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This paper employs digital ethnographic methods to explore the Facebook fan group for the popular podcast My Favorite Murder. We argue that the My Favorite Murder podcast and Facebook group, while providing a potentially unique feminist online space for its members in its early days, quickly devolved into a toxic space rife with conflict and ultimately destroyed by white-centred feminism and white supremacy. We explore failed gatekeeping practices in relation to other Facebook podcast fan groups that have met a similar demise. Finally, we question whether truly inclusive anti-racist feminist spaces can exist in capitalistic models of media production and consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caste in the South Asian context is a deeply felt phenomenon, practised through bodily and sensory regimentation, and the prescriptive social organization of bodies in space. These relationships between caste and embodiment have historically been closely regulated in norms around the partaking, sharing and cooking of food, and meat in particular. This paper examines how these gastronomic prescriptions endure and take on new meanings in digital food media, which disrupts physical space and food's relationships to the body and sensory experience. Drawing on two years of ethnography with creators who produce home-cooking content in the emerging Indian "creator economy," this paper considers how caste is embodied, articulated and remediated online during a time of violent Hindu nationalist food politics in India. How is caste articulated even when it is not explicitly named by creators in their posts? How are caste-based disgust and humiliation, and conversely, caste intimacy elicited by creators as they labor for the creator economy? Bringing together feminist and anti-caste theories of experience, articulation and embodiment, the paper theorizes caste as affect, and in doing so, illuminates how it comes to have a digital life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experience of pregnancy and motherhood is complex and changeable, marked by feelings of fulfilment, growth, and joy, but also depression, stress, anxiety, increased conflict, and regret. Yet the chaotic realities of motherhood remain taboo subjects, rarely discussed, in society and across the media. This paper shows how discussion forums can work as powerful outlets to capture the meaningful expression of viewpoints that mothers may not feel able to articulate or confess elsewhere. These anonymous online spaces offer a supportive space where the reality of the often-hidden maternal experience can be communicated, in resistance to the dominant narratives reinforcing the idea of the “good” mother. Analysis of UK forum Mumsnet suggests that public digital communities provide a valuable space to explore a socially relevant research area relating to maternal suicide and lived experience. This paper responds to a need to understand how women discuss suicidal thoughts, facilitating an understanding of the hidden discourse around motherhood. Through thematic analysis of Mumsnet posts (n = 4,186), five themes were identified: escaping the burden of motherhood; motherhood or pregnancy trauma as a trigger; feeling that children would be better off without them; children being a reason to live; and perceived shameful thoughts leading to silenced feelings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alcohol and Other Drug Facilitated Sexual Violence (AODFSV), known as "drink-spiking," is the administration of alcohol or other drugs to someone without their consent, with the intent to harm them. Investigation into portrayals of AODFSV in the Australian news media is needed. Using feminist critical discourse analysis, this paper investigated the portrayal of AODFSV in the Australian news media in the past ten years. 226 articles were included for analysis and three themes were identified. Firstly, "how the media constructs the drink spiking narrative," uses the "cautionary tale" that warns women about the dangers of the night-time economy and reinforces and perpetuates victim-blaming and rape myths. Secondly, "how the media normalises the drink spiking discourse" focuses on the substances used in drink spiking, the settings, the construction of the perpetrator and the victim as well as the depictions of sexual violence. Thirdly, "how the media shapes responses from emergency services" including police and hospital staff. This paper highlights the way the media creates and reinforces drink-spiking discourse, which constructs drink-spiking as individual behaviour rather than a culturally embedded issue. Such ideology perpetuates victim blaming and rape myths. We argue for critical and thoughtful reporting on AODFSV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, Eileen Gu attracted considerable attention and sparked numerous discussions on Chinese social media. Using the method of textual analysis, this paper examines the various responses of Chinese women, particularly Chinese feminists, to Eileen's achievements on Chinese social media, framing these responses within recent studies of neoliberalism's undoing of feminism as well as long-standing debates about the relationship between feminism and nationalism. This paper argues that discussions about Eileen on Chinese social media not only illustrate how neoliberalism is absorbed, reworked, and resisted in its transnational circulation but also demonstrate how nationalist narratives can be strategically used by Chinese feminists to validate their feminist positions. It further enriches existing scholarship on neoliberalism with a transnational perspective, reaffirms the importance of contextualizing the relationship between Third World feminism and nationalism, and highlights the significance of uncovering indigenous feminist resources in Third World countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with the creative strategies and media interventions of the Parragirls—a lose collective of women subject to punitive confinement and abuse as children in out-of-home "care" at the former Parramatta Girls Home—as a feminist archive of collective resistance, reclamation, and repair in the wake of institutional harm and media damage. We consider the Parragirls feminist archive in the context of a larger project analysing the role of media, journalism, and media activism in the ground-breaking Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–17) (RCIRCSA). Drawing on Couldry's theorisation of "media as practice," we foreground the ways Parragirls have responded to media injustice and media damage. We analyse a range of Parragirls practices and interventions which, taken together, complicate one of key media narratives which emerged during the RCIRCSA public hearings about abuses at Parramatta Girls, namely that "providing evidence, while traumatic can be beneficial and worthwhile." Our paper thus contributes to critical scholarship on news values as racialised, classed, and gendered hierarchies of attention, and to feminist media scholarship that highlights resistant and transformative alternative visions for media practice. We ask: how might we imagine, or work towards a more reparative media? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparing the mouthed words and official dubbings of Word of Honor (WoH), a Chinese web drama adapted from a homoerotic danmei novel, this paper examines which parts of dangai works are changed to accommodate censorship. The paper explains the censorship standards of the Chinese National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) regarding how the male image is conveyed: Men must achieve predictable social relationships with authorities and cannot be limited to their personal intimacies, let alone be regarded as objects of desire. On the other hand, the mouthed words hidden by the official dubbings are forms of strategic self-preservation. However, one must remain alert to how these mouthed words also support the dream of "a quiet time of equal rights for men and women"1 for Chinese female audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the ideology of pro-work conservatism prevails in East Asia, scholars have largely overlooked its discursive construction in media communication from a linguistic perspective. This paper examines the discursive construction of pro-work conservatism in 3,000 Weibo posts with the most "likes" in response to China's implementation of the three-child policy. Using the sociosemantic approach as an analytic framework, the paper finds that three dominant themes underpin the discourse of pro-work conservatism: women's sacrifice in the labour market, the high cost of raising children, and gender-essentialist norms. This discourse is articulated in the posts via a number of discursive strategies, including authorization, morality, and rationalisation. This paper sheds light on the influence of the one-child policy and the awakening of feminist consciousness in the new era and highlights the implications of language use in shaping gender-role ideologies to influence public perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular Hindi cinema in India has come a long way in portraying women. From the 1910s, when male actors used to play heroine characters, to the 1950s, when female actors started playing lead roles, women's depiction has undergone various forms of experimentation. One such aspect constantly discussed in cinema, literature, and other art forms are their depiction of the extremes and their take on the marginalities. This paper attempts to analyse the representation of women in refugee camps in popular Hindi cinema. There are works available focussing on the depiction of women in cinema content-wise. However, the cinematographic portrayal explicitly referring to refugee camps is not widely explored. This paper attempts to fill these existing gaps. It also discusses the current political landscape of India vis-à-vis popular Hindi cinema. The cinematographic representation of women exemplifies their nurturing and caring nature. The screen time shrinks when the focus shifts to their inner conflicts and emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

#MeToo is a digital social movement that has garnered significant attention from feminist scholars since the hashtag obtained viral fame in 2017. Nonetheless, how survivors of sexual violence experience participating in #MeToo remains an understudied question. In this paper we analyze vlogs posted on YouTube under the hashtag to understand how women represent the affordances and drawbacks of participating in the movement, and how they imagine their experiential narratives may affect other survivors. We argue that vloggers represent #MeToo as a forum for breaking the culture of silence that structures sexual violence. As they narrate their experiences, vloggers challenge silencing mechanisms by cultivating voice, resistance strategies, and survivor solidarity, while encouraging viewers to similarly examine their own experiences. Vloggers also identify the emotional burdens associated with disclosure and the damages incurred by confronting rape myths and the entrenched denial of perpetrator guilt as drawbacks of participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addressing the soap opera's enduring vitality, this study focuses on the soap culture on the Russian-language Web (Runet). With the serials produced in Asia and Latin America at the center, this culture emerges as a vibrant site of transnational spectatorship and a crucial area to negotiate the interpersonal relationships and social values. A fundamental condition of this cross-border phenomenon is language translation predominantly performed by women. In foregrounding the case of the Hindi soap serial on the Runet, this paper examines the role of women translators as a driving force behind global television traffic and an important agent of soap imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2021, a girl named Du Meizhu revealed on Weibo (Chinese Twitter) of having been emotionally and sexually abused by the top-tier idol Kris Wu. The incident gained publicity over the month and climaxed in mid-July, when netizens started the hashtag #girls help girls# on Weibo. Rapidly topping the trending list, this incident led to heated discussions around the case and women's social status in contemporary Chinese patriarchy. Yet unlike its #MeToo counterpart, the hashtag had been taken down hastily within hours, cutting its practitioners off from further engagements. In this paper we nonetheless propose a more positive interpretation of the incident. Combining Massumi's affect theory with Foucault's heterotopia, we argue that Weibo users constructed themselves an affective heterotopia in the hashtag #girls help girls#. Through an affective textual analysis of the posts in the hashtag, we argue that while vulnerable to censorship, the affective force in this heterotopia is ultimately untameable to the discursive regime, potentially leading to concrete feminist ends. In so doing, we offer methodological insight for understanding online feminist discussions in the particular context of contemporary China, adding to scholarship that transcends the global North orientation in feminist theory and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a French feminist subversion and contemporary reimagining of Mike Nichols' classic American film, The Graduate, Marion Vernoux's Bright Days Ahead (Les beaux jours) rebukes Hollywood for its general exclusion of leading women aged 40 or over and its Oedipal portrayals of them. Vernoux's film subverts The Graduate by portraying the latter film's adulterous affair between a younger man and an older woman through the woman's eyes. Using Jacques Lacan's mirror stage of development and Laura Mulvey's explanation of how to overturn the male gaze of traditional film, this paper argues that Vernoux conceives a new language of desire for women, or a female gaze, in Bright Days Ahead through the younger lover's positive reflections on the older woman, Caroline (Fanny Ardant) and close-up images of sensuous touch between Caroline and her younger lover. Scenes of touch between Caroline and her lover were filmed in extreme close-up as they mutually caressed one another. The film's overall messages are that some men will always be philanderers, but women do not have to accept them, and women including actresses can be sexual throughout their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores three cases of celebrity miscarriages or pregnancy losses as mediated on Twitter. Through an exploration of how ambiguous grief is mediated in social media, this paper highlights the way gender, race, celebrity, and grief intersect in social media spaces. Using interdisciplinary work from media studies, gender studies, disability studies and trauma studies, this article offers a way to recognize how digital media offers space for coping to everyday people through mediations about and by celebrities, even while policing the boundaries of those celebrities' grief. In exploring the complexity of this type of digital mediation this article offers an entry point through which to understand other digital mediations of loss, grief, and trauma in social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the rise of “reactionary feminism” within popular culture, suggesting a possible departure from, or mutation of, the hegemony of neoliberal and postfeminisms of recent decades. It locates reactionary feminism as key to the growing backlash against “liberal feminism,” pointing to emergent popular feminist discourses of “brutal truths,” “material conditions,” and women as a “sex class.” I analyse three seemingly diverse iterations of the reactionary feminist turn: its political-intellectual articulation by anti-progressive, “post-liberal” feminists; secondly, its manifestation within the “femosphere” - the online, female-centric communities which mirror those of the manosphere—focusing specifically on the “Female Dating Strategy;” and thirdly, “dark feminine” dating influencers on TikTok and YouTube, sometimes framed as “Andrew Tate for girls.” Reactionary feminism appears to have certain similarities with leftist, intersectional feminism; it has a strong critique of liberal feminism, and explicitly centres issues such as misogyny, the devaluation of women’s work, gendered economic inequality, and the politics of care. However, I argue that while it purports to oppose misogyny and the manosphere, it mirrors many of its regressive logics, and is characterised by an aggressive sense of fatalism, bio-essentialism, and a deep animosity towards liberationist feminism and any form of social hope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years Incel1 has become a regularly cited example of extreme contemporary misogyny and antifeminism. This paper develops existing understandings of the phenomenon and contextualises Incel as in important ways the product of a painful embrace of neoliberal ideas about market outcomes and social value, expressed through the practices and rhetoric associated with gender relations in this era, with an emphasis on its gendered metapolitical constitution and vision. This is achieved in two steps. Based on a close thematic analysis of textual data collected from the main hub of Incel discourse, other Incel texts, and elements of digital ethnography, I first draw attention to the Incel worldview's interpretation of the neoliberal era as uniformly pro-feminist and note how in doing so collapses the distinction between women, feminists, and elite power. Second, I highlight how this interpretation informs the self-ascription of transgressive and emancipatory qualities, which serve as additional animating logics in Incel hatred of feminism, feminists, and women. I conclude by suggesting that this approach allows for a more productive understanding of the Incel phenomenon and the role of antifeminism and misogyny within it, which includes complicating Incel's purported parallels with the far-right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded in empirical data, this qualitative study analyses how female anti-feminist influencers engage in metapolitics and how anti-feminist practices of metapolitics unfold within visual social media content. Employing multimodal content analysis and netnography this study adds to the research on metapolitics and political influencers. Applying network media logic as an analytical lens this paper is focusing on three female anti-feminist influencers and their metapolitical practices on TikTok. Results show that female anti-feminist influencers use different practices to metapolitize their (supposed) private life while introducing their audience to anti-feminist ideas and other anti-feminist actors, e.g., actors of the so-called manosphere. Further, they use TikTok to commodify their anti-feminist worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention (in March 2021) and the high prevalence of gender-based violence reflect the current patriarchal political atmosphere in Turkey. Such backlash occurred despite the strong feminist resistance and transnational support to combat anti-gender developments. In this political climate, online disclosures of gender-based violence have become critical in shaping public debates about violence against women in Turkey. In the last decade, we have witnessed a movement similar to #MeToo, whereby women shared their experiences of gender-based violence on Twitter. This paper is about six of these disclosures and how they formed networked feminist counterpublics. Through a qualitative study of our participants´ lived experiences of online disclosures, we aim to illustrate what responses and reactions they encountered in online spaces, how these reactions and responses affected their well-being, what online spaces offered to them to counteract their victimisation, and, finally, how these online disclosures contributed to feminist collective consciousness and agency in Turkey. Our findings reveal dual consequences of disclosing gender-based violence online, where these networked feminist counterpublics bring together the excluded stories and challenge the mainstream public knowledge, and yet, at the same time, result in backlashes and digital vulnerabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sheds light on how digital technologies and transnational media culture in the U.S. promote new ways of making sense of Korean American identity by renegotiating Asian attractiveness in terms of body images and identity. As a prominent case of media globalization, the rise of the Korean Wave in a global context initiated the exploration of Korean Americans' imagination of attractiveness. Noting that white standardized body images have spread along with mass-mediated content, this paper questions whether this new media environment brought with it a similar shift in perceptions of attractiveness. Employing the concepts of intersectionality and Appadurai's notion of global imagination, the researcher delved into the daily lives and media practices of Korean Americans during ten months of fieldwork in the Philadelphia area and conducted in-depth interviews with about thirty Korean Americans. Transnational media became emancipative resources for their global imagination, embracing their ethnic identity. Yet, young Korean American women in particular actively engaged in consumerism driven by global capitalism, as well as Western-centered beauty standards and fashion trends, via mediated images in Korean media. In this way, this new media environment is not an exclusively emancipative force, especially for young women in a racial minority group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to reflect on the ways in which a non-metropolitan academic feminist community engages with digital media to reimagine the discipline of Women’s Studies, and consequently feminist politics. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Women’s Studies Centre at a university in Tamil Nadu, India, this paper moves away from the framework of the digital as simply enabling or empowering, and instead seeks to examine these digital cultures as shaped by the particularities of their geographic coordinates, and as part of a larger media environment which is characterised as much by continuities as it is by innovations. In doing so, it attempts to understand feminisms as media phenomena that are actively shaped by and shaping media technologies and discourses. It argues that Women’s Studies scholars in these locations, operating from hybrid geographical and digital places, enable the possibility of decentring feminist scholarship and thus allow for a reframing of the digital. To do this, it focuses on three distinct areas of engagement—the co-creation of knowledge in Tamil language Wikipedia, interactions on social media platforms, and their engagements with little magazines in their online avatars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how lesbians utilize YouTube to make themselves into rhetorical citizens and how YouTubers use hypermediation and mediated authenticity to achieve an authentic sense of a virtual community among the lesbian minority group. I review the concepts of rhetorical citizenship, mediated authenticity and remediation. Furthermore, I analyze two videos by lesbian YouTubers, focusing on the stylistic features while applying the theory of mediated authenticity. The paper concludes that, through the platform of YouTube, some lesbians have the opportunity to acquire rhetorical agency—and become rhetorical citizens through participation in democracy. Through the use of authenticity puzzles, the lesbian YouTubers manage to create a sense of community and encourage lesbian viewers to actively participate—and unite them in shared experiences they can relate to such as shared cultural codes. Although lesbian YouTubers today play a big part in giving lesbians representation and reducing minority stress, there is a long way to go before lesbians have achieved the diverse representation they need to attain access to rhetorical citizenship through the platform of YouTube. Until BIPOC lesbians get more visibility, one will not be able to claim that lesbians have gained the full potential of rhetorical citizenship through YouTube. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American television producers have created a slew of television series that focus on motherhood’s experience and meanings. This paper examines how SMILF (Showtime, 2017–2019) and The Deuce (HBO, 2017-) depict the intersection of motherhood and sex work under a capitalist and neoliberal society. Both series aired in 2017 when U.S. conversations around women’s bodily agency increased and thus, intervene in historical and current debates regarding women’s bodies and motherhood. I situate this paper within feminist television criticism informed by motherhood studies to examine cultural meanings circulated by each series. This paper reveals the connections between sex workers and mothers concerning their gendered labor and how this intersection displays neoliberal paradigms that govern mothers. While both series explore sex work seriously in the context of motherhood, I argue that SMILF and The Deuce suggest their characters’ labor is only moral if carried out for the sake of their children. Ultimately, these series complicate discourses around motherhood and sex work and reinforce dominant neoliberal narratives around the morality of motherhood in American culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the interdisciplinary scoping review undertaken into the online abuse of women. The review assesses literature published between 2000 and 2020, using a scoping review methodology, to discover how online abuse is defined, and recommendations proposed to ameliorate it. Using five databases and a selection of keywords generated 61 studies meeting the criteria. The majority defined online abuse as a structural issue (52/61). This paper determines that contemporary literature describes online abuse as a manifestation of gender-based violence, also evidencing the role of misogyny. The paper concludes that tackling online abuse requires action at three levels—the personal, the organizational, and the societal. Furthermore, utilizing the scoping review method to assess the literature identifies innovative multi-disciplinary solutions to a complex issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine a recent incident involving Gülşen, a Turkish singer who was brutally attacked on Twitter (now X), and demonstrate how moral panics translate into misogynist e-bile and violent cyber-attacks, both of which reinforce a polarized political environment. We analysed tweets posted 24–August 30 2022 and show that e-bile was used distinctly more often by opponents of Gülşen who are characterized by religiously conservative norms and values. We suggest that Gülşen’s subsequent criminalization by state institutions (she was detained and arrested in the aftermath of #arrestgülşen) effectively validated the violent attacks of Gülşen’s opponents while leaving her supporters intimidated and paralysed. Our study contributes to the understanding of e-bile by suggesting that cultural intelligibility and political hegemony make space for and legitimize the graphic language of online communities. By the same token, misogynistic and homophobic invective turns into an instrument of symbolic violence that is exercised by culturally and politically privileged segments of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a landscape where videogame development has long been dominated by a patriarchal tech culture, gendered engines create spaces for girls’ participation. In this paper I explore two gamemaking toolkits that are attached to existing—and highly gendered—interactive fiction applications, Episode and Dorian. The engines belong to a broader history of initiatives hailing girls to pursue STEM fields, yet they more-so draw on girls’ hobbyist coding practices, namely those rooted in fandom activities. The engines’ monetisation infrastructures, however, engage in an ethos of post-feminist entrepreneurism that entangles leisure and work. I analyse Episode and Dorian’s gendered branding and emphasis on romance storytelling as a limiting design convention, though I also consider the subversive potential at play when the hyperfeminine comes into contact with the masculinised realms of videogames and gamemaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of the tribal woman in movies is inextricably linked to patriarchal biases and pleasure aesthetics. What counts in representation here is the depiction of the alienated subject as an eroticized object with show-girl connotations. Even as progressive film makers valorize the sexuality of tribal women, movies like Ayyappanum Koshiyum offer a totally different and subversive perspective. Tribal woman as portrayed in the movie is displayed not as a spectacle but as a woman who defines her own power equations. This paper critically analyses the visual nuances that subvert the hegemonic subaltern female discourse using the example of the Malayalam movie Ayyappanum Koshiyum and attempts to decode the politics of representation that continuously engages in redefining identities through various art forms especially films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China’s Internet literature (CIL) epitomises one of the most vibrant platformised cultural sectors in China and is characterised by a distinct gender demarcation. This paper critically revisits the history of its gendered development by identifying nüpin (women’s channel) and nüxing-xiang (women-oriented) as keywords in China’s cultural sphere. Drawing from platform studies and cultural studies, the study examines the power dynamics underpinning the construction and evolution of nüpin and nüxing-xiang, and the implications for their normalisation. My research finds that nüpin is established on patriarchal assumptions that prescriptively confine women’s literature to certain genres as a point of difference for market competition. Additionally, while nüxing-xiang started as a community identity, it later became incorporated into the nüpin effect through the increasing convergence of CIL and multimedia sectors. By unveiling how individual platforms, users, market forces, gender norms, and power relations intersect to shape the trajectories of these keywords, this article lays the groundwork for interventions to challenge the prevailing gendered binarity in CIL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages a (post)feminist-aligned critical reading of women's gendered performances in Afrobeats music videos to highlight—in the visual culture of this popular African musical genre—the visibility of sexually assertive black African women who variously subvert heteropatriarchal moral public scripts about "respectable" African womanhood and expression of their sexualities in relation to black African men. In my considerations of postfeminist sensibilities, I align with Simidele Dosekun by regarding postfeminism as a transnational cultural sensibility with flexible contours that render it analytically applicable and valuable as a scholarly lens in an African popular cultural landscape. I deploy a multimodal discourse analysis of five Afrobeats music videos (derived from a larger corpus of videos from my PhD study), their storylines, plot progressions, and the accompanying lyrical contents, to advance my arguments. The article draws significantly on postfeminist literature and key perspectives from bodies of feminist critiques of popular culture to demonstrate inflections of feminine subjectivities that I theorise as "sexssertive," given their active constructions of counter-narratives in relation to conservative and restrictive meanings of black African womanhood. I conclude by considering the implications hereof for broader feminist efforts towards the just treatment of women across diverse African contexts in the domains of sexuality and sexual expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When former British Prime Minister Theresa May resigned in May 2019, in the first few days much mainstream and social media coverage focused on the tears she cried. Newspapers highlighted her tears as an extraordinary act for a politician. Her unexpected display of emotions was met with sympathy, sometimes even considered a feminist political moment, and often contextualised the framing of May's political legacy. Analysing UK mainstream tabloid and broadsheet coverage following May's resignation, this paper explores the media reactions in more detail. A dominant theme in the assessment of May's legacy was her perceived inability to "get Brexit done." Any deployment of feminist celebrations of public female tears was quickly overtaken by coverage that constructs May as politically and personally fragile, rooted in a known range of sexist tropes that associate femininity in politics with weakness. This "feminine weakness" is the opposite of what is needed to fulfil the Brexit project, which is often described in masculinist terms. Thus, Brexit is constructed as inherently masculine, and women are considered a threat to this project, highlighting the ways in which Brexit is mediated as a gendered political process. This article argues for greater attention to the role media play in the gendering of populist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates that women’s affective labor was widely and deeply appropriated in the Red Army’s war propaganda in the early 1930s. This appropriation allowed women to emerge as free humans, visible social producers, empowered political subjects, significant war participants, and active shapers of history on an unprecedented scale in Chinese history. The selected cases examined in this paper are drawn from the songs, plays, and posters employed in the Red Army’s war propaganda of the early 1930s. By highlighting the recurrent symbols of women’s affective labor in these rudimentary yet innovative examples of wartime propaganda, this paper provides an in-depth analysis of the complex and dialogic messages regarding women’s contribution to social production and reproduction conveyed through the Red Army’s propaganda. Additionally, this paper explores the liberating potential of gendered affective labor as a non-capitalist concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how conservative media reported on the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh which emerged during his 2018 confirmation hearing to the Supreme Court. Whilst the focus on the potential reputational damage to Kavanaugh was perhaps unsurprising, this paper is concerned with how the Kavanaugh name was mobilised to allow Brett Kavanaugh to stand in for his family, American men, and the nation more broadly, and contrasts this with the relative erasure of Christine Blasey Ford's narrative, that worked to paint her (and feminists who supported her) as an aggressive force attempting to destroy the lives of men. This was operationalised through moralistic conservative discourses that worked to privilege Kavanaugh's discursive victimisation, over Blasey Ford's material one. The message rang clear: tarnishing a man's "good" name is more perverse than sexual assault itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to feminist conversations about algorithms and design justice by examining ways Facebook's (Meta) Memories affordance, when it draws on previously posted photographs of abusive former partners, is problematic for gender-based violence (GBV) survivors. With analyses drawn from semi-structured interviews with twelve "survivor-users" and a walkthrough of Memories' settings to better understand what opportunities users have to control this function, this paper finds that Memories triggers survivors, makes their abuser seem inescapable and reduces survivors' sense of agency, among other challenges to their well-being. By extending abusers' intimidation back into survivors' lives, Memories unintentionally supports perpetrators' aims: to scare, isolate and punish their targets. This paper concludes that a masculinist bias within Memories' design leads to painful consequences for survivor-users of varying identities. Ultimately, this study proposes possible means of addressing Memories' challenges for survivor-users, including the option for users to opt in to, rather than out of, the function in the first place; alterations to Memories' interface to enable the immediate flagging of problematic content; and continued movements towards trauma-informed design practices in the technology sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of gender-based violence against women in politics (WIP) is increasingly recognized as a global phenomenon of interest. In particular, the new affordances of the Web 2.0 play a crucial role in the use of language, images, and other symbols to marginalize and exclude women as political actors. This paper illustrates the visual semiotics of misogyny against WIP on social media platforms. Two multimodal strategies are inductively identified and critically explicated as examples of semiotic violence at work: 1) image manipulation and 2) false identity attribution, both characterized by the use of image-based, user-generated content to abuse WIP. Delving into an inductive conceptualization of digital visual misogyny, this paper accounts for the long-standing, sexist and objectifying attention towards women's bodies which now proliferates on the inherently visual digital media platforms. As such, it underscores the relevance of a semiotic and multimodal approach to social media data in order to critically analyze the complex, multimodal discursive events of the Web 2.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the largest social media platforms, Instagram has an essential role in shaping emerging cultural values in contemporary culture. Instagram is also home to myriad digital intimate publics—one of which centers on both tackling and celebrating daily experiences of women striving for health and wellness. This paper explores the affective practices of Instagram's wellness culture, drawing from Arlie Hochschild's concept of "feeling rules" and from recent scholarly work on feminist sensibilities in contemporary media. The analysis suggests that, in the #womenswellness intimate public, women are encouraged to 1) be honest about their feelings, 2) be grateful even in the face of failure, 3) be kind towards themselves, and 4) be empowered and ready to take down "diet culture." The paper concludes that the enforcement of specific feeling rules makes recent changes in gendered cultural sensibilities visible: the emotions present in #womenswellness manifest a shift from postfeminist rhetoric of confidence and "bouncing back" towards popular feminist affective formations tied to self-love, kindness and vulnerability. Still, even if the rules of feeling in contemporary feminine culture are changing, the rigorous self-governing needed to survive as a woman in neoliberal culture remains apparent in the #womenswellness data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the representation and self-representation of Sarah Fuller before, during and after her historic kick for Vanderbilt’s football team in 2020. Through an analysis of 193 social media posts and 397 articles, the findings from this study demonstrate that, even in seemingly celebratory coverage of Fuller’s experiences as a football player, media members employed gendered language that “othered” Fuller in relation to her male teammates. Meanwhile, Fuller used her own social media accounts to present herself as a two-sport athlete and occasionally respond to critics. This research concludes that hegemonic themes and patterns remain prevalent in sports media coverage of women athletes. Incorporating women athletes’ voices or perspectives from their personal social media accounts more frequently in sports reporting, however, could serve as one way to increase the depth and quality of such coverage. Building on feminist sports media literature and frameworks around hegemony in sport, the results from this paper ultimately contribute to a robust field of research on women athletes’ representation in the press and on personal social media pages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper dwells into the sensitive topic of eroticism and sexuality within Islam, with a specific focus on contemporary Morocco. It explores the challenges faced by Muslims in openly discussing these subjects due to cultural sensitivity. The study investigates the impact of eroticism on Moroccan society, considering encounters with the West, media influence, cinematic and technological interactions, and responses to global risks. The analysis is structured around three distinct historical moments: “composition,” which examines the colonial-era constructions of eroticism in meticulously staged representations; “decomposition,” which explores the proliferation of erotic imagery and the subsequent disintegration of long-held Islamic notions of shame; and “re-composition,” which signifies a shift in power dynamics within spectatorship and the active manipulation of visual content by “my daily routine” (MDR) female creators. By drawing on Sartre’s concept of keyhole eroticism, the paper connects the erotic gaze and shame to modern practices of mobile phone-mediated surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that self-authored depictions of illness, disability, trauma and bodily hurt by marginalised individuals have deep agentic potential, particularly when these experiences are retold within empathetic online spaces on their own terms and in their own words. This is seldom possible in mainstream institutional settings which are structured by hegemonic norms and where the marginalised are often spoken for. Through an analysis of selected writings in Skin Stories, an Indian collective feminist media publication that publishes gendered articulations of disability, illness and healing, this paper explores the potential of marginalised writings in reclaiming control over one's bodily narrative, sharing knowledge and forging spaces of empathy and connection. It analyses ways in which authors through "intimate vulnerable retellings" of everyday as well as traumatic bodily events/processes like ongoing illness, lifelong chronic pain and sudden disability reclaim and own narratives of bodily vulnerability. These retellings are analysed as interconnected, shared experiences that bear deep knowledge and challenge medicalised understandings. By acknowledging "bodies as knowledge" rather than "bodies as data" these retellings could potentially supplement and enrich medical approaches in managing and understanding chronic pain and illness specifically in India, thereby piecing together experience, knowledge(s) and expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lebanon's reservations in ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1997 left women at the mercy of the country's personal status codes derived from its 18 religious sects and its lenient, if not absent, laws on marital rape and domestic violence. It was only in August 2017 that article 522, which allows a rapist to escape punishment in case he marries his victim, was repealed by parliament. Rape, nonetheless, is still stigmatized and victims are often blamed and shamed. Using Bakhtin's heteroglossia and Foucault's moral principles of refusal, curiosity and innovation, this paper presents an in-depth analysis of women's advocacy campaigns to argue that these campaigns formulate heteroglossic discourses that consolidate the social field of women through their silence and visibility. Identifying heteroglossic disturbances as fundamental to the production of the discourse on gender and the propagation of its perception, the study also attempts to show how women's voice is generated through a particular staging of forces. The main case study for this paper is the campaign entitled Shame on Who?, launched in November 2018 by ABAAD, one of the most prominent non-profit associations advocating gender equality in the MENA region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes a viral Twitter thread from October 2020 in which Marvel fans debated the quality and political significance of a scene from Avengers: Endgame that highlights a number of Marvel's female superheroes. Comments formed a complex reception matrix that used gender and affective reactions to the scene to construct political statements about the role of identity politics in popular culture. Many users framed supposedly rational, critical interpretations of the scene as inherently superior to emotional or affective responses, and posited that those fans who enjoyed the scene (often young people and women) were naïve and unintelligent. Some fans co-opted feminist language to criticize those fans who enjoyed the scene, which in effect framed fans of hegemonic identities (i.e., cishet white males) as the most proper and intelligent audience members. This paper uses theories of affect, gender, and feminist critique to analyze a sample of fan comments. This discussion shows how social media shapes both political discourses and fan identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, while there has been some attention to the issues online harassment in higher education, the impacts of online sexual harassment have been lost within the broader focus. There is negligible research looking at these specific experiences within Indian universities. To address this gap, this paper explores three different but interconnected forms of online sexual harassment—image-based sexual abuse, online chat rooms, and trolling in the context of Indian universities. Following the works of Liz Kelly (1987) and Clare McGlynn, Erika Rackley and Ruth Houghton (2017), this paper establishes the importance of understanding online sexual harassment as a continuum of other forms of offline sexual violence having physical, mental, and financial impacts on survivors, deeply affecting their sense of safety. In doing so, this paper attempts to develop a materialist understanding of online sexual harassment in Indian universities in turn demonstrating the confluence of India’s patriarchal and casteist society and an authoritarian state who use technology as a powerful disciplining tool to push women and queer people out of digital public spaces. This research attempts to establish that this disciplining and silencing of women and queer people are essential for the spread of both techno-capitalism and Brahmanical Hindutva nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on content analyses of 175 newspaper articles about repealing the ban on American women serving on the front lines of combat, this paper explores how news media portrayed military women. Historically, media depicted women in war as damsels in distress, yet after a decade of women's service in blurred front lines, media had ample opportunities to frame women differently. The news media have a powerful role in reinforcing or challenging hegemonic masculinity when presenting women as warriors. Using an intersectional lens, this paper finds that news media portray women as legitimate warriors; however, media do not discuss military women's race, ethnicity, sexuality, or family roles, rendering women as one-dimensional. Implications of one-dimensional representations of military women make diversity indiscernible and reinforces the double-bind, which upholds hegemonic masculinity and limits women's career potential both within the military and the labor force, more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how transgender identity is represented across articles from three British national newspapers: The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph. Transgender identity has become a highly contentious issue in areas of western culture, especially Britain, and even within feminism itself, with heightened visibility leading to a backlash against the rights of trans people to protection, and even recognition, in law. However, the influence of the broadsheets, Britain's so-called "quality" newspapers, in shaping the debate over transgender rights is under-researched. Using feminist critical discourse analysis (Michelle), I assess how the above newspapers position transgender subjects to alternatively legitimize or "other" transgender identity. Despite polarisation on issues of trans rights between newspapers, this paper finds that both "pro-trans" and "anti-trans" articles appropriate a feminist lexicon to define womanhood and gender in ways that justify their stance and foster division within wider society. I conclude that (white, cisheteronormative) feminism has become a vehicle for mainstream news media to further political agendas that can be crudely cast as either "progressive" or "conservative". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages issues of complicated femininity and the representation of such in South African telenovela Gomora. Set in South African township Alexandra, Gomora tells the story of contemporary life in post-apartheid South Africa, where people are forced to engage issues of poverty, inequality, racism, and more. In particular, the paper engages one of the main characters in the program, Nomasonto Mildred Molefe. Mam' Sonto is the matriarch of her family who is also the head of an established hijacking syndicate. Throughout the first season of this show, audiences are able to engage with a complicated woman who is good and bad, kind and cruel. Moving away from a moral reading of the character, this paper unpacks how the character comes to be and how she asserts her own power and agency in engaging a deeply racist and sexist society in order to survive and provide for her family. Engaging works of Pumla Gqola, Sisonke Msimang, Roxanne Gay, and more, the paper presents a reading of this character that enables a clear argument for the need for such depictions of complicated womanhood as part of pushing the reified boundaries of patriarchy that women are forced to exist within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the movement of "item numbers" from mainstream Bollywood culture to the regional culture of Assam. Given the level of eroticism that is part of such songs, the paper will specifically explore the means of surveillance and control that these "non-normative" cultural texts are subjected to within a local spatial context. By deconstructing this inter-cultural movement of performance, the paper attempts to reveal whether and how cultural appropriation of the "mainstream" by the "periphery" functions to keep the power dynamics of gender and national/sub-national identities intact. Based on visual methodology and textual analysis of Assamese item songs and cringe pop songs, the paper will theorize the regulation of bodies in these spaces. Understanding the renewed relationship between music and bodies in a new context will situate the gendered nature of body-space politics through item numbers. While, on the one hand, the dancing body has the capability to subvert gender norms, on the other hand, the same dancing body is often controlled through hyper-nationalist imaginations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how and why first-person shooter games can enable players to forge a more masculine sense of self. In doing so, it advances an understanding of the interconnected nature of players' online and offline worlds, and their "actual" and "ideal" selves. Whilst existing masculinities research has explored how technological mastery can lead to expressions of "geek" masculinity, it does not consider the beneficial effects of online competition and collaboration. Similarly, whilst research has considered the triggers and effects of toxic playing behaviors within online gamespaces, lacking is an understanding of how these behaviors intersect with the formation of more masculine subject positions. Addressing these lacunae, this paper draws on in-depth interviews conducted amongst male players of first-person shooters to explore how the hyper competitive, skill-based, and team-oriented characteristics of online gamespaces provide opportunities for them to experiment with, and develop, a more integrated sense of the masculine self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how documentary cinema in war contexts can challenge gender representations. To do so, we adopt a feminist and postcolonial approach to analyze the work of Catalan non-fiction filmmaker Alba Sotorra in Kurdistan, Afghanistan and Catalonia. In her films, Sotorra positions herself close to a series of subjects absorbed by wars and armed conflicts that (re)define their identities while acting beyond gender stereotypes. In particular, the paper analyzes the modes of production and representational strategies of two of Sotorra's latest feature films, Game Over and Commander Arian, documentaries with which the filmmaker aims at overcoming the visual exploitation of alterity. After an introduction to Sotorra, and a brief revision of the theory of postcolonial feminist cinema, our argument unfolds in four parts. Firstly, we reflect on cinematic representations of women and men at war; secondly, we introduce our methodology, based on in-depth interviews with the director to support our film analysis; thirdly, we contrast our hypotheses by means of close-readings of the films; lastly, we reflect on how the filmmaker aligns herself with intersectional feminism by using empathy and solidarity towards her subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines competing media discourses about women's alcohol consumption as spectators at the Melbourne Cup, a historically prestigious annual Australian horse race. Taking a feminist poststructural lens, this paper identifies how print media representations of the female drinking subject can provide a multitude of subject positions that can be contradictory and subversive, offering possibilities for resistance to idealised middle-class gendered norms about women and drinking. This paper provides new insights into print media portrayals of "unruly" female spectators and their alcohol consumption at public events such as the Melbourne Cup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women experience abuse both physically and psychologically in a war, and, marginalized women's voices are rarely heard. Yan Geling's The Flowers of War 金 陵十三 钗 [Jinling shisan chai] is based on a true story of vulnerable parochial schoolgirls whose lives intersect in a Catholic cathedral with the lives of a local cadre of prostitutes. The two groups became trapped in the cathedral during the sudden and brutal occupation during the 1938 Nanking Massacre. This paper analyses the fate of two disparate women's groups by showing how cultural, religious, and social chastity norms were used as a weapon of abuse and oppression by the chaste group against the prostitutes. This oppression in turn caused the fragmentation of the female identity of both groups of isolated women and led to tragic results. Using the fragmentation theory as a framework, this paper investigates how oppressive tactics caused women who otherwise should have been mutually supportive in their common need for survival, to oppose and oppress each other, fragmenting individually and as a group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to develop a compare-contrast model that will help students understand the gender and social-status stereotypes that appear in some texts of fairy tales, and are further deepened in their screen versions. The paper accentuates classic fairy tales perceived by critics as traditional (conventional and conservative) due to their gender, class, etc. stereotypes. These stories are an important factor in maintaining the stereotypical pattern of female inferiority, which is encoded through different types of media in the cultural patterns of our age. In order for those patterns to be deconstructed, it is necessary to apply methods that will develop critical literacy skills during education. We developed story maps as graphic organisers to show the social status trajectories of heroes and heroines. Story maps show social trajectories and allow the possibility of viewing the stereotypes embedded in the story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to understand the "accented" documentary practice of Mizgin Müjde Arslan, a contemporary Kurdish female filmmaker who was born in Turkey but lives in diaspora. I will discuss her filmmaking through the features of accented cinema, developed by Hamid Naficy and furthered by Asuman Suner. These features are multi-perspectivity, liminality, being the subject and the storyteller simultaneously, deconstructing the borders, replacing the history with a new memory, and cyclicity. As Naficy's model lacks the gender dimension in its imagery of nation, identity and belonging, I will discuss his model from a broader perspective by adapting Suner's approach, adding the gender dimension into my discussions. For this purpose, I will use the principles of "accented feminism", a term I develop within the paper and draw the concept of "accented feminist cinema" from. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]