Olivia Pope: a black post-feminist subject? Analyzing Scandal’s intersecting post-feminist and colorblind discourses

Previous analyses of Scandal have focused on how colorblind discourse in the series influences the representation of lead character Olivia Pope’s Blackness. Less has been written about how dominant discourses of race and gender intersect in the series. Correspondingly, post-feminist scholarship has overwhelmingly concentrated on discourses of gender in depictions of white women. This article seeks to bridge the gaps between scholarship on representations of race and gender on television. Situating Scandal within the context of post-feminist and colorblind discourses of gender and race that have been prominent on mainstream television since the early 2000s, this article takes an intersectional approach to interrogate how Olivia Pope, a Black woman, is incorporated into post-feminist discourse. Rhetorical analyses of episodes of Scandal’s seasons 1 through 5 uncover how colorblind and post-feminist discourses provide at their junction a restricted space for a Black post-feminist subject. Olivia Pope’s post-feminist characterization comes at the expense of obfuscating how her Blackness affects her identity as a woman, and effectively “posts” her Black womanhood. The visibility of the Black post-feminist subject in colorblind post-feminism is thus paradoxically contingent on the concurrent invisibility of Black women’s experiences and Black feminist concerns.     

Neoliberal homophobic discourse: heteronormative human capital and the exclusion of queer citizens

In this article, I examine the relationship between homophobic language use and its broader social context, focusing on how a U.S.-based, conservative Christian organization's institutionalized homophobic text-making practices seek to derive legitimacy from the broader political economic discourses associated with the neoliberal moment. Using the Family Research Council's statement on marriage and the family as the basis for analysis, I demonstrate how the organization seeks to represent lesbian and gay subjects and their kinship formations as a threat to human capital development because they are based on affectional relationships that neither reflect nor respond to the kinds of self-governance and marketization that neoliberalism requires of all citizen-subjects and their families. Linguistic strategies for creating such representations include lexical choices that avoid overtly identifying lesbian and gay subjects as the object of discussion, the creation of a taxonomy for what constitutes "proper" families-based on neoliberal principles--that implicitly excludes lesbian and gay kinship formations, and the use of neoliberal discourses of self-governance and marketization as the basis for that exclusion.     

Gesellschaftliche Verfasstheit im Feld des Sehens — Deutungsabsichten und verborgene AutorInnenschaft

In a way, museums and exhibitions can be taken as symptoms of knowledge and image construction. Exhibitions as places of (visual) representations reflect current cultural narrations and images of society — the conscious and the hidden or unconscious ones. In general, these narratives which are mediated on a visual level are neither reflected nor identified as social constructions. In this context, I tried to analyze displays of four exhibitions focusing on the categories gender and “the other”, on the way these categories are addressed or left out and by which visual means. The central idea of this investigation of the production of meanings within complex exhibiting procedures is to turn the means of staging themselves into an object of analysis, that is, to find out which methods of production consciously or unconsciously transmit which contents. The aim of this paper is to reveal (hidden) discourses that are produced and mediated through visual methods, to heighten the awareness of processes in visual culture by which cultural and social codes are accredited and approved of and to claim responsibility for these representations.     

Invisible golden girls? Post-feminist discourses and female ageing bodies in contemporary television fiction

Abstract

The popular television series The Golden Girls (1985–1992) seems to be an exception in the history of the representation of third-age women femininities and bodies in television fiction. This series about four mature women living in the same house in Miami made ageing women visible in television representations. Older women are generally invisible in popular television fiction. Despite this absence, a discourse on ageing and femininities is present in all sorts of popular media texts. We will question post-feminist discourses on ageing bodies and femininities. Are the post-feminist claims regarding ageing bodies present in popular television fiction? Moreover, are these discourses represented by the portrayal of ageing bodies? We will analyse the representations of ageing femininities in television fiction labelled as “post-feminist television fiction.” The series Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, and Girls will be studied using a textual analysis to look for discourses on ageing female bodies and their particularities in relation to post-feminism. We distinguished a limited set of three sets of discourses (losing femininity, masking of ageing, and the wisdom of ageing) on ageing femininities. Although ageing feminine bodies are absent, a discourse on ageing, “good” ageing, and acceptance of ageing is present in the narration in all three series. The discourse on the masking of ageing, however, is predominant.     

Discourses of Mobility: Institutions,Everyday Lives and Embodiment

This article seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on the politics of mobility, revealing the ways in which the governing of mobility intersects with everyday mobile lives. We suggest that dominant and enduring institutional discourses of mobility, which are pervaded by a privileging of individualised automobility, can be conceptualised around a framework of morality, modernity and freedom. By examining everyday discourses of mobility in this context we highlight the ways in which these discourses reflect and resist normative sets of knowledge and practices. It is argued that by emphasising the everyday and mundane in an analysis of discourses of mobility, and acknowledging their situatedness in prevailing normative discourses, we are then able to focus on how movement is a social and cultural practice in constant negotiation and (re)production.     

Not “Simply the Breast”

Two prominent media events involving breastfeeding celebrities prompted unprecedented transnational media attention to their bodies, their breastfeeding practices, and their beliefs about the act of breastfeeding. This study critically analyzes media representations of Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie that feature (or imply) a nursing celebrity breast to argue that discourses about celebrity breastfeeding are a semiotically potent phenomenon that destabilize boundaries of public and private, perpetuate normative beauty standards, and prescribe proper breastfeeding practices to audiences. The transnational celebrity of Jolie, Hayek, and others makes analyzing media discourses of their breastfeeding particularly necessary because they are prominent purveyors of femininity and have made activism about women's health a key aspect of their public personae.     

Narrations and practices of mobility and immobility in the maintenance of gender dualisms

This paper analyses the role of practices and representations of mobility in supporting particular kinds of gender orders. While scholarship has shown the various ways women are materially and symbolically ‘fixed’ in place, less attention has been paid to how discourses and practices of mobility interface with systems of gender differentiation more broadly. This work is based on a robust empirical base of 55 interviews, 90 h of participant observation and an analysis of museum displays in Kalgoorile, Western Australia, an iconic frontier mining town selected for this investigation as a site of strongly bifurcated gender discourses. Analysing our field data through the lens of feminist theory which problematizes gender binaries, we argue that while some narrations of gender mobilities serve to reinforce gender binaries, lived practices of movement can also destabilise (idealised) notions of gendered movement. This paper extends conceptual work by advancing understanding about the role of mobility within systems of gender differentiation, showing how lived practices of mobility are just as likely to challenge idealised patterns of gendered movement as they are to reinforce these patterns.     

The Workings of Homonormativity: Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,and Queer Discourses on Discrimination and Public Displays of Affections in Portugal

This article analyzes how heteronormative discourse may be (re)produced by the very same people it serves to oppress, binding heteronormativity to a specific form of homonormativity. Furthermore, this article also links Portuguese history and society by discussing the context and the recent legal changes that led to legislation providing for same-sex marriage. Using thematic analysis of 14 interviews, this article demonstrates how heteronorms are upheld in the discourses of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) participants. Themes linked to public displays of affection and discrimination emerged from the interviews. Participant discourses are analyzed in terms of their incorporation of heteronorms. Homonormativity is present in both the themes subject to analysis. Analysis of the interviews shows how transgressing the heteronorm implies costs and is ultimately perceived as a personal risk. This article concludes that the lack of discursive resistance denies the possibility of re-signification and subversion even in LGBQ discourses. This clearly indicates the pervasiveness of discourses reiterating heteronorms, even those issued by those most oppressed by such norms.     

The Changing Shape Of Pregnancy In New Zealand Women's Magazines: 1970–2008

This article examines the representation of pregnant embodiment in thirteen New Zealand women's magazines published between January 1970 and December 2008. It offers a theoretical focus on postfeminism, media, and embodiment, and situates their conjuncture within cultural, demographic, and labour market trends. Magazine representations of pregnancy concurrently illustrate the degree to which discourses surrounding pregnancy have shifted, and the continued association of motherhood with feminine success. Monthly and weekly publications were sampled and a visual analysis undertaken of images and spreads. Over nearly four decades, substantial changes were found in the normative or extraordinary status of pregnancy, the appearance and display of the pregnant body, the frequency of representations, the association of pregnancy with celebrity, and its dissemination through celebrity culture. Changes in the status of pregnancy parallel larger social changes, in particular the increase in delayed childbearing amongst white, middle-class women. Pregnancy images were also influenced by changes in the format and substance of women's magazines, the advent of celebrity culture, and the emergence of a maternity market.     

The Discursive Construction of Women Politicians in the European Press

The appointment of the first majority female government in Spain generated a significant amount of coverage in newspapers across Europe, synthesising the multi-faceted debate about the relationship between gender and political leadership. Through the combination of qualitative thematic and quantitative content analysis, this article examines the construction of women politicians across different European nations. By analysing the coverage of the issue in the main newspapers of four European countries (France, Italy, Spain and the UK) in the two weeks after the new Spanish cabinet was appointed, this article explores the values and ideal roles the media assign to female politicians. The article is based on the premise that mediated representations of female politicians can tell us important things about the relations between gender, power and politics. Such representations embody a set of assumptions about how successful women should look, behave and speak, and thus implicitly express judgments on models of femininity. Ultimately, such representations construct heroines and villains that inform our conceptions of women's political participation, thereby encouraging some forms of gendered political discourse and discouraging others. Our research found that while certain discourses celebrate women ministers for their (symbolic) emancipatory value, others judge them by their physical appearance or their performance as wives, mothers, and mothers-to-be.     

Gender and Development in Youth Media

This article addresses the conditions of possibility for international youth who produce media in the context of the AMIGOS/IDA development program run by Amigos de las Americas (AMIGOS) and an International Development Agency (IDA) in rural Nicaragua. The authors examine the conditions within which youth make decisions to produce media about gender, in order to examine how media, gender, and hope intersect in the context of youth-led development programming. Gender emerges as a popular and significant focus for media production in the context of social change within this context. The authors draw on qualitative case study data to argue that modernist development norms and post-feminist sensibilities contribute to the assemblage of complex pedagogical spaces that animate and inform a cautionary analysis regarding marginalization, power, and the limits of pedagogical interventions and liberation discourses.     

The politics of lesbian specificity

The notion of lesbian specificity must be understood in the context of heteronormative society. Heterosexual norms affect negotiations of power and sexual desire in lesbian relationships. But this investigation into woman-to-woman sexual practices also views the possibility of lesbian specificity as potentially subversive, in the sense that it poses fundamental questions about conventional discourses on sexuality and eroticism.     

“So Tight in the Thighs,So Loose in the Waist”

While a wide range of research documents how media continue to devalue female athletes, negatively affecting female body image and perceptions of female athletic ability, new media technologies are allowing athletes to potentially challenge these representations. This essay focuses on @SoccerGrlProbs, the Twitter handle of an anonymous group of soccer players, and their interaction with over 180,000 followers. Examining how @SoccerGrlProbs constructs female athletic identity, it considers how this identity is taken up by girls and young women in their own self-constructions as athletes. It argues that @SoccerGrlProbs enables young female athletes to negotiate the conflicting demands of emphasized femininity and athleticism by inspiring self-constructions that allow them to claim athletic “somebodiness” while simultaneously subverting sports discourses emphasizing self-mastery and female athletes' (hetero)sexual attractiveness.     

The Erotic Lesbian in the Spanish Sexploitation Films of the 1970s

This article studies the representation of female homosexuality in the newly born erotic Spanish cinema of the 1970s, questioning the political and social implications of these first representations of lesbianism which contributed to shaping the first democratic discourses around women's sexuality. In order to do so, it looks at some of the most relevant films of the genre (most of which have never been studied before) and examines their portrayal of lesbian sex, focusing later on the figure of Ignacio F. Iquino and his film The Mask as the main representative of this genre in order to prove how the narrative construction of the eroticizing lesbian was largely based upon fascist conceptions of homosexuality.     

Shaping LGBTQ Identities: Western Media Representations and LGBTQ People’s Perceptions in Rural Spain

A growing academic discussion has focused on how, in a globalized world, LGBTQ identities are shaped and influenced by different and international actors, such as the media. This article analyzes how LGBTQ people from a rural region of a Western country—Spain—feel toward their representations on TV series from English-speaking countries. Employing a qualitative approach, this research aims to depict whether the academic conceptualizations to analyze these identity conformation processes are accurate. In addition, it explores how dominating media representations are being adapted in a region that, although within the West, can serve a context of a very different nature. The results found that a major rejection of the TV series representations among participants can suggest both an inaccuracy of the conceptualizations used by some scholars to understand LGBTQ flows and a problematic LGBTQ representation in media products that goes beyond regions and spaces.     

That Teenage Feeling

This article deconstructs news media representations of two custody abductions that took place in Aotearoa New Zealand in the mid-2000s. In the first case, the father abducted his five-month-old daughter; in the second case, the mother was held responsible for the abduction of her six-year-old son even though he was in the presence of his maternal grandfather. The analysis demonstrates that the media's pejorative construction of the mothers at the center of both cases was facilitated by a number of significant gaps and silences in the narration of the abductions. These silences, in lending support to a fathers' rights construction of custody disputes in which mothers are to blame for dispossessing fathers of their children, reveal the media's reliance on pro-father discourses, particularly fathers' rights discourse.     

Career Girls

Television representations of the British postwar working woman have been afforded little consideration in British historical television scholarship. In its exploration of two early 1960s female ensemble television series set in the workplace, Compact (1962–1965) and The Rag Trade (1961–1963), this article makes a significant feminist intervention in the reinstatement of this neglected figure into extant critical television histories. It also demonstrates that implicit media discourses around women balancing work and home life customarily situated in the latter part of the twentieth century were already in circulation in the early 1960s.     

Sociodicies of (im)mobility: moral evaluations of stasis,departure and return in an emigrant village (Shenzhen,China)

Inhabitants of Pine Mansion, a former emigrant village in a present-day Chinese megacity, hold an ambivalent and nuanced morally laden discourse about migration. This paper takes up several of the challenges issued by the ‘regimes of mobility’ approach, and focuses on people’s moral justifications of (im)mobility. I build upon Boltanski’s sociology of critique to analyze how these narratives constitute sociodicies, explanatory schemes that retrospectively justify and evaluate past ‘choices’ and compare the destinies of those who stayed in the village and those who migrated abroad. Paying attention to sociodicies of (im)mobility fosters an understanding of the dynamics of change in the representations of migration and of the interplay between local understandings and state nationalist discourses. They furthermore reverse the tendency to present stasis and departure as the respective expressions of a deprivation and a manifestation of agency.