“We’re a movement”: crowdfunding,journalism, and feminism

As media organizations struggle to remain financially viable, and layoffs become more common, crowdfunding has been championed as one way for journalists to finance new ventures and create work outside of mainstream media. There is a growing body of research that is starting to critically examine the relationship between journalism and crowdfunding. This research, however, has tended to look at journalism as a whole, rather than specific genres. The purpose of this paper is to look at how crowdfunding is being used to create feminist online magazines, online spaces, and freelance journalism to tell stories about women, or aimed at a female-identified audience. It argues that beyond simply wanting to write and produce content the hope is to create change and often the crowdfunding campaigns are positioned as trying to create a “community” and/or a “movement.” This article uses a political economic framework, drawing on the concept of structuration, to analyze how these crowdfunding campaigns are being used to push back against, and open up, mainstream dialogues of what it means to be a woman or female-identified, as well as create safe and open spaces for these conversations.     

“Last Night,I Did a Striptease for My Husband”

Representations in popular media at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first suggest that North American culture idealizes a kind of femininity constituted in erotic display while at the same time disavowing the parallel performance of that femininity in strip culture. This paper begins to consider why femininity is so insistently constituted on these terms, focusing in particular on women's advice media, self-help, and exercise programs of erotic dance as a domestic activity, and working to identify and understand the implications of that representation, for women who work as erotic dancers and for women who do not, with reference to the ways in which these two categories of femininity are constituted and maintained as separate categories through representation and to the effects of this separation for the labour of erotic dance and for the performance of femininity in the everyday. This paper undertakes to understand this complicated relationship and to determine what precisely is at stake in such representations, how to read them, and what they mean.     

“I am a fat baby,who moved to a fat child,who moved to a fat teenager,who moved to a fat adult”: Women’s reflections of a lifetime of body and weight concern

The present study explored how women aged 50–65 years reflect and make meaning of a lifetime of body and weight struggles. Seven purposefully selected women with longstanding body image challenges participated in interviews and reflected on their perceptions, thoughts, and emotions around their body and weight since childhood. Findings revealed consistent and consuming concerns about the body; prevalent body-related self-conscious emotions; influential social experiences that impact physical self-perceptions; and enduring impacts of weight bias, stigma, and discrimination. Collectively, these findings provide support for the stability of body disturbances and highlight the need to explore the unique body-related narratives of women in midlife.     

Gender,aging, and the economics of “active aging”: Setting a new research agenda

The world is aging, and the percentages of older people are on a dramatic ascent. This dramatic demographic aging of human society is not gender neutral; it is mostly about older women. One of the key policy approaches to address the aging revolution is known as “active aging,” crystalized by the WHO in 2002 by three pillars: participation, health, and security. The active aging policy has financial and economic aspects and affects both men and women. However, as argued in this article, a gender-based approach has not been adopted within the existing active aging framework. Therefore, a new gender-specific research agenda is needed, one that focuses on an interrelation between gender and different economic aspects of “active aging” from international, comparative, cultural, and longitudinal perspectives.     

“Little Lena's a Big Girl Now”

Lena Zavaroni became famous as a child star on the British TV talent show Opportunity Knocks in 1974, suffered from anorexia from age thirteen, and subsequently died from complications associated with the problem in 1999, age thirty-five. This article uses 165 press articles from 1974 to 1999 to analyse how Zavaroni's relationship with anorexia was constructed in the British popular press. Existing feminist work suggests that stars with anorexia are worth studying because they make eating disorders popularly visible, with the coverage providing an occasion to analyse how the media constructs anorexia in relation to particular ideologies of femininity. But this article argues that it is important to explore how discourses on fame become intertwined with discursive constructions of anorexia, shaping how such problems are explained and gendered. Because Zavaroni appeared in the media as a child, her trajectory also dramatises how anorexia is seen to be linked not only with the role of the media, but with the development of female identity. Thus, whilst bringing stardom and celebrity into the frame, this article thus seeks to contribute to the feminist work which interrogates how popular constructions of anorexia mark out normative/disordered femininities.     

“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.     

“A Cruel Medium for a Woman”

The developing Melbourne television service featured a number of female personalities who successfully transcended the circumscribed boundaries of their on-camera roles to become household names. Personalities like Corinne Kerby, Panda Lisner, and Toni Lamond were pivotal to the affective connection that many viewers forged with live, locally produced shows. Yet, these women have all but disappeared from the official histories of Australian television, as well as from the shared recollections of the past that form the “public archive” of Australian television. This article not only seeks to recuperate these early performances, but to examine the public discourses that circulated around these personalities, their TV personas, and their private lives.     

“Hedge Your Bets”: Technology’s Role in Young Gay Men’s Relationship Challenges

Technology is playing an increasingly pervasive role among young gay men in the process of meeting potential romantic or sexual partners. We investigated challenges posed by technology related to young gay men’s relationships. Focus groups (n = 9) of young gay men aged 18–24 (n = 43) were transcribed verbatim, and thematic analysis was used to identify two major themes regarding challenges to relationship development and maintenance. Subthemes include unrealistic expectations of relationships, inauthentic self-presentation online, sexual primacy over romance, increased opportunities for infidelity, and jealousy. The implications of this study for sexual education and sexual health promotion are discussed.     

“There is a Massacre of Women”: Violence Against Women,Feminist Activism,and Hashtags in Turkey

Abstract

In academic and popular debates about sexualisation, the “mainstreaming of sex in the West” is a common catchphrase. As noted by post-colonial and critical race scholars, categories such as “the West” remain powerful discursive ideas shaping how both researchers and researched border and construct race, difference, and sexuality. However, there is very little research that employs a post-colonial analysis of young people’s negotiations of sexualised media, most particularly studies that elucidate how the oppositional frameworks of colonial discourse sets up normative and “othered” subjectivities. In order to address this gap, I turn to Stuart Hall’s classic paper The West and the Rest to reflect on a project undertaken in South Australia with young people from a broad range of cultural backgrounds. In a fascinating set of reflections, the young people present a powerful set of challenges to the binary of the West and the Rest through their narratives on sexualised media. Taken together, these complex and sometimes contradictory narratives remind us of the problems associated with talking in generalised and universalising ways about “sexualisation in the West.”     

“It’s like a bus,going downhill,without a driver”: A qualitative study of how postpartum haemorrhage is experienced by women,their birth partners,and healthcare professionals

ProblemPostpartum haemorrhage [PPH] remains a major cause of maternal morbidity and mortality. Whilst low-resource settings bear the greatest burden of deaths, women live with associated morbidities in all healthcare settings. Limited data exists regarding the experience for women, their partners, or healthcare professionals [HCPs], affected by PPH.AimTo qualitatively investigate the experience of PPH, for women (n = 9), birth partners (n = 4), and HCPs (n = 9) in an inner-city tertiary referral centre. To provide multi-faceted insight into PPH and improve understanding and future care practices.MethodsParticipants were interviewed about their experiences within two weeks of a PPH. Data were analysed using thematic analysis.FindingsFour distinct, but related, themes were identified: ‘Knowledge specific to PPH’; ‘Effective and appropriate responses to PPH’; ‘Communication of risk factors’; and ‘Quantifying blood loss’; which collected around a central organising concept of ‘Explaining the indescribable’.DiscussionPPH was viewed as a ‘crisis-style emergency’, generating respectful fear in HCPs, whilst women and partners had little-to-no prior knowledge. Specific PPH knowledge dictated HCPs’ response and risk communication. PPH risks were typically linked to quantification of blood loss, assessment of which varied with acknowledged questionable accuracy. Women’s and partners’ confidence in HCPs’ ability to deal with PPH was unquestionable. Non-verbal communication was highlighted, with HCP body language betraying professional confidence.ConclusionInformation about blood loss during childbirth must be imparted in a sensitive, timely manner. Whilst training for HCPs results in effective PPH management, consideration should be given to their non-verbal cues and the impact of dealing with this stressful, ‘everyday emergency’.     

“You Look Like a Dude,Dude”: Masculine Females Undoing Gender in the Workplace

ABSTRACT

Interviews with 49 masculine females from diverse identities and occupations suggest that their workplace interactions undo gender, that is, breach rather than revise gender parameters. In this study, participants reveal that, although they were acknowledged as women in the workplace, their treatment was often more similar to men. Their classification as “like men” sometimes accrued advantage such as male camaraderie, access to information and opportunities, and greater assumed competence relative to gender-conforming women. Participants’ interactions with coworkers, supervisors, and customers suggest that, rather than a pariah femininity, masculine females may more accurately be described as a subordinate masculinity. Interactions that classify masculine females as predominantly masculine or “like men” denaturalize gender. By visibly countering gender’s anatomical basis and the notion of coherent gendered selves, masculine females might, in one small way, undo gender.     

“A Girl Alone in a man's World”

War films were one of British cinema's mainstays throughout the 1950s, and one of the most iconic of the cycle is Ice Cold in Alex (1958). This particular film overturned some of the already familiar conventions of the genre, not least by allowing a female character, the nursing sister Diana Murdoch (played by Sylvia Syms), to play a more important role than women were usually granted. This article deploys close textual analysis to examine the representation of Diana, and suggests how this character not only reflects various competing and often self-contradictory discourses of 1950s femininity but also offers a rare depiction of women's contribution to the war effort from the decade following it.     

Statistics and Politics in a “Knowledge Society”

The importance of information in economic and political processes is widely recognised by modern theories. This information, coupled with the advancements in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has changed the way in which markets and societies work. The availability of the Internet and other advanced forms of media have made information more accessible to citizens than ever before. Therefore, the ideal of the “fully informed decision maker” should be a reality. Unfortunately, this is far from the case. As Einstein put it, “information is not knowledge” and although citizens are bombarded by information on a constant basis, this bombardment does not necessarily bring about knowledge. Several studies have analysed the characteristics of the knowledge society, as well as its impact on the production of “official” statistics. In this paper we do not enter into this debate, but we analyse the role of statistics in building a knowledge society and improving the democratic control of policy makers. The paper analyses the relationships between information, expectations and economic theory, as well as the nexus between information and political sciences. Various approaches to the measurement of societal progress and the role of “key indicators” in this respect are also discussed. Finally, both theoretical models and empirical evidence about what citizens know on societal progress are discussed and the OECD project on the measurement of societal progress is presented.

“Nyota Uhura is Not a White Girl”

This essay examines the online debate surrounding representation of the Black/African character of Lt. Uhura in the 2009 prequel film, Star Trek. Some fans, particularly those viewing the film from a gender/race intersection, applauded her portrayal, while others, including many “slashers” who espouse a homoerotic reading of classic Trek from an ostensible gender/sexuality standpoint, disapproved—especially of Uhura's romantic storyline. Virtual observation and appraisal of these discourses demonstrate the adaptability of Patricia Hill Collins' intersectionality framework to studies of media reception, especially in terms of hegemonic and interpersonal domains of power and cultural studies notions of articulation. Accordingly, the investigation finds the first fan faction's rhetorical efforts more authentically and pro-actively oppositional.     

“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.     

解决“老有所养”,促进计划生育

解决“老有所养”,促进计划生育,大家的认识是一致的。但是怎样才能解决好,却是一个值得研究和探讨的问题。在这方面,各地农村都已根据自己的条件采取了一些措施,创造了一些解决办法,把它们归纳起来,大体有以下三种类型。     

香港“婴儿潮”一代将退休,职场“青黄不接”

香港统计处2012年最新数据指出,香港退休人数现时每年超过6万人,受婴儿潮效应影响,2011年50～54岁共约60万人,预计退休潮高峰期将于2018年涌现,     

“Making work pay” in a rationed labor market

This paper empirically analyzes the labor supply effects of two “making work pay” reforms in Germany. We provide evidence in favor of policies that distinguish between low effort and low productivity by targeting individuals with low wages rather than those with low earnings. We discuss our results more generally and with comparisons to the family-based tax credits in force in the US and the UK. For the evaluation of the policies, we apply a static structural labor supply framework and explicitly account for demand-side constraints by using a double-hurdle model.