“Flawed Vessels”

The 2008 election was a watershed year in presidential politics, with two prominent women, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, drawing national media attention to gendered themes during the election. This study investigates whether/how the media connected these historic female candidacies to feminism by evaluating the national news media's framing of feminism during the election. Using qualitative media discourse analysis, we analyze how discussions of these two prominent female candidates, as well as Barack Obama, were linked to framing of feminism in the news media. During the 2008 presidential election, the media recast evaluations of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin into a discussion of the status of modern feminism. The news media framed the movement as fractured, highlighting existing conflicts within the feminist movement, while legitimizing post-feminism and choice feminism through the perspectives of the Obama and Palin nominations. The news media also trivialized the movement by emphasizing style over substance in their assessments of whether candidates were (or were not) feminists. The results suggest feminist movement actors and goals may not substantially benefit from greater media attention prompted by increasing numbers of female candidates.     

“Nothing Hurts the Cause More Than That”

The final season of the television series Veronica Mars was marked by a narrative shift from an apparent investment in supporting feminist values to a virulent attack on US feminism. This shift reproduces several of the tenets central to the discourses of the backlash, including the views that feminism promotes hostility towards men, that it has betrayed women rather than advocating on their behalf, and that feminist liberation comes at a tremendous personal cost, which leaves women miserable and unfulfilled. This essay examines the show's transformation into a backlash text within the context of the pressure reportedly placed on writers and producers to increase ratings in order to avoid cancellation. It argues that because the series's reproduction of backlash rhetoric can be read as reflective of the popular view that feminism is antithetical to the values of the US cultural mainstream, it illustrates the influence of the backlash on US market forces, as well as on US popular culture. It also suggests that, in the process, the series reveals a great deal about the ways in which profit motives intersect with, and possibly override, ideological considerations in the production of popular culture texts.     

“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.     

White Feminist Stories

The last decade has witnessed an increased visibility of grassroots feminist activism in Britain. This article concerns the representation of such activism in the left-leaning newspaper The Guardian, and focuses on issues related to race and whiteness. Drawing on anti-racist critiques of “white feminism,” the article presents a close reading of three articles which have appeared in recent years. Combining a content and narrative analysis, the article unpicks underlying assumptions about British feminism, and identifies three specific narrative techniques which are problematic in relation to race. These construct contemporary feminist activism as: (1) a continuation of a white feminist legacy; (2) a unified movement of “like-minded” individuals; and (3) “diverse” and “happy.” Presented as common sense, these narratives erase power differences between women, as well as a multitude of feminist organising in Britain, including black British feminism. While anti-racist feminists repeatedly challenge such representations, including occasionally on The Guardian's own blog, this appears to have little effect on the dominant constructions of feminism in the more prominent news and feature articles. This resistance to change highlights the continued unequal power relations between white feminists and feminists of colour, and the persistence of whiteness in defining feminism within mainstream liberal media.     

Authorship and professional digital presence in feminist blogs

This research traces the shift from stand-alone, personal blogging toward professionalized use of social media. To exemplify this process, we draw attention to the transition from pseudonymous to identifiable authorship in feminist blogging. This transition toward professional digital presence is important for two major reasons: first, it reveals how oppositional politics is part of the commercial circuits and neoliberal market logics of identity management; second, it underscores the ways in which online harassment of feminist bloggers can harm their public identities and negatively impact their larger professional self-making. Further, we suggest that feminist bloggers perform a dual role of social media influencers and web-based public intellectuals as they affectively participate in the political sphere through systematic production of oppositional knowledge and counter-discourses. The paper concludes with a reflection on the significance of professionalized feminist blogging as a site of creative, intellectual, and relational labor.     

Scene of the Crime

The brutal gang rape and murder of a young woman on a New Delhi bus became a media spectacle, flooding the news stream worldwide with articles, commentaries, blogs, and images. Drawing on theoretical insights from transnational feminism and social geography, this analysis focuses on the mediated deployment of space and place as potent signifiers of gender and sexuality in news coverage of the event. Using feminist critical discourse analysis to interrogate the verbal and visual texts in mainstream US news media during the first two weeks of coverage, this analysis found that the American news media invoked archetypes of the Third World as a primitive and undisciplined place populated by savage males and subordinate women, a space in which women's mobility is constrained and where state authority is complicit in rendering women vulnerable to sexual assault due to its incompetence. The study found that through this limited and ethnocentric lens, the US news media reinscribed social geographies of power in terms of sex and gender. The overall tenor of the coverage obscured the incidence of sexual violence in the First World/global North, effectively countermanding transnational feminist praxis and collective action against the worldwide problem of sexual violence against 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.     

The communicative construction of FEMEN: naked protest in self-mediation and German media discourse

Abstract

In this article, we investigate how FEMEN employs female nudity to raise public attention in their mediatized strategies and how this form of naked protest is represented and interpreted in German media discourse. We will show that the significant media presence of FEMEN’s naked protest actions and its self-portrayal as the new feminism of our days have become increasingly ambivalent over time. As this is of great importance with regards to public perceptions of feminism, feminist activists, and feminist agency in general, our analysis provides a detailed investigation of the processes of appreciation and devaluation of FEMEN as an expression of contemporary feminists and feminism. Employing a qualitative discourse analysis, the article highlights the interwoven processes of contextualization and decontextualization in FEMEN’s self-mediation and news coverage in Germany. It is shown that FEMEN’s protests from 2008 to 2013 materialize in “local” actions, but are increasingly constructed and interpreted on a transcultural level. In this analysis, we identify the core interpretative scheme of decontextualization that becomes apparent in three forms of detachments. As we show, these forms of detachment are a core issue in the media’s devaluation and depolitization of FEMEN and feminism in general.     

Pregnancy,Then It's “Back To Business”

This essay theorizes the contours of a post-feminist gender regime that utilizes figures such as Beyoncé in order to hail women as self-governing subjects who make the right choices with respect to career, marriage, motherhood, and the disciplining of their bodies. As a black woman, the narrative about Beyoncé's life and choices has specific implications; it positions professional black women as ideal citizens and mothers and also seeks to reconfigure and normalize representations of the black family. The body, specifically the black female body, plays an important role in attempting to transform and normalize these representations. This essay offers one of the few examinations of black women's relationship to post-feminism. Although post-feminism has been conceptualized in ways that ignore black women, I aim to demonstrate why further consideration of black women's relationship to post-feminism is needed. It is my contention that with successful black women increasingly in the public eye, what they say about feminism and how they relate to feminist politics have important implications for how all women, but especially young black women, engage in types of activism that go beyond placing value on individualism at the expense of the collective.     

“Exciting” and “borderline offensive”: bloggers,binaries, and celebrity feminism

Feminism is “cool” like never before in popular culture and celebrity feminism is arguably the most visible manifestation of this currently chic status. Some scholars and commentators see this as evidence of a global feminist resurgence; others critique it as empty and devoid of political traction. The hypervisibility of celebrity feminism makes it an ideal site to explore sense-making of contemporary feminism. Long-standing feminist debates about sexuality, intersectionality, and commodification cohere around the figure of the celebrity feminist, and are debated amongst media commentators, feminists, and celebrities themselves. We analyse blogs and comments sections as a particular site where meanings of celebrity feminism are constructed and contested in the everyday. Our analyses underline the operation of a good/bad binary that constituted celebrity feminism as “other” to an imagined authentic, politically engaged feminism, although consensus about what constitutes an authentic feminist was elusive. However, celebrities were not always positioned as “other,” with the recognition that celebrities share with all women the contradictions and demands of inhabiting a postfeminist media culture. Our findings emphasise the need for a nuanced approach to theorising and understanding celebrity feminism’s relationship with other feminisms and its implications for feminist practices and identifications.     

Empowering Members,Not Overpowering Them: The National Organization for Women,Calls for Lesbian Inclusion,and California Influence, 1960s–1980s

Standard accounts of the National Organization for Women (NOW) seriously underplay the duration of tensions between heterosexual and lesbian NOW members and the ways those tensions included both racialized analogies and tactical concerns. Based on personal papers, archival sources, interviews, and a re-evaluation of printed sources, I argue that by considering the perspective of national, state, and local lesbian feminist NOW members, we see tensions from the 1960s through the 1980s that have been missed by studies that focus either on NOW or on the growth of lesbian feminism or on second-wave feminist development generally. To legitimize their position, White lesbian feminists analogized their oppression with that of racial minorities while claiming to be better feminists than heterosexual women. Their approach is significant to conceptualizing the scope of feminist issues and tactics, the ways White women's discussion of race exacerbated racial divisions, and the fate of the Equal Rights Amendment.     

Hidden in Public View

This study analyzes the visual representations of women in Bulgaria from the 1950s to the 1980s, as depicted in photographs in the official daily newspaper of the communist party. The study is theoretically informed by feminist theories of media representations and engages specifically with Gaye Tuchman's idea of “symbolic annihilation,” which referred to Western media's condemnation, trivialization, and omission of women in public discourse. However, this analysis adapts Tuchman's theory to the specificities of socialist societies, where women's participation in public life was ideologically mandated. The authors propose the concept of “symbolic glorification” as a correlate to Tuchman's idea, and argue that symbolic glorification was a necessary part of ideological efforts to claim that women's participation in the labor force and political life was a sign of true emancipation. Nevertheless, the visual data reveal that certain aspects of femininity, related to motherhood and sexuality, were symbolically annihilated as a way to make female identities conform to ideological goals. The paper concludes by raising questions about the ways in which the ideologically constructed identities of women during socialism may impact on a feminist agenda after the end of the Cold War.     

Germaine Greer's Adaptable Celebrity

There is little doubt that Germaine Greer is the West's, and especially Britain's, most well-known feminist. This article, looking at her more recent public appearances, argues that Germaine Greer has proven adept at adapting her feminist celebrity, especially through various (and often comedic) performances on quiz and lifestyle programmes on British television. In particular, she exemplifies what has been called an “unruly woman”; that is, she is a transgressive figure who uses the space provided by these new entertainment formats not simply to reinforce her celebrity but to circulate (and perform) a particular feminism. Her celebrity, and her relationship to the mainstream media in Britain especially, has shifted and evolved over time and therefore provides an important case study into the complicated operations of celebrity as well as the feminism–media nexus itself. As an instance of gendered celebrity—and that of a feminist especially—that comes to at once trouble and buttress certain celebrity logics, Greer illuminates the political importance of this ground for feminism and helps to underscore that feminist celebrity is a distinct, and developing, mode of public subjectivity which celebrity studies and feminist media studies have thus far failed to significantly address.     

中国劳动供求态势变化、问题与对策

本文分析了劳动供给和需求态势的变化,认为我国无限劳动供给时代已经结束,"招工难"具体地反映了劳动供求形势所发生的根本性变化,这一变化虽然并不意味着劳动力数量绝对短缺,但意味着劳动者工资只有实现合理增长才能保持劳动力资源充分供给。综合劳动供求变化,本文进一步探讨了当前劳动力市场的形势和问题,认为虽然从统计数字来看我国城镇失业率继续保持较低水平,但劳动力市场形势并不令人乐观,实际失业率水平仍然较高,同时就业的结构性矛盾越来越突出。为实现充分就业,我国仍然需要保持经济适度快速增长,同时需要改善就业质量,让劳动者更加公平地分享经济增长成果。     

Subversive acts and everyday midwifery: Feminism in content and context

BackgroundMidwives are often at the forefront of political campaigns for women's empowerment, overtly advocating for women's rights and reproductive justice. However, midwives can also be found engaging in inadvertent activism on a daily basis within routine care. When casting a feminist lens over both the content and context of midwifery practice in Australia, subversive acts and opportunities for feminist reform can be found.AimTo interrogate the significance of feminism in midwifery practice, identifying feminist successes and further opportunities for implementation including: analysis of the Midwifery Standards for Practice; the primary tenets of woman-centred care; the content versus context of midwifery in Australia; and feminist opportunities for enhanced practice. This paper will discuss the importance of feminism in midwifery practice and its significance in informing optimal midwifery care.DiscussionIncorporating women's voice and respecting women's bodies and agency in the delivery of care is a fundamental component of midwifery practice. However, while the content of midwifery practice is innately feminist in its emphasis on woman-centred care, it will be argued that the context of birthing in Australia is not. The resultant effect is the emergence of victim blaming in maternity care and the construction of an archetypal ‘good birthing woman’.Implications and recommendationsMoving away from the myth of the ‘good birthing woman’ and the act of victim blaming, midwifery could instead direct its focus towards challenging the rigid systems and structures within which midwives implement care. By further embracing feminist principles midwives will ensure a truly woman-centred future.     

Women's Alternative Internet Radio and Feminist Interactive Communications

The nude male centrefold spread like a virus through the new women's magazines of the seventies. At the time, and since, the academic gaze has viewed the centrefold as little more than a joke, a failure for feminism and female sexuality. This article returns to the heyday of the centrefold and listens to the responses of ordinary women in reader letters published in the new Australian women's magazine Cleo from 1972 until 1985. It argues that far from being a failure, these representations of the nude male became a practice of popular feminism, one of the early representations of popular feminist desire in mainstream women's magazines.     

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.     

Tedious: feminized labor in machine-readable cataloging

This essay examines previously unexplored IBM reports and manuals that document the development of Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) in the 1960s to understand gendered assumptions manufacturers made about the labor of information retrieval and to ultimately discuss the ways in which MARC transformed the feminized labor of information, making it more diffuse and shifting expectations about productivity. In the process, this essay will show that cataloging, like other forms of women’s labor transformed by technology in the latter part of the twentieth century, has a complicated relationship to the market labor and industrialization. Finally, this essay ends by connecting MARC and feminized labor to the contemporary discussion of BIBFRAME.     

Pop,Porn, and Rebellious Speech

In Excitable Speech, Judith Butler contends that rebellious speech constitutes a “risk taken in response to being put at risk, a repetition in language that forces change.” With this in mind, this article examines the politics of employing and altering the language and imagery of “porn” in texts and multi-media performances of (post-)feminist (pop-)artists. The discussions about Elfriede Jelinek's novel Lust in the early 1990s exemplify the difficulties associated with transforming the language of pornography into rebellious feminist speech. The text received extensive media attention, but most critics felt ambivalent about Jelinek's attempt to create artificial, repetitious, pornographic speech and questioned the text's ability to foster any kind of “change.” At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the multi-media performances of Charlotte Roche and Reyhan Sahin aka Lady Bitch Ray again triggered discussions about feminism, pornography, body politics, and sexual expression. Their provocative pop-performances use multiple media outlets, TV, music, and electronic media. They are commercially successful and mainstream media understand them as challenging social conventions. This essay critically examines the politics of Jelinek's, Roche's, and Sahin's texts and performances and contextualizes the politics of their rebellious speech within discussions about social roles, gender, and sexuality.     

A Gap in the Market

In an era of increasing globalization, women continue to be underrepresented and stereotyped in national, international and global news media. The problem is exacerbated when traditional geographic boundaries are crossed and the media in one country report on issues and events, particularly those that impact women, in another country. The question addressed in this article is how news organizations can best represent women and our diverse lives within this new global context. In an effort to bridge the local-global dichotomy, this article aims to make connections between macro-level theories of cultural globalization and micro-level theories of feminism. Three scenarios of cultural globalization, as proposed by Pieterse (2004), are extended to show their relationship with journalism, feminism, and story stances. The article shows how the clash of civilizations scenario relates to nationalistic news practices, patriarchal representations, and story stances that only include the voices of the dominant group. Similarly, it shows how the scenario of cultural homogenization relates to cultural imperialism, “global feminism,” and a story stance that homogenizes women's lives. Finally, it shows the relationships among cultural hybridization, glocalized journalism, transnational feminisms, and story stances that give voice to underrepresented groups.