“We wouldn’t say it to their faces”: online harassment,women sports journalists,and feminism

In April 2016, a US-based independent sport media organization Just Not Sports launched #MoreThanMean, a digital media campaign to raise awareness about online harassment of women in sports journalism. The video quickly reached 3.7 million views and generated widespread coverage in mainstream news media, sports media, and online-only outlets. Using the #MoreThanMean campaign as a case study, this study assesses how discourses circulate in the sports media environment and, in particular, how feminist messages travel as the content moves from social media to mass media. This study engages with post-feminism in order to examine how various producers of media content position online harassment and sexism in sport and society. While the campaign positioned online harassment as gendered workplace discrimination, the mainstream and sports media coverage typically centralized men in the discussion. Feminist perspectives were constrained to platforms with a progressive, women-centered, and/or explicitly feminist take. Implications for digital feminist activism in the context of sport are discussed.     

Politics of Sex Appeal in Advertising

This article is an ethnographic exploration of how gender ideologies were negotiated in the South Korea of the 2000s, in advertising texts and in advertising workplaces. Advertising has been criticized for reproducing gender stereotypes, and it is easy to assume that it is men within advertising agencies who are responsible for the objectifying and sexualizing portrayals of women. Yet behind some of the raciest South Korean advertising campaigns were ambitious women, who not only eagerly repeated the marketing adage that “sex sells” but also, provocatively, attempted to obliterate the lingering patriarchal norms and double sexual standards—with sexualized advertising. This article examines the politics of sex appeal in contemporary South Korean advertising by drawing on participant observation at an advertising agency, interviews, and public discourse analysis. Having situated the women's interventions within the cultural–historical context of South Korea, I, first, show how women's embrace of the sex-appeal aesthetic was a strategy to succeed in a male-dominated work environment and, second, detail how fighting gender discrimination with sex-appeal advertising was a profoundly contradictory project. I suggest that the politics of sex appeal in advertising was symptomatic of how women's struggles for equality were collapsing into neoliberal post-feminist sensibility.     

Sleeping with a Vampire

The research explores the narrative frames of recent vampire TV and cinematic stories with a special focus on the construction of gender relations and female agency in order to determine whether these narratives conjure up any liberating or empowering potential for their audience. The most significant elements of vampire fiction are taken into account: the central position of the heroine, power relations, love triangles, and the objectification of male characters. The identified common patterns both reflect and generate a crucial shift in Western sexual politics; at the same time, they address the burning concerns this shift has aroused, invoking the anthropological concept of “reflexivity.” The analysis is further couched in the debate on female empowerment and post-feminist gender representations in popular culture, including the idea of sexual subjectivity and a diagnosis of post-feminism as “double entanglement.” The described changes within the contemporary vampire narratives should not be, however, simplified as new forms of sexist discourse.     

Drinking as a Feminine Practice: Post-Feminist images of women's drinking in Swedish women's magazines

Previous feminist analyses have pointed out how the news media demonize women who drink, labelling them as irresponsible, disturbing or behaving “like men.” Popular media such as women's magazines, however, construct alternative representations, that frame women's drinking encouragingly and as part of a successful and “modern” femininity. This study carries out an analysis of fashion reports from six Swedish women's magazines, published between 1984 and 2008. It concludes that despite the fact that women's magazines create an alternative to problematizing portrayals of women who drink, this does not necessarily make them unproblematic from a feminist point of view. While the prevalence of positive and encouraging images may be interpreted as indicating a change towards more gender equal or gender neutral depictions of drinking; this article argues instead that these images should be regarded as parts of a discourse that celebrates stereotypical femininity and reproduces gender difference. As such, the present article brings new perspectives to the complex discourses that give shape to ideas about gender and alcohol in general, and women's drinking in particular.     

A Maternal Heart: Angelina Jolie,choices of maternity,and hegemonic femininity in People magazine

In the last decade practices of celebrity transnational adoption have garnered a significant amount of media attention. Through an analysis of transnational adoption as a site of morality where ideals of femininity are enacted and embodied, this paper brings together celebrity studies, theories of maternity, and literature on adoption in pursuit of studying hegemonic femininity as a social phenomenon spread by media discourses. Focusing on Angelina Jolie as an epistemic individual, this paper draws on concepts of female moral authority, global motherhood, and successful femininity to explore the ways transnational adoption adheres to norms of femininity and norms of racial hierarchy in an era of autonomy and choice. In a critical discourse analysis of articles covering Jolie’s transnational adoptions from People magazine, narratives of choice, individualism, and mobility emerge. Such narratives contribute to Jolie's hegemonic position as a globe-trotting, mobile figure of successful femininity made possible by her position in gendered, raced, and classed hierarchies. Jolie's presence in the mediascape continues to signal boundaries of femininity through choices enabled and constrained by historical ideals of motherhood, global dynamics of transnational adoption, and expectations of female moral authority.     

析《蜗居》对新女性主义的折射

通过对六六的小说《蜗居》中女性形象的分析,展示了新女性主义的性格多元化、女性话语结构化和女性写作主体化的特点,解构了“中心主义”与“二元论”,多角度、多方面体现出新女性主义的观点和特征,展示了新女性主义的理论意义,强烈地折射出新女性主义的精神。     

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.     

Branding the self as an “authentic feminist”: negotiating feminist values in post-feminist digital cultural production

Freelancers who produce creative content online work in an increasingly precarious neoliberal economy, which requires self-branding, self-promotion, and constant audience engagement to succeed. Creating feminist content in a digital environment thus requires the negotiation of individual self-branding and promotional activities alongside the advancement of collective feminist politics. In this study, interviews with 11 feminist online writers reveal that they reconcile the individualistic undertakings required to succeed in the digital economy and their collective feminist values in three ways. Firstly, they incorporate “authentic feminism” into their personal branding endeavors; secondly, they redefine feminism to more closely match the values of post-feminism; and, thirdly, they advance peripheral collective goals in their creative communities. It is through these strategies that feminist values are negotiated and reworked, enabling producers to succeed as feminists in a digital economy that is more closely aligned with post-feminism.     

Welfare Queens,Thrifty Housewives,and Do-It-All Mums

In this paper, we consider how the cultural politics of austerity within Britain plays out on the celebrity maternal body. We locate austerity as a discursive and disciplinary field and contribute to emerging feminist scholarship exploring how broader political and socio-economic shifts interact with cultural constructions of femininity and motherhood. To analyse the symbolic function of mediated celebrity maternity within austerity, the paper draws on a textual analysis of three celebrity mothers: Kate Middleton, Kim Kardashian, and Beyoncé. This analysis was undertaken as part of a larger qualitative study into celebrity culture and young people's classed and gendered aspirations. We show how these celebrity mothers represent the folk devils and fantasy figures of the maternal under austerity—the thrifty, happy housewife, the benefits mum, and the do-it-all working mum—and attempt to unpick what cultural work they do in the context of austerity within Britain. Through the lens of celebrity motherhood, we offer a feminist critique of austerity as a programme that both consolidates unequal class relations and makes punishing demands on women in general, and mothers in particular.     

The Isle of Man and the First Votes for Women

Over a century ago, the Isle of Man became the first country to grant propertied women a parlamentary franchise. This paper presents a case study of the Manx Election Act of 1881 which first enfranchised women and examines some of the factors which may have helped make its passage possible. Chief among these were the involvement of the Manchester National Society for Women's Suffrage and its liberal, middle class appeal, strategy and tactics; the personalistic style of politics on the island; and the absence of any party system.