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.     

Diary entries from the "teachers' professional development playground": multiculturalism meets multisexualities in Australian education

Educational institutions are major cultural and social systems that police and regulate the living out of multicultural and multisexual queer identities, yet which also provide sites for anti-discriminatory responses to the marginalization of these multiple, hybrid identities. Censorship and disapproval (both real and imagined) together with informal codes and regulations for inclusion and representation within school and college communities reflect and reproduce formal debates within the wider society, and within ethnic, feminist, and gay/lesbian communities. Through a series of "Diary Entries," I document my work and experiences with educational groups in both secondary and tertiary education in Australia in recent years-in what a bicultural, bisexual teacher-friend calls "teachers' professional development playgrounds." I explore dilemmas, concerns and strategies for placing "multiculturalism" on the "multisexual" agenda and, conversely, for placing "multisexuality" on the "multicultural" agenda.     

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.     

Buffy's Voice

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     

Shameless television: gendering transnational narratives

The UK television drama Shameless (Channel 4, 2004–2011) ran for eleven series, ending with its 138th episode in 2011. The closing episode did not only mark an end, however, but also a beginning – of a US remake on Showtime (2011-). Eight series down the line and carrying the weight of critical acclaim, this article works to consider the textual representations and formal constructions of gender through the process of adaptation. Paying close attention to the structural elements of recaps, voiceovers, and final sequences of Shameless’ first series, while drawing on the work of feminist narratologists and transnational TV theory, we argue that the examination of gender in narrative reveals differing cultural values between the UK and US.     

Times for birth: chronic and kairotic mediated temporalities in TLC’s A Baby Story

Despite repeated acclaim within the television industry, feminist media scholars have argued that TLC’s long-running program, A Baby Story, disciplines women into selecting obstetrical intervention by offering a standard episodic structure for understanding a complex birth experience. This article thickens this line of inquiry by arguing that TLC uses a narrow, but decipherable, range of temporalities to leverage biomedicine’s claim to childbirth. Drawing on the rhetorical concepts of chronos as narrative duration-time and kairos as interruptive moments of possibility, I argue that episodes are structured by a chronic articulation of “family completion” and “hospital biomedical duration” that conditions women to expect a kairotic interruption of selected birth plans. I conclude with implications for studying birth temporalities and rhetorically crafting women-centered birth narratives.     

Beyond Bluebeard: feminist nostalgia and Top of the Lake (2013)

Jane Campion’s films have repeatedly used the Bluebeard story as a myth underpinning their narrative structures. This article examines the way in which her 2012 TV series, Top of the Lake, both uses and moves beyond this myth, arguing that its central focus on mothers and daughters draws instead on another, related myth, that of Demeter and Proserpine. This story, Mary Jacobus has suggested, is the Greek myth that Freud does not select, indeed represses, in his search for a founding myth that would ground the psychoanalytic story of childhood development. It is also a myth which, in a gesture of “feminist nostalgia,” feminists have repeatedly appropriated in their desire to recover a “lost,” unalienated mother-daughter relationship. Top of the Lake, I argue, is both an exercise in and investigation of such feminist nostalgia. Campion’s evocation of the myth of Proserpine/Demeter to underpin its complex mix of female Gothic and detective story counters the dominant cultural narrative of Oedipus. But like Jacobus it remains suspicious of utopian fantasies and the unalienated body.     

Becoming Pregnant

This article considers the implications of the presence of Juno's pregnant girl body in the film Juno (2007). The narrative follows the high school student Juno's pregnancy, her decision to have the baby adopted, and its birth as she attempts to determine her feelings for her friend Bleeker. As a pregnant girl, Juno persists in a state of liminality and disrupts linear ideas of becoming: becoming woman, becoming mother, becoming feminist. Having considered contemporary discourses of pregnancy, I explore Juno's representation of the pregnant body as both abject and humorous, recognising the restrictions upon girls' sexuality and moments in which they are contested. I then move to consider Juno in relation to discourses of risk and responsibility, acknowledging the ways in which the film simultaneously perpetuates and critiques the presumption that teenagers make bad parents. I argue that analysing the juncture of girl and pregnancy represented in Juno enables a move beyond simplistic expectations of “normal” feminine girlhood to recognise it as complex and messy.     

(Re)circulating Foreign Bodies

This paper situates Richard Fung's auto-ethnographic video Sea in the Blood within the context of the personal illness narrative as a mode of political resistance which emerged alongside the movements of feminist health activism and global HIV/AIDS activism. I argue that as a critical illness narrative, which reads the experiences of transnational travel and migration in and through a narrative of illness, race, and sexuality, Sea in the Blood disrupts the genres of both the personal illness narrative and the imperial travel narrative while resisting the assimilative pull of what Charles L. Briggs calls the “political economy of communicability.” Specifically, I argue that Fung resists cultural and political absorption using three primary strategies: the symbolics of blood, the juxtaposition of illness and travel narratives, and the tactics of misalignment, or the self-conscious use of contradictory narratives and competing modes of representation. Through these strategies, Sea in the Blood is installed as a form of revolutionary activism which comments on the historical pathologization of foreign bodies, and exposes the ways in which the medicalization of race underwrites the medicalized history of sexuality. Accordingly, Sea in the Blood inaugurates what might be thought of as a politics of incommunicability through the sensuous and metaphorical re/circulation of foreign bodies.     

“Difficult,Messy, Nasty,and Sensational”

Feminist publishing played an important role in the feminist art movement of the 1970s and into the 1980s, and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics was a key journal in this landscape. This paper argues that Heresies is important not only because it was a forum for some of the most influential feminist art women of the period, but because it experimented with an editorial structure that required participants to reckon with the discomforts of difference. Editors of the periodical took seriously the feminist critique of hierarchically structured organizational cultures and both promoted and practiced collective publishing. Moreover, through an emphasis on editorial statements, I consider how Heresies gives expression to the affective entanglements of the women involved in Heresies' specific form of collaboration and collective feminist politics. An examination of the editorials as sites of affective intensity helps to come to an understanding not of what women were thinking, writing, and making, but how they may have felt about their work and their relationships with women with whom they worked.     

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.     

How menstrual shame affects birth

In Western, industrialised culture, menstruation and birth are commonly seen as unstable, pathological processes requiring medical control. Girls learn to see menstruation as shameful and secretive. Menarche is a nodal event around which girls’ beliefs and attitudes to being female are organised. The perception of menstruation as a liability has foundational implications for future female experiences, particularly birth. Other cultures have recognised menstruation and birth as spiritual phenomena, with menarche and childbirth experienced as powerful initiatory processes. My PhD research explored the links between cultural attitudes to menstruation and spirituality, and women's experiences of birth. My feminist perspective recognised the power imbalances, patriarchal controls and structural inequities that oppress women in their intimate body experiences. Menstrual shame was identified as a core patriarchal organising principle that inculcates and perpetuates male dominance and female subordination. Engendering the perception of female physiology – and thus womanhood – as inherently flawed, menstrual shame was a key factor that predisposed women to approach birth feeling fearful, disempowered and vulnerable to intervention. However, my research also unearthed a counter-cultural group of women who had transformed their relationship with both menstruation and birth. Redesignating menstruation as a spiritual phenomenon enabled these women to dismantle their menstrual shame, connect with their female spirituality and give birth fearlessly and powerfully. For others, the profound spirituality of birth transformed their understanding of menstruation. Contrary to cultural norms, both menstruation and birth can be sacred female experiences which are sources of authority and empowerment.     

“Out of place” bodies and gender: urban exclusion and emplacement as documentary method in My Own City

In this paper, I investigate Indian filmmaking that emerges from the encounter between urban experience and documentary practice to examine how Indian feminist critique responds to neoliberal discourses of urbanism and gender. I consider the analysis of urbanism in Sameera Jain’s documentary My Own City (2011) which depicts how women become “out of place” in neoliberal cities by focusing on the gendering of urban temporality, mobility and belonging, in relation to which women’s subjectivities and performances are mediated in the nation’s capital New Delhi. In the second section, I conceptualize the use of a deliberate strategy of place-specific performance in the film as “emplacement” which enables a visible field of gender performances and observable mutations of both, subject and space. In contrast to documentary staging or re-enactment, conceptualized as emplacement, the audiovisual recording of complex relations of “becoming” allows place-specific ecologies of material, sensory and social environments to be considered together in the construction of gender. Following the film, the paper outlines provocations regarding critical ways of conceptualizing place in how cultural forms like documentary represent gender in relation to geographies and environments.     

Good Mothers Never Wane: Mothering at Menopause

ABSTRACT

Due to recent feminist scholarship, we know a considerable amount about women's mothering identities and activities, as well as the impact of mothering ideology on individual women. Nonetheless there are gaps in our knowledge about motherhood. For instance, we know mostly about experiences of mothers with young children, and an implicit assumption is that mothers are also fairly young themselves. Yet, what about mothers at midlife and beyond? What about menopausal mothers? This paper represents an initial attempt to explore motherhood experiences of middle-aged menopausal women. Findings presented in this article are based on 45 in-depth interviews with middle-class, heterosexual menopausal women in a midwestern state in 2001. Findings suggest that motherwork and the maintenance of “good” mothering ideology are still primary activities of women at menopause despite assumptions that menopausal women have completed mothering experiences and are now grandmothers (if caregivers at all). In analyzing menopausal mothers, I encourage broader explorations of women's experiences of both motherhood and menopause.     

Written on the Body

The author considers two recent prize-winning films by women directors (one British and one American) with similar, if not identical themes. Placing them in the category first defined by David Considine as “the cinema of adolescence” the author considers the filmic traditions from which they arise. In both of the films under consideration—Fish Tank and Girlfight—the young female protagonists attempt to resist or subvert socially imposed restrictions. The author considers the way the entrapment of the working-class teenage girls at the centre of these films is represented by non-professional “actresses” selected because they come from the same milieu of run-down sections of cities as their on-screen characters. She explores the way in which these two writer-directors use their actresses to embody on screen issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and culture, and the near-impossible routes out of poverty. To do so, the author utilises theories from sociology, feminist theories of the body, as well as theories derived from film studies to examine these politically driven films.     

Negotiating the Intersection of Racial Oppression and Heteronormativity

This qualitative study examines the narratives of seven heterosexual, cisgender individuals who identify both as persons of color and as positively disposed toward LGB and transgender-identified persons. Using psycho-discursive qualitative methodology, the authors will present the narrative strategies taken up by these positively disposed cisgender heterosexuals of color as they attempt to position themselves as supportive of LGB and transgender persons while negotiating the discourse of heteronormativity. The three narrative strategies have been titled differentiation, empathy, and coherence. In addition to mapping the three narrative strategies, the authors also explore why informants may choose certain strategies over others and argue that the intersection of social identities must be considered when attempting to understand social oppression. Implications for the human services fields will be discussed.     

Men at sport: gay men's experiences in the sport workplace

Research on sexual identity and sport has revealed a shifting narrative about the experiences of gay men. While some suggest the atmosphere is hostile, others posit that homophobia and sexual prejudice are playing less of a role in gay men's experiences. This research focuses on the experiences of 10 gay men working in professional, collegiate, and club sport, as part of a larger dataset of 37 male and female employees. Five of the men were overtly and publicly out at work, while five were closeted (to varying degrees). This article focuses on three themes for gay men working in sport: 1) the importance of coming out in the workplace; 2) the role of the locker room as a contested terrain, and 3) the disconnect between their experiences at work and their perceptions of the workplace environment as negative or positive. Men in this study were basing their impressions on their total experience in sport (as current and former players, as employees, and as fans). It also suggests that the public "story" of gay men working in sport represents one of two extremes-either the proverbial "horror story," or the extremely positive representation of gay men's experiences. This research suggests that gay men's experiences in sport are more complex and nuanced than the public narrative implies.     

News media on trial: towards a feminist ethics of reporting footballer sexual assault trials*

Court reporting is rarely discussed in journalism ethics, as it seems to be widely viewed as a straightforward task. However, this article develops a theory of meaning-making in court reporting to show how media coverage of high-profile sexual assault trials poses complex ethical questions. Positioning court reporting as a “hybrid” genre between legal narrative and news reporting, I show how genre conventions grant particular kinds of significance to events and speech acts. Subtle discursive and narrative strategies privilege either the prosecution or defence’s narrative, portraying the defendant or complainant as “guilty” even without overt sensationalising or vilification. Using the trial of Australian footballer Brett Stewart as a case study, I show how even reporting that meets current ethical standards can be ethically questionable, including reinforcing myths and stereotypes about rape—such as relating to mental illness and DNA evidence. I suggest that another, feminist approach to journalism ethics is needed in these cases, to balance the right of a defendant to the presumption of innocence with the rights of a complainant, and the feminist imperative to counter damaging attitudes towards rape.     

Good mothers never wane: mothering at menopause

Due to recent feminist scholarship, we know a considerable amount about women's mothering identities and activities, as well as the impact of mothering ideology on individual women. Nonetheless there are gaps in our knowledge about motherhood. For instance, we know mostly about experiences of mothers with young children, and an implicit assumption is that mothers are also fairly young themselves. Yet, what about mothers at midlife and beyond? What about menopausal mothers? This paper represents an initial attempt to explore motherhood experiences of middle-aged menopausal women. Findings presented in this article are based on 45 in-depth interviews with middle-class, heterosexual menopausal women in a midwestern state in 2001. Findings suggest that motherwork and the maintenance of "good" mothering ideology are still primary activities of women at menopause despite assumptions that menopausal women have completed mothering experiences and are now grandmothers (if caregivers at all). In analyzing menopausal mothers, I encourage broader explorations of women's experiences of both motherhood and menopause.     

Co-Sexuality and Organizing: The Master Narrative of “Normal” Sexuality in the Midwestern Workplace

ABSTRACT

Human sexuality is a highly regulated but fluid construct that people communicatively organize around. What has been socially constructed as “normal” sexuality (e.g., preferences, rights, vocabulary, etc.) has shifted dramatically over time, and differently between communities and geographic boundaries. In workplace contexts, where policies and daily practices explicitly and implicitly regulate performances of and communication about sexuality, regional and cultural sexual “norms” can affect how people of diverse sexualities understand and experience their jobs. The Midwestern United States is a particularly complex and diverse region when considering sexual equality in the workplace. Using the lens of co-sexuality, this study explores how people identifying with varying sexual, gender, and professional identities in Midwestern workplaces explained their perceptions of “normal” sexuality and how it affected their workplace experiences. Participants drew on the master narrative of the Midwest, composed of perceived Judeo-Christian norms and a cultural discomfort with difference, and described feeling simultaneously pulled toward and pushed away from cultural sexual “norms” in their day-to-day work environments.