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The women's pages of a newspaper have often been dismissed as fluff, playing at most a subsidiary role, while the real news of a paper is in the malestream pages: the domestic news or leader pages. Yet historically, these pages are often key in constructing women, and men, politically, socially and economically; in terms of generating revenue within the paper; and in terms of how the paper constructs itself in relation to its readers. Further, they have been important in bringing women into newsrooms, and allowing them to construct themselves as journalists with specialist expertise and independence from the male editorial hierarchy. In Malaysia, however, the women's pages of the Malay-language press played a key role in the 1996 campaign for a Domestic Violence Act. Informed both by feminist critical discourse analysis and oral histories with female journalists working at the time, this article sheds light on the gendered nature of Malaysian newsrooms, with implications for how feminist media activists can negotiate feminist coverage, even in an environment hostile to feminism. There are further implications for the importance of understanding processes of both negotiation within newsrooms and identity formation as journalists, both of which impact upon the news produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual violence reporting is a site where issues of visibility, publicity, privacy, algorithms, and intelligibility all converge, and where the language of digital "space" is married to metaphors of "going public." Using Google search results of Emma Sulkowicz and Chanel Miller's stories of sexual violence as a springboard, this theoretical paper explores how all of these metaphors—public spaces, going public, being seen—are both prevalent and entirely inadequate for describing the realities of being covered by journalists in today's contemporary technoculture. Stories of sexual violence in the media operate within a capitalist system of visibility in which they are repackaged, distributed, and made profitable for both news outlets and digital platforms. Rather than a neutral "public space," stories of sexual violence and survivorship travel in what I call a public stage, or the eternal, infinite, and (often) intensely misogynist space of the internet. I conclude that the visibility economy of digital space, in which everything is treated as public and visible forever, has only intensified rather than abated the skepticism with which survivors are treated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the ideological profile of the Spanish online-only press regarding feminist and LGBT issues. We perform a content analysis of opinion columns sampled from the most popular Spanish online-only newspapers. The analysis focuses diachronically in two moments: May 2011 and June 2016. The coding sheet includes feminist and sexual identity-related categories such as the mention of women and women's rights, abortion, traditional family, LGBT identities, or the role of Catholicism. The Spanish press' conservatism or progressiveness is measured by computing frequencies of mentions and their positive/neutral/negative valuation. Results indicate a more plural scenario regarding the traditional conservatism of Spanish digital media, with online-only opinion paying more attention to women and non-normative sexualities. Findings are discussed and contextualized pertaining to the current wave of feminist activism in Spain, and the emergence of left-leaning online-only newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As they are a privileged site for the (re)construction of the dominant gender order, media often contribute to naturalizing inequalities. This paper aims to critically discuss the way in which hegemonic meanings of gender have been accepted, resisted, and/or challenged in the Portuguese media context, both by professionals working in news magazines and by publics. This discussion revolves around three different topics: access, distribution, and participation in the media industries; reporting practices and media contents; and gender equality policies. The research is based on 11 focus-group discussions with 101 undergraduate students, as well as on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 15 media professionals. The collected data were subsequently submitted to a thematic analysis. The findings show that hegemonic meanings of gender were mostly (re)produced: gender asymmetries in the media industry were either taken as a non-issue, or attributed to individual-level factors. Additionally, gendered media representations, and the relationships between the male-biased news-making process and the neoliberal trends in political economy of communication were largely disregarded, as far as their impact is concerned; gender equality policies were dismissed as actions required to achieve equality, diversity, and social justice. Critical gender perspectives have rarely been endorsed by media professionals and publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up Chris Beasley and Carol Bacchi notion of "fleshy citizenship" to examine media texts of two instances in which Australian politicians breastfed in parliament. We identify the predominance of trivialising and sexualising discourses in the media texts about the breastfeeding women which worked to constrain maternal subjectivities and knowledges in legislative space. Following this, we illustrate how the presence of breastfeeding bodies debunks the myth of the citizen as a disembodied individual. In conclusion, we argue that by placing bodies at the centre of citizenship theorising, the social, material, historical and embodied specificities of knowledge production, and the consequences of exclusion for policy making, are highlighted. In summary, our application of Beasley and Bacchi conceptualisation of "fleshy citizenship" reveals that the presence or absence of different bodies matters for legislative agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]