Masculine domination and gender subtexts: The role of female professionals in the renewal of the Swedish video game industry

The video game industry is a showcase industry in the entrepreneurial, knowledge-intensive, and technology-based economy. Despite recent technological shifts rendering digital media portable in the form of smartphones, tablets, and laptops, attracting new categories of gamers, most notably women above the age of 35, the video game industry is struggling to handle its masculine domination, prescribing specific and gendered divisions of labor in terms of lowering thresholds for female video game developers. This article reports on empirical material based on interviews from the burgeoning Swedish video game industry and suggests that female professionals entering the industry encounter inherited gendered beliefs and ways of organizing work which locate women in specific, and not always desirable, roles within the industry. In this regime of masculine domination, the study concludes, female video game developers are understood as a particular group primarily knowledgeable about female gamers’ preferences and not as the possessors of general skills attractive to the video game companies. Ultimately, the masculine domination and the historical gendered divisions of labor are preventing the industry from creating more gender-equal workplaces and, as a consequence, fully exploiting market potentials.     

Threats and Supports to Female Students’ Math Beliefs and Achievement

This study examines how student perceptions of teacher practices contribute to female high school students’ math beliefs and achievement. Guided by the expectancy–value framework, we hypothesized that students’ motivation beliefs and achievement outcomes in mathematics are fostered by teachers’ emphasis on the relevance of mathematics and constrained by gender‐based differential treatment. To examine these questions, structural equation modeling was applied to a longitudinal panel of 518 female students from the Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study. While controlling for prior achievement and race, gendered differential treatment was negatively associated with math beliefs and achievement, whereas relevant math instruction was positively associated with these outcomes. These findings suggest inroads that may foster positive math motivational beliefs and achievement among young women.     

Gender Socialization,Countertransference and the Treatment of Men with Eating Disorders

Knowledge about the treatment of eating disorders is largely based on the experience of women with these disorders. The motivations, beliefs, vulnerabilities and developmental factors that cause and perpetuate eating disorders in men are often gendered. Engaging men in therapy and helping them build and sustain motivation requires therapeutic sensitivity to the impact of these gendered factors. Therapists’ sensitivity to these factors inevitably activates personal experiences with gender and provides an important source of information about patients’ experiences. This article focuses on how gender socialization and internalized views of masculinity affect client, therapist and the co-created therapeutic relationship. Male and female therapists can use awareness of gender influences to improve their ability to detect and communicate their gendered countertransference reactions. The article concludes with a discussion of how gendered assumptions and emotional reactions can affect treatment team interactions and treatment program protocols.     

Gender as Symbolic Capital and Violence: The Case of Corporate Elites in Turkey

Based on a Bourdieusian approach, drawing on qualitative analyses of 63 life interviews, our study demonstrates that gender is performed as both symbolic capital and violence by corporate elites within the dominant ideologies of patriarchy and family in Turkey. Our analysis reveals that, in the male‐dominated context of Turkey, female elites appear to favour male alliances as a tactical move in order to acquire and maintain status in their organizations, whereas male elites appear to remain blind to the privileges and constraints of their own gendered experience of symbolic capital and violence. Our study also illustrates that gender order is still preserved, despite beliefs to the contrary that equality in education, skills, experience and job performance may liberate women and men from gender‐based outcomes at work.     

Feminist and Gender Media Studies: A Critical Overview

This paper offers a general overview of past, current, and developing issues and debates in the growing field of gender and feminist media studies. Its main aim is to provide for those who are new to the field, as well as advanced students and researchers, a broad sense of what is now significant and important area of academic research. It engages with the differences and similarities between gender and feminist media studies, gendered communication systems, gendered news production, feminist methodologies and methods in communication research (textual, audience, and production based), the media's role in constructing gender, and gendered and feminist research by specific media form including advertising, magazines, film, television, news, radio, and the Internet and new media. The outline of research presented is not exhaustive; however, it attempts to trace certain significant developments in the field historically, conceptually, methodologically politically and trans‐nationally.     

‘If you're a male primary teacher,there's a big “why are you doing that? What is wrong with you?”’ Gendered expectations of male primary teachers: The ‘double bind’

The underrepresentation of men in non-traditional fields of work is often attributed to essentialist gendered beliefs that associate such roles exclusively with women. This phenomenon is not limited to any specific country but is observed worldwide. Moreover, male teacher drop-out rates remain a consistent issue. This article examines the detrimental impact of gendered expectations of masculinity on male primary teachers through interviews conducted with both male and female teachers in the UK. It argues that men in this occupation face a ‘double bind,’ being judged for conforming to hegemonic masculine norms while also facing judgement for deviating from them. All male teachers interviewed expressed feeling the pressure of gendered expectations, which primarily stem from one central misconception fuelled by traditional conceptions of gender; that the occupation is unsuitable for men. As a result, men who enter the profession encounter challenges not only related to their gender but also their sexuality and their sense of professional identity as teachers. Addressing the damaging role of gender beliefs is crucial in promoting the numerical representation of men in the teaching profession.     

Constructing Girlhood: Abject Labour in Magazine Offices

Girls' magazines act as important texts through which meanings of childhood, girlhood and womanhood are mediated and constructed. However, previous research has focused on either the conditions of work practices or cultural production of the magazine as a product. Separately in each context women or girls have been described as abject. The paper will argue that employees working on girls' magazines experienced a simultaneous double abjection: in the gendered working practices and as an outcome of the construction of girlhood they produced. Two studies of all female teams producing teenage and pre‐teen magazines were used, including interviews and observations. Our approach engaged with the difficulty of examining abjectivity in working practices, as present but marginalized, silenced and othered. As a result of scrutinizing the gendered embodiment in these studies, the findings suggest there is a relation between the working practices and gendered cultural production, forming a process of abjection. This process was threefold: a marginalization of a particular gendered embodiment, the cracks or leaks where abjectivity became apparent and the silencing of those leaks. This study will be of value to scholars interested in gendered embodiment in workplaces, abjectivity and cultural production, noting the interrelation between these areas.     

Against the Tide: Gendered Prejudice and Disadvantage in Engineering

Although a balance has been achieved in the overall numbers of female and male students in higher education in the industrialized countries, vertical sex segregation has remained high as male academics and students continued to outnumber their female counterparts internationally. Gender representation is only one façade of gendered disadvantage in engineering, as complex forms of gendered disadvantage occur in social, cultural, psychological and economic layers of life, where women engineering students find themselves swimming against the tide of prejudice. This article draws on comparative and historical data, and a qualitative study with interviews and a questionnaire survey which generated 603 completed responses from female and male engineering students in Turkey. It seeks to reveal the complex and layered nature of gendered prejudice levelled against female engineering students. The findings suggest that linear formulations of gendered prejudice and disadvantage in engineering study are insufficient to account for the complexity of influences on career choice and their concomitant gendered outcomes.     

Micro-entrepreneurship,new media technologies,and the reproduction and reconfiguration of gender in rural China

This article explores the connections between micro-entrepreneurship, new media technologies, and gender in rural China. Based on fieldwork among diverse individuals engaged in agricultural and non-agricultural micro-entrepreneurship, I examine how uses of technology in economic production become the site for the reproduction and/or reconfiguration of gender hierarchies. Grounding my analysis in feminist and critical theories of technology, I investigate the gendered uses and discourses of new media technologies that emerge from three types of entrepreneurial spaces: physical places where micro-entrepreneurship is based on new media technologies, such as internet cafés and mobile phone shops; virtual realms where new media technologies potentially facilitate entrepreneurship, including text messaging and various websites; and virtual spaces where informal learning and sharing take place via mediated networks formed around common occupations. I argue that in the context of entrepreneurship, even among women and men who are young and have migration experience, deeply entrenched gendered power differentials produce unequal access to capital and social networks, and hence uses and understandings of technology. Although engagement with technology has opened up new spaces for economic enhancement and the rearrangement of conventional gender norms, such engagement does not overcome – indeed, in many cases reproduces – gendered power relations.     

“It Takes a Man to Put Me on the Bottom”: Gay Men’s Experiences of Masculinity and Anal Intercourse

In anal intercourse between gay men, men who are typically insertive (“tops”) are often perceived as, and may identify as, more masculine than those who are typically receptive (“bottoms”). “Versatile” men, who may adopt either position, may be perceived as more gender balanced and may transcend the gender-role stereotypes associated with self-labeling as top or bottom. The aim of this study was to explore how gay men’s beliefs about masculinity were associated with their beliefs about the gendered nature of sexual self-labels and their behavior in anal intercourse. Individual semistructured interviews were undertaken with 17 UK-based gay men. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) identified that perceptions of tops and bottoms as gendered social identities varied depending on the extent to which gay men subscribed to the mandates of hegemonic masculinity, the dominant masculinity in Western society. The findings also suggested that some gay men differentiated between top and bottom as social identities and topping and bottoming as gendered behaviors. This had implications for gay men’s behaviors in anal intercourse. It is suggested that future efforts to engage with gay men about their sexual behavior should account for their beliefs regarding the gender-role stereotypes associated with gay sexual self-labels.     

Crisis communication in the rhetorical arena

This study applies and extends the rhetorical arena theory (RAT) of crisis communication with a network analysis. Taking the Volkswagen emission crisis as a case in point, the media discourse in two German and two US-based newspapers was analyzed. Patterns of interaction between various voices that co-construct the rhetorical crisis situation were examined using a relational analysis of statements. A symbolic network was constructed that consisted of rhetorical relations between the actors. The findings show that VW is by far the most prominent voice in the media coverage. However, this prominence is based on the fact that VW mainly appears in the role of the addressee of statements, and that many of the corporation’s statements are self-referential. Politicians and public authorities, as well as experts, have a good chance to actively have their say. Affected stakeholders and NGOs, on the other hand, barely got an opportunity to speak. Overall, the media discourse appears to be dominated by a few high-ranking actors, and the roles and power relationships are distributed very unevenly. Implications of this imbalance in media discourse are discussed, and suggestions for further research are made.     

“Maniacal slaves:” normative misogyny and female resistors of the Mojahedin-e Khalq Iran

Feminist scholars the world over are increasingly aware of the importance of analyzing popular discourse, especially regarding women’s involvement in proscribed violence. Yet few have looked at Middle Eastern organizations, and fewer still at the Mojahedin-e Khalq Iran (MEK), a longstanding resistance group whose all-female leadership and sizeable female membership present a compelling challenge to prevailing gender norms. How do popular media portray female MEK resistors and what might these representations signify for our gendered conceptions of violence? In examining the MEK’s female leadership, this article undertakes a close reading of western and Iranian news coverage in an attempt to analyze the degree to which these women are painted as willful political agents or, as is often assumed, irrational actors incapable of autonomous political participation. Following Sjoberg and Gentry, I develop four cognitive frames to describe female resistors, while also challenging the media’s victimizing and sexualizing gaze. I thus problematize these women’s portrayals as “maniacal slaves,” and explain how such gendered rhetoric operates to preclude the notion that members of the MEK might practice legitimate political resistance worthy of analysis or understanding.     

Out of the Blue: the dark side of creative enterprise

This paper draws on an archive of media texts that document the making of the film Out of the Blue. Within these media accounts are statements made by a group of residents resisting the film project, and the film‐makers responding to this resistance. We employ a Foucauldian informed discourse analysis to read these statements of resistance as a starting point to examine the power relations within contemporary knowledge generation processes of creative industries. We theorise creative industries as a discursive object located at the intersection of three discursive formations: ‘creativity’, ‘enterprise’ and ‘place’. Through analysing the particular place–identities of Aramoana engaged by the resisting residents and the film‐makers, we are able to suggest how this film project came to be discursively constituted as creative enterprise. In so doing, we find that the resisting residents’ statements work to disrupt the taken‐for‐granted ‘goodness’ of film enterprise, and creative industries more generally.     

Drug Peddlers: How Four Presidents Attempted to Influence Media and Public Concern on the Drug Issue

This agenda-building study examined the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush to determine to what degree they influenced media and public concern for the drug issue. This study found a complex reciprocal relation between the president, the public, and the press, with results differing depending what president and newspapers were studied. However, when the data are examined across the various presidents rather than on individual leaders, the agenda-setting process is especially powerful with 8 of the 9 predicted paths proving significant. This study discovered that the president plays an equal or greater role than the media in the agenda-building process. The path between presidential statements and public approval was higher than the one between the media and the public. Although public approval polls drove both media coverage and presidential statements, the polls had a greater effect on the media. Finally, the path from presidential statements to subsequent media coverage was just as strong as the one from media coverage to subsequent presidential statements. Agenda-setting researchers, then, should not ignore the effects of the president and other officials on the agenda-setting process.     

“A Literature Review of Women and The Martial Arts: Where are We Right Now?”

Women who participate in male dominated sports engage in sport that is framed from a gendered ideology. Sports, within this society, is identified as masculine and, as a result, values masculine characteristics. Femininity, women in particular, have been marginalized. The focus of this paper is to examine the female martial arts practitioner within a gendered society. As Title IX has enabled women to gain access to participate in sports, it has yet to fully challenge dominate gender ideology. The female martial arts practitioner not only has to battle masculine traits within the martial arts studio, but also within gendered norms. Unfortunately, the research focusing on the experience of female martial arts practitioners is limited; however, when they are examined these women are either placed in the margins or in gendered terms. Upon further examination, the female martial arts practitioner challenges the gender norm in a unique manner; she questions the male as protector and the female as victim.     

A CAMERA WITH A VIEW JenniCAM, visual representation, and cyborg subjectivity

Hailed as the originator of the digital camera 'homecam' phenomenon, Jennifer Ringley has garnered national media attention for her website, JenniCAM (Ringley 1998c), which offers viewers a constant window into the bedroom of a young woman through internet technology. Using the JenniCAM website as my primary text, I examine how Jenni integrates flesh and machine in the formation and display of a cyborg subjectivity, a hybridized identity (re)presented through the new technology of the digital camera. Towards that end I use feminist film theory to demonstrate how the construction and display of the female body-via the medium of digital camera-transforms our readings of gendered bodies as sites of knowledge production and pleasure. I assert that JenniCAM, a cyborg subject created through the integration of the electronic image and the internet, exposes more than just flesh. JenniCAM reveals cultural tensions surrounding epistemological conceptions of vision, gender, and identity and raises questions for future conversations regarding the role of technology in the representation and construction of gendered subjects.     

Who Benefits from Production Outcomes? Gendered Production Relations among Climate‐Smart Agriculture Technology Users in Rural Ethiopia

The use of agricultural technologies is generally expected to increase production and household incomes. Gendered disparities in making use of agricultural outcomes could result in inequitable agricultural development. However, too little is known about whether the use of agricultural technologies improves gendered production relations, particularly in the Global South. This study investigates the question of gender‐equitable production relations by drawing on empirical data from women and men smallholders involved in conservation agriculture and small‐scale irrigation schemes in three study areas in Ethiopia. Findings show that the use of agricultural technologies does not improve unequal gendered production relations; rather, gender norms that exist within patriarchal social structures continue to influence production relations in at least three ways. First, societal norms restrict women from asserting their self‐interest in gendered bargaining. Second, there is a customary law in all the study areas that allows men (but not women) to inherit land—thus providing men with better bargaining and decision‐making positions over production outcomes, as they bring land to the marriage. Third, the restricted access of women to rural institutional services further contributes to unequal gendered production relations, as these services support men more than women in the use of agricultural technologies for enhanced production.     

Hiding Spinach in the Brownies: Frame Alignment in Suffrage Community Cookbooks, 1886–1916

Recent studies have examined how the conventions of cultural genres help advance frames. This line of scholarship can be used to study how activists might popularize radical frames that fundamentally challenge widespread beliefs. In this article, I analyze how the gendered character of suffrage community cookbooks aids in frame alignment. I determine how these cookbooks advance ‘femininity frames’ that drew on widespread beliefs about femininity (and thus were more likely to resonate with a broad audience). I also examine how suffrage cookbooks advance ‘republican citizenship frames’ that argued that women should vote because they could embody the masculinized republican ideals of civic virtue and public responsibility. Republican citizenship frames challenged widespread beliefs about femininity (and thus were likely to be viewed as more radical). I find that the embrace of domestic femininity in community cookbooks amplifies femininity frames by intensifying traditional beliefs about women. Furthermore, the gendered character of community cookbooks extends republican citizenship frames to the average housewife by proving that women could incorporate new practices into their lives without abandoning their traditional feminine roles. This study enriches our understanding of the roles of cultural genres in framing, and it demonstrates how activists may try to popularize radical frames.     

Feminist Readings on Abu Ghraib: Introduction

This article examines feminist responses to mainstream media coverage of female terrorists in West Germany during 1977. Women in left-wing terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction (RAF) and ‘Movement 2. June’ (‘Bewegung 2. Juni’) inspired a gendered discourse reflecting a cultural unease about women participating in political violence, in which the media propagated notions that posited female terrorists as ‘unnatural’ women. This analysis demonstrates how different ‘Alltagstheorien’ (everyday or common sense theories) on female terrorists we find in West German media publications in the 1970s and 1980s served as a springboard for West German feminist activists to examine arguments about violence as legitimate means in their own political communities. This essay begins by briefly outlining key feminist positions on political violence that have made invisible the complex debates taking place in the 1970s. The second part of the essay uses images of female terrorists circulated by the West German media, such as the newsmagazine Der Spiegel (The Mirror), to contextualize the ‘Alltagstheorien’ the magazine propagated in an article covering RAF actions in 1977. The third and main part of the essay then examines the responses this and other articles elicited from contemporaneous feminist movement publications.