The Seduction of the Surface: From Alice to Crash

Drawing on a qualitative analysis of Swedish newspaper debates in 1979 and 1995, this article examines how Swedish newspapers refer to biological sex difference as central to drinking practices. The study shows that women are a special category of concern in debate about gender and drinking in both 1979 and 1995. Further, it shows that Swedish newspapers draw upon biology in different ways in the two years. In 1979, debate about drinking during pregnancy and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is central and newspapers link biomedical research on FAS to the moral idea that mothers do anything to avoid harm to children. In 1995, debate about girls' drinking habits is central and newspapers link sex hormones and neurotransmitters to the moral idea that girls shouldn't “drink like men.” These differences are discussed in the context of Swedish media interest in evolutionary psychology and biomedical solutions to alcohol problems during the 1990s.     

Gender and jockography: post-feminism and resistance in female sports autobiographies

While research consistently shows news media’s devaluation of female athletes, “the jockography,” or sports autobiography, is one form of widely-consumed media through which female athletes can construct their own representation. However, there has been little consideration of the genre. This essay addresses this gap by analyzing how thirty women’s jockographies published since 1992 rhetorically construct female athletic identity and sports practice. It finds that most athletes, regardless of their sport or racial or class background, constitute their identities and participation in ways that reinforce post-feminist notions of upward mobility and heterosexual femininity while failing to confront inequalities affecting women in sport. Nevertheless, a few recent jockographies challenge normalizing discourses, asking readers to recognize differences between women and confront inequities shaping their athletic experiences.     

Crooked men and straightened women: images of homosexuality across race in two women's magazines, 1986-1995

Images of traditional sexuality, across race, prevail in mass media, especially in women's magazines. While omitting less traditional sexual practices for the most part, New Woman and Essence magazines construct the image of a bisexual male who threatens the heterosexual woman and the legitimate heterosexual couple. These women's magazines also redefine homosexual activity, suggesting women who experience homosexual inclinations are really engaging in normal heterosexual behavior.     

Visibility and denial: accounts of sexual violence in race- and gender-specific magazines

Prior research on media representations of race, gender, and sexual violence has established that media emphasize women’s role in preventing their own victimization and omit Black women as victims. This study uses feminist intersectionality to build on prior research by investigating not only how social groups are portrayed, but whether and how the intended audience matters for media representations. Specifically, who are the portrayed victims of sexual violence, and how is fear of sexual violence communicated to different audiences? Content analysis of articles in race- and gender-specific magazines shows two key mechanisms of representation through which racism and sexism work together: visibility and denial. Results show that White women are hypervisible as victims while Black women as victims are relatively invisible compared to Black men’s persecution and Black children’s victimization; men’s magazines deny the importance of sexual violence as a problem, focusing on false accusations and convictions. These narratives go largely unchallenged regardless of the source’s intended audience, demonstrating that portrayals of sexual violence are both gendered and racialized across multiple media sources.     

Playing with Sims as a Space of One's Own

Studies of women's use of popular media have highlighted how these contested genres may be used by women to create a space of their own. Is this also the case when the media text in question is a digital game and the community around it moves online? Investigated via a netnographic approach, this article analyses the articulated experiences of playing The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 in relation to how the players perceive the activity's function in their everyday lives. Seven emic categories are identified and discussed in the inductive analysis, namely “relaxation and dealing with stress,” “playing according to mood,” “managing and taking control,” “experimentation,” “get what one does not have,” “making something one's own,” and “creative outlet.” A central denominator of these seven categories is the notion of a space of one's own in the widest sense of the phrase. In the discussed accounts playing becomes a way not only to escape other obligations for a while but also in various ways to work with the self and its place in everyday life.     

Visibility patterns of gendered ageism in the media buzz: a study of the representation of gender and age over three decades

Abstract

The mainstream media provides a constant flow of visual images of men and women, whether it is via newscasts, billboards, magazines, or television. In media research, these different media types are usually investigated separately. The aim of this study is to analyse the accumulated gender representation of all images that we passively or actively take part in, here defined as “the media buzz.” To capture the representation of gender and age in the media buzz, this study focuses on images from one day in the most circulated media within Sweden: news, feature stories, fiction, and advertising. The empirical data is drawn from three different decades—1994, 2004, and 2014. Overall, the study indicates there to be a general male/female balance in terms of numbers. However, when turning older, both men and women become almost invisible, even though older men are more visible than older women. Older persons rarely reach the news and they are more likely to be found in advertising and feature material. The work presented here suggests that the structures of visibility and the clusters of gender-age representation in the media foster stereotyping. The media buzz not only contributes to ageism, but is also still distinctly gendered.     

#BlackDontCrack: a content analysis of the aging Black woman in social media

Abstract

This paper examines how positive social media representations of aging Black female bodies problematize existing notions of aging as an almost uniformly negative phenomenon. Using the social media platform Tumblr, this study reveals that the framing of age, race, and gender is both complex and nuanced. Images which challenge deeply set historical notions of female beauty include those of celebrities, noncelebrities and comparisons between aging Black women and historically standardized representations of physical attractiveness. Findings illustrate that managing impressions vis-à-vis social media is a complex, sometimes messy performance in which images both challenge and substantiate problematic assumptions. Some images that framed Black women positively but did so at the expense of other women. This paper adds to the body of work that explores how social media is used as a vehicle for counter narrative messaging. These findings offer additional insight into how impression management theory is used to analyze social media content.     

It takes a virtual village: Childbearing women's experience of a closed Facebook support group for mothers

BackgroundChildbearing women engage in large public pregnancy and parenting forums, primarily for the purpose of seeking information and advice. There is an absence of research related to women's engagement in closed and private online mothers’ groups.AimThe aim of this study was to explore the experiences of participation and support for members within a closed online mothers’ group.MethodA qualitative study using in-depth interviews. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyse the data.FindingsThis study demonstrated that a closed online mothers’ group enabled a group of childbearing women to overcome isolation and form sustained, evolving and supportive friendships within a small, private and trusted group. The technology allowed women to engage and share at a level much deeper than what they would in “real life”. The depth of sharing was enhanced in a closed online mothers’ group due to a smaller, private audience of trusted friends. Virtual support felt safer than face-to-face support as information could not impact one's real world reputation, and communication was able to be controlled. This was particularly helpful to women experiencing social difficulties or isolation.ConclusionThis study has provided a unique and rare insight into the private world of closed online mothers’ groups. As a virtual village, this closed group enabled childbearing women to form a small community with members sharing responsibility and working for the wellbeing and benefit of all. By encouraging, locating and establishing similar groups, maternity health professionals may assist women to access their own ‘virtual village’.     

Absent Non-Fathers: Gendered representations of voluntary childlessness in Swedish newspapers

This article applies a media frame analysis in order to highlight representations of voluntary childlessness in Swedish newspapers. The analysis identifies how childfree couples are framed as carefree, fulfilled and content. Childfree women on the other hand are framed as struggling with problems, stereotypes and doubts. Childfree men are absent and implicitly framed as unconcerned and unaffected. Even in the only newspaper article that draws attention to men and voluntary childlessness the voice of the childfree man is absent. Instead of a childfree man a father of six is interviewed and presented as an exception. To explain these different frames this article argues that gender stereotypes, maternalism, pronatalism and heteronormativity influence who is constructed as newsworthy when news media report on voluntary childlessness. While the feminine identity and women's social role is conflated with motherhood, the link between fatherhood and masculinity is weaker. Because men's parenthood roles are indistinct so are men's roles as non-parents. As a result a father to a daughter in a previous relationship can be represented as part of a carefree and childfree couple. Consequently, childfree women are more newsworthy than childfree men, and a father of six is more newsworthy than a non-father.     

I Think It More of a White Persons Sort of Awareness: Condoms and the Making of a White Nation in Media Representations of Safer (Hetero)sex

In recent years, both the media and the government in the UK have been increasingly preoccupied with the problem of rape involving alcohol. For example, in order to increase low conviction rates, the government proposed, yet eventually rejected, reforms equating drunkenness with incapacity to consent to sexual intercourse. Research evidence, for example studies by Benedict (1992) or Finch and Munro (2005, 2007), suggests that conviction rates are influenced by an interplay of cultural discourses and legal arrangements. This article uses discourse analysis to identify and critically examine the major discourses which are produced around rape involving alcohol in one major daily newspaper, the Daily Mail. This conservative paper disapproves of women's binge drinking and is unsympathetic to victims of rape involving alcohol. The analysis indicates that its discourses deprecate and delegitimise victims by a) reinvigorating and refashioning old rape myths, b) re-gendering rape involving alcohol as a problem of female drinking rather than male sexual violence, and c) masquerading women's responsibilities and risks as rights. These findings open up the possibility for research into the popularity of these discourses across contemporary culture and their impact on cultural consumers, including those involved in legal decision-making processes.     

The Body as a Site of Gender-Related Distress: Ethical Considerations for Gender Variant Youth in Clinical Settings

ABSTRACT

The present article maps out understandings about embodied distress among gender-nonconforming youth. Feminist bioethics and queer-inflected clinical perspectives are used to inform thinking about ethical, nonpathologizing health care in the case of gender-related distress. Specific attention is directed at self-harming among gender variant and trans youth. This is contextualized in relation to the role that self-harm plays for some LGBT youth, where it may be seen as a rite of passage or as reasonable and inevitable way of coping. The particular complexities of self-harm among trans youth seeking clinical intervention are examined. Queer bioethics is proposed as potentially facilitating productive uncertainty with regard to the diverse imagined futures of gender variant and trans youth.     

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.     

Frontline Farmers,Backline Sources: Women as a tertiary voice in climate change coverage

Gender meaning construction and interpretation, which suggest women's inferiority to men, is deeply rooted in social-cultural signs and codes drawn from traditional contexts. In Uganda, girls start to face this reality at an early age. Among low income earning families, very few are enrolled in school, thus as they grow up they suffer from invisibility created by low education and income levels. This paper notes how such gender realities in the media have been investigated in other parts of the world and that the general thesis has been that the media have “marginalized women in the public sphere.” Turning to the position of women as both sources and reporters, in Uganda this area of inquiry has been given little scholarly attention. To fill that gap, this essay draws upon feminist media theory to help contextualize findings obtained through content analysis (N = 671) data drawn from two Ugandan newspapers. Using climate change as a coverage issue, since 56 percent of women in Uganda are farmers, the results of this study show that the gender gap in Uganda is highly pronounced, with women as sources ranked third in importance after men and anonymous sources.     

Coming Out as Transgender: Navigating the Social Implications of a Transgender Identity

ABSTRACT

This study examines transgender coming-out narratives. Most previous studies of coming out as transgender have relied on psychological stage models of identity development, with little empirical verification. This study uses identity theory to reframe transgender coming out as a primarily external, ongoing, and socially situated process. The data were collected from 20 transgender people residing in the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota metro area through interviews and focus groups. The analyses reveal that coming out as transgender requires navigating others’ gender expectations, others’ reactions, and the threat of violence. The results indicate that transgender individuals do not simply decide to “come out of the closet” and then stay out. Rather, they make strategic decisions regarding the enactment of gender and gender identity disclosure based on specific social contexts. Coming out as transgender is best conceptualized as an ongoing, socially embedded, skilled management of one’s gender identity.     

Large gaps in the quality of healthcare experienced by Swedish mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-sectional study based on WHO standards

Background and ProblemExisting healthcare systems have been put under immense pressure during the COVID-19 pandemic. Disruptions in essential maternal and newborn services have come from even high-income countries within the World Health Organization (WHO) European Region.AimTo describe the quality of care during pregnancy and childbirth, as reported by the women themselves, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden, using the WHO ‘Standards for improving quality of maternal and newborn care in health facilities’.MethodsUsing an anonymous, online questionnaire, women ≥18 years were invited to participate if they had given birth in Sweden from March 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021. The quality of maternal and newborn care was measured using 40 questions across four domains: provision of care, experience of care, availability of human/physical resources, and organisational changes due to COVID-19.FindingsOf the 5003 women included, n = 4528 experienced labour. Of these, 46.7% perceived a poorer quality of maternal and newborn care due to the COVID-19. Fundal pressure was applied in 22.2% of instrumental vaginal births, 36.8% received inadequate breastfeeding support and 6.9% reported some form of abuse. Findings were worse in women undergoing prelabour Caesarean section (CS) (n = 475). Multivariate analysis showed significant associations of the quality of maternal and newborn care to year of birth (P < 0.001), parity (P < 0.001), no pharmacological pain relief (P < 0.001), prelabour CS (P < 0.001), emergency CS (P < 0.001) and overall satisfaction (P < 0.001).ConclusionConsiderable gaps over many key quality measures and deviations from women-centred care were noted. Findings were worse in women with prelabour CS. Actions to promote high-quality, evidence-based and respectful care during childbirth for all mothers are urgently needed.     

The Quest for Inclusion: Jewish-Israeli Gay Men's Perceptions of Gays in the Media

This article seeks to understand the gendered dynamics of political leadership in contemporary Israeli society by examining how the Israeli press dealt with the issue of Tzipi Livni's “womanhood” and “feminine style” (or lack thereof) in the course of the 2008–2009 campaign. By analyzing the media debate surrounding Livni's candidacy to the premiership, I am able to complicate the discussion concerning the media's treatment of the issue of gender and political leadership in general and in Israel in particular. The main sources of data are some fifty items published in the daily national newspapers during the election campaign, and Livni's website. Employing a rhetorical analysis, I chart the persistent power of gender ideologies in Israeli public and political discourses and outline the ways in which they are accepted, contested and subverted. I find that although creative appropriation attempts were made to produce an alternative leadership discourse, these came fairly late in the campaign and were unfocused, and thus, ultimately, were unable to pose a serious challenge to Israeli gender ideologies concerning leadership.     

Gender as a Moderator of the Relation Among Social Support Functions and Life Satisfaction in Older Malaysians

The aim of this study was to examine the moderating role of gender on relations among social support functions and life satisfaction in older Malaysians. The study sample was 1,800 older residents in a community; all were at least 60 years old. This study was a cross-sectional and corelational survey, and the data were collected by multistage stratified sampling. This study revealed that fewer social support functions, and therefore less life satisfaction, were available for females than for males. The results of moderated regression analyses demonstrated that gender interacted only on the relationship between positive social interaction support and tangible support with life satisfaction. Specifically, at a high tangible support level, females had lower life satisfaction when compared to a low tangible support level. There may be a need for new programs and services to provide other aspects of social support to older female adults to improve and maintain life satisfaction in later life.     

Women in community radio: a framework of gendered participation

Women’s participation in community radio is examined through a case study of Ireland, with data gathered by survey, interviews and a focus group. Key findings note that women are under-represented as participants in community radio, but there is little activity within the sector to address this imbalance. Similarly, women’s voices are absent from community airwaves but this is framed through a limited understanding women lacking on-air confidence. Solutions to the problem were limited to individual stations rather than approached in a collective manner. There was no sense of women’s voices on air being a priority issue for stations, for the sector, nor for the national regulatory body. With regard to content, stations largely tended to produce “islands” of specialist women’s programmes but there was a sense that women produced content in ways that were not normative and were explicitly linked to gender. Gendered social structures, as well as organisational structures within community radio, constituted further barriers to women’s equal participation in community radio in Ireland. Finally, the presence of women as role models, sponsors, and managers, who were relational in their approach, was key gendered benefits that women derived from their participation in community radio.     

LGBTQ+ Young Adults on the Street and on Campus: Identity as a Product of Social Context

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and other sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ+) young adults face unique identity-related experiences based on their immersion in distinctive social contexts. The predominant framework of performing separate analyses on samples of LGBTQ+ young people by their primary social status obfuscates more holistic understandings of the role of social context. Using 46 in-depth interviews with LGBTQ+ college students and LGBTQ+ homeless young adults, we ask: How are LGBTQ+ young adults’ capacities for “doing” their gender and sexual identities shaped by their distinctive social contexts? In developing their identities, both groups of LGBTQ+ young adults navigated their social environments to seek out resources and support. Most college students described their educational contexts as conducive to helping them develop their identities, or “undo” rigid norms of gender and sexuality. Homeless young adults’ social environments, meanwhile, imposed complex barriers to self-expression that reinforced more normative expectations of “doing” gender and sexual identities.