“L” is for Looking Again

This paper focuses on an important aspect of the Showtime television series The L Word: its exploration of the representation of gender and sexuality in contemporary visual art. The program presents a sophisticated feminist perspective on the histories of female and lesbian representation, and it uses the work of particular contemporary artists, who are known for their engagement with questions of female, lesbian, and/or queer representation, to advance its critique of a long history of erasure, misrepresentation, and objectification. Simultaneously, while foregrounding its awareness of the contradictions of trying to create new forms of representation in a thoroughly commercial and commodified context, the program uses works of art to present the possibility of inventing alternative images or of redefining existing ones. The show's consistent attention to innovative art constitutes a formal device that offers a counter-discourse to those conventions of representation required by the show's need to appeal to a broad audience. In this way, The L Word offers attentive viewers new ways to look at and think about apparently familiar images and narratives.     

Feminist Discourse and the Hegemonic Role of Mass Media

There has been a notable cultural trend in which feminist concerns are conveyed through many popular culture texts in South Korea since the early 1990s. Many different social groups and organizations have been engaged in the formation of feminist discourse in popular culture, among them the mainstream media. To broadly address the role of media in incorporating feminist discourse within the dominant ideology in specific socio-economic contexts, the research sought to identify the ways in which feminist discourse was generated and/or assimilated into the dominant ideology in newspaper content about the messages in the two television dramas Lovers (1996) and The Woman Next Door (2003) and other socio-cultural phenomena surrounding the dramas. Newspaper content became more favorable to the sexually liberated female characters and acknowledged changing gender roles as a current socio-cultural trend. However, it never questioned the nuclear family system itself—which occupies the hegemonic realm in patriarchal capitalist society.     

Negating Identity: A Feminist Analysis of the Social Invisibility of Older Lesbians

SUMMARY

Older lesbians are invisible both within and outside of the lesbian community. Using a postmodern and lesbian feminist approach, in this article we identify a paradox in our society which defines lesbians in terms of their sexuality while older women are generally viewed as asexual. We suggest that this paradox contributes to the invisibility of older lesbians. Our focus is on the interactive nature of the relationship between personal and public constructions of lesbianism in the lives of older women. Finally, we discuss the potential impact of invisibility on self-identity, and using a feminist gerontological framework suggest implications for the empowerment of older lesbians.     

Predictors of Feminist Activism Among Sexual-Minority and Heterosexual College Women

Engagement in activism is related to several aspects of social development in adolescence and emerging adulthood. Therefore, it is important to examine the correlates of different forms of activism, such as feminist collective action, among all youth. However, previous research has not investigated young sexual-minority women's engagement with feminist collective action. This study examined predictors of college-aged heterosexual and sexual-minority women's commitment to and participation in feminist activism. Sexual orientation, number of years in college, social support, experiences with discrimination, and gender identity were tested as predictors of commitment to and participation in feminist activism with a sample of 280 college-aged women (173 heterosexuals and 107 sexual minorities). Similar predictors were related to both commitment to and participation in feminist activism. However, for sexual-minority women, but not heterosexual women, the number of years in college was correlated with participation in feminist activism. Young sexual-minority women reported more participation in feminist activism than did heterosexual women, even after controlling for social support, discrimination, and gender identity.     

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.     

Something Else Besides a Father

While heterosexuality has long been the assumed ideology of reproduction, the material existence of over thirty-three thousand US children a year born from sperm donation alone attests to a radical disjuncture between our conceptions of conception and how a good many children are actually conceived. Reproductive technologies, ranging from the aforementioned sperm donation to the more complicated processes of egg harvesting, surrogacy, and IVF, can thus be read as subverting our notions of the heteronormative family. As such, assisted reproductive technology evokes widespread cultural anxiety, especially for how it challenges notions of gender, sexuality, and parenthood.

Not surprisingly, popular culture has stepped in to allay some of these anxieties, and as such it is a productive site through which to examine debates around gender, sexuality, and parenthood. At the very least, the wide market of Hollywood cinema is evidence of the discursive pull of these debates. In an examination of three recent and representative Hollywood films, Baby Mama (2008), The Switch, and The Back-Up Plan (both 2010), I will analyze how they both challenge and reinforce the “socially foundational status of the male–female couple.” Through their (re)deployment of a variety of cinematic conventions, these films attempt to yoke the radical potential of reproductive technology to a conservative ideology incorporating post-feminism and new masculinity that insists on the emotive primacy of the heterosexual couple and its “language of naturalness.”     

Everyday Life,Everyday Death

In this article I note limits of cultural activism in third-wave feminism, demonstrating that this activism often relies on a music scene that neglects intersections of race and gender. I offer the space of the online fansite as an alternative site for analysis, describing it as a site for everyday activism and consumer activism. Specifically, I explore the online fansite of the HBO show Six Feet Under, describing how fans treat subjects of gender and race in the show and in their everyday lives. Although fans discuss race and gender in limited ways in their explorations of the show and their daily lives, when they discuss the subject of death, they more productively address intersections of both race and gender, considering differences in burial and funereal practices among diverse cultures. Fans also construct the fansite as a place for consumer activism, sharing information about how to be active consumers in the funeral industry and to direct the course of their own burials.     

Mediating Feminism

This study attempts to understand how A-level media studies plays a role in girls' navigation through today's postfeminist media culture. Of particular interest in this article is to identify the ways in which students cultivate a feminist (as opposed to postfeminist) sensibility through their experiences in media studies. Classroom observations were conducted across three UK institutions. Further data were collected by means of semi-structured interviews with fifteen girls and four educators. Findings suggest that students adopt a feminist voice when discussing young girls' relationships with media and when articulating their own desires for a career and for equality in the domestic sphere. A postfeminist voice, however, persists in their understandings of natural sexual difference and the reclamation of adult women's sexual subjecthood. Interviewees express hesitation to adopt the feminist label, and educators rarely address feminism as a main topic in the classroom. Though the media studies classroom is a site which improves the awareness of existing gender inequalities, suggestions for updated classroom content are considered to improve the development of girls' feminist sensibility, including a clearer and more detailed exploration of transitions from girlhood to womanhood, and a clarification of the media's role in naturalising gender differences.     

Underneath we’re angry: feminism and media politics in Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s

In the late 1970s, a billboard advertisement for Gigi underwear was installed at street level in various British cities. It depicted a woman in a trench coat walking on the street at night and looking defiantly at the camera. A second image portrays her unbuttoning her coat and revealing her underwear. A caption reads “Underneath they’re all Lovable.” This billboard evoked a wave of feminist opposition exemplified by Rosalind Coward’s essay “Underneath we’re angry” attacking the Gigi advertisement for being an invitation to rape women as well as photographic works by The Polysnappers condemning the ad. This article contextualizes the passionate resistance to the Gigi advert within the time’s feminist debates, which characterized media images as oppressive towards women, the discourse around the ideological functioning of advertisements, debates on “the sexual politics of representation,” the political role of photography, social historical events, and the political significance of the street.     

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.     

Reporting The Women's Movement

This article examines and compares how four British and American newspapers reported the second-wave feminist movement during its most active political period, 1968–1982. Through the use of both content analysis and critical discourse analysis, this study reveals that despite socio-political differences, both US (The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune) and UK (The Times, Daily Mirror) newspapers used a similar range of discourses when addressing the women's movement and its members. While coverage overall can best be described as fragmented and contradictory, I argue that on the surface, there was significantly more “positive” or supportive articles on the women's movement than previous scholars have noted. However, these news stories rarely addressed the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy oppress women as a group, and often created a demarcation between “legitimate” and “de-legitimate” feminists, the latter being anyone who deviates from traditional feminine norms. Such constructions therefore were not only politically incapable of challenging women's oppression, but helped construct feminism as a dirty word, a connotation which still exists today. This paper will also address the emergence and eventual dominance of oppositional discourses, examining the patriarchal and capitalist ideologies used in both countries to rebuff the movement, its members and their goals.     

Framing "Killer Women" Films: Audience Use of Genre

This paper examines cinematic images of gender in the South Asian diaspora through four recent films—Bend It Like Beckham, Bollywood/Hollywood, Monsoon Wedding, and Second Generation. Using post-colonial theory along with feminist film theory, I analyze the father/daughter dynamic in the above films for their treatment of race, gender, sexuality, and generation. I pose the following two questions: 1) how do father/daughter representations in these films perpetuate ideas of dominant fatherhood within the diaspora; and 2) how do these representations offer images of “oppositional fatherhood,” which challenge stereotypes of South Asian patriarchy? I look at the colonial influence on contemporary homeland and immigrant identities. I then discuss the patriarchal component of South Asian father/daughter relations. I move on to examine notions of good fatherhood (represented through love and loss) and bad fatherhood (as sexually violent) and how the different films deal with these issues.     

“Allow access to location?”: Digital feminist geographies

Abstract

This article looks at the impacts ongoing processes of digitization have on feminist politics of location. It argues that, rather than being borderless by nature, the digital has to be understood as producing different kinds of borders, demanding different kinds of politics of location. New potentialities arise with the challenge of creating a politics fitting to the current mode in which locations become slippery. Discussing the emergence of cyberfeminism in the early 1990s and a more recent example of digital feminism—the #SolitarityIsForWhiteWomen hashtag—this article thinks through the following questions: what does the “cyborg” as a posthuman (and postgender) category have to offer for those who have been (and are) excluded from the notion of the “human”? More specifically, how can we understand and conceptualize the “cyborg” beyond triumphalist narratives of being beyond difference?     

Demographic,Residential, and Socioeconomic Effects on the Distribution of Nineteenth-Century White Body Mass Index Values

Little research exists on the body mass index (BMI) values of nineteenth-century Americans of European descent. Examination of a new body mass index data set and robust statistical analysis yields the following conclusion: between 1860 and 1880, BMIs decreased across the distribution; however, after 1880, BMIs in the highest quantiles increased, while those in lower BMI quantiles continued to decrease. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century white BMIs increased at older ages in higher quantiles and decreased in lower quantiles, indicating significant net biological disparity by age. During industrialization, white BMIs were lower in Kentucky, Missouri, and urban Philadelphia.     

Cinderella's Having a Ball

“Ugly Betty Mania” has created numerous versions of this telenovela across the globe. This paper explores the representational schema within the franchise's Cinderella/Ugly Duckling narrative, whilst focusing on the exclusionary notions of beauty in Mexico's hit 2006 production La Fea Más Bella (“The Most Beautiful Ugly Girl”). By reading the slapstick comedy within this version through feminist theories of laughter, this paper identifies representational modes that challenge traditional Manichaean formulas within the Mexican telenovela, which are tied to notions of good (beauty) and evil (ugliness). Examining this telenovela's popularity through a cultural and industrial analysis, this paper uses data from interviews with industry professionals to consider how an increasingly disengaged Mexican telenovela viewership may have been recaptured through the slapstick gender dynamics of La Fea Más Bella.     

IQ, Birth Weight, and Number of Sexual Partners in White, African American, and Mixed Race Adolescents

Mean levels of three characteristics—verbal IQ, number of sexual partners, and birth weight—were examined in African American, White (European-descent) Americans, and Black/White mixed race American adolescents. The sample came from Wave 1 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The mean age was 16 years. According to their interviewers, the mixed race children had an African American physical appearance. The African American adolescents had a lower birth weight, a lower verbal IQ, and a higher number of sexual partners than did White adolescents. For each characteristic, the mixed race mean fell between the means of the two parental populations. Design extensions were proposed that include: (1) directly genotyping for individual racial admixture, (2) including parents of the mixed race children, and (3) including their cousins.     

Sexual Messages in Black and White: A discourse analysis of Essence and Cosmo

The research presented employed critical discourse analysis to examine advice columns on sex and women's sexual freedom as expressed in two popular women's magazines, Essence and Cosmopolitan, over a three-year period. Essence has a Black female audience, Cosmo a predominantly White female audience. Critical discourse analysis is concerned with language as a primary force for the production and reproduction of ideology and belief systems that come to be accepted as common sense. The study asked whether and to what extent sex talk in these two magazines mirrored tenets of sexual liberation as set forth by “second-wave feminism.” Findings showed that while both magazines reinforced women's right to sexual pleasure and to ask for what they wanted, Essence came closest to mirroring the tenets of women's liberation by advocating women's right to say no to men's bad behavior and to be their own persons. By contrast, Cosmo advised women to be innovative in exciting and keeping their men and to be more flexible in managing men's less than desirable behavior.     

Lesbians Bait the Military

This article analyzes the racial and sexual politics of the “don't ask, don't tell” storyline on Showtime's series The L Word. It situates The L Word within a political economy of media industry and policy advocacy organizations to argue that the show participated in a form of “policy-tainment” by producing critique of both existing government policies and the role of racial representations in oppositional political strategies, and finally exercising influence in policy networks.