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself” to Gay,Lesbian, Bisexual,and Transpersons in the South?

ABSTRACT

Across the United States there has been a spate of legislative bills and initiatives that blatantly stigmatize and discriminate against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. This study was a cross-sectional, exploratory survey designed to measure the attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors of Tennessee social workers and future social workers toward the LGBT population and toward proposed discriminatory legislation. A 3-way factorial ANOVA investigated the effects of political affiliation, religious affiliation, and social contact on the dependent measures. Significant main effects were found. Self-reported political affiliation was found to be the most important factor predicting LGBT acceptance and LGBT respect among this sample.     

Location shooting in “the Wild East”: risk and masculinity in Hollywood productions in the Philippines

This essay argues that risk has become a crucial part of Hollywood’s transnational media productions, revealing these productions’ links to various forms of masculinity. Entailing the deliberate confrontation of uncertainty, the concept of risk connotes rational decision-making, territorial exploration, economic investment, and, more implicitly, the kinds of masculinities associated with these practices. As such, risk becomes a means of understanding how the older forms of white masculinity associated with empire map onto newer geopolitical contexts, gendering production narratives that seek to mythologize filmmakers as auteurs, businessmen, and danger-seekers. Focusing on American productions in the Philippines, the essay examines risk and white masculinity in three cases of filmmaking: 1970s exploitation cinema commemorated in Machete Maidens Unleashed!; Apocalypse Now and Coppola’s subsequent tourism ventures; and the blockbuster The Bourne Legacy.     

Schooling the public on boys: the ongoing salience in media representations of the “crisis” in boys’ education

This paper explores the salience of the “crisis” in boys’ education as it is articulated in Australian print media. We will consider the ways in which this crisis is expressed through a gendered language which simultaneously represents boys as “forgotten” by teaching practices thought to be prioritising girls’ learning, and as an equity (disadvantaged) grouping who require specialised teaching methods different from those currently offered within the Australian school system. Further, we will examine the extent to which feminist-inspired reforms in education are either implicitly or explicitly referenced as an explanation for boys’ apparently poor education attainment, and relatedly consider the work of “experts” supporting claims of a pro-feminine bias that adversely affects boys’ learning outcomes, particularly those experts offering neurological or psychological/cognitive findings which assert a biological basis for gender difference. In this context, we argue that rather than advancing gender equity in schools, popular public discourse, as presented in Australian print media, reinforces and perpetuates notions of gender difference and masculine entitlement.