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This paper explores how Tinder marketing responds to gender politics and discourses within contemporary postfeminist media cultures transnationally. We provide a comparative semiotic analysis of the prominent Tinder advertising campaign Single, Not Sorry, which runs across several European countries, as well as the UK and USA, with marketing material from Tinder India's YouTube page. Challenging sexist cultural stereotypes and norms of feminine sexual passivity and modesty has a clear economic rationale as a marketing strategy for Tinder. The Tinder marketing media analysed appears to be largely aimed at young women and speaks to postfeminist notions of women's new sexual freedom in global neoliberal modernity, with Tinder positioning itself as a tool enabling such. Yet, as we illustrate, some key differences emerge across these marketing messages about women's empowerment and the kind of gender roles and "modern" heterosexual relations made available through Tinder in the European and Indian contexts. The analysis we offer contributes to scholarship on transnational postfeminist media cultures and discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the visual representations of "leftover women" (unmarried women who are 27 or above) in the English language news media in China by employing multimodal discourse analysis. The findings show that both conservative and gendered discourses are constructed by different visual resources in relation to "leftover women's" actions, reactions, outfits, symbolic processes, and settings. Our research provides new understandings of Chinese single womanhood, which reflect the State profamily and pronatalist agenda intertwined with the pressure from tradition on the one hand, and women's increasing awareness of individual choices, sexual freedom, and feminist values under the influence of globalisation and modernisation on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the homonormative and homonational politics and the discourse of LGBT rights in contemporary Israeli cinema. Some Israeli films such as Yossi and Jagger, The Bubble, and The Secrets promote homonormative and homonational discourse that is guided by a progressive trajectory from traditional societies to modernity, from shame to pride, from homophobia and the secrecy of the closet to gay sexual liberation and identity that follows Western standards. In contrast, films like Joe + Belle, Blush and the Arisa Mizrahi party line videos critique logical temporal conventions of development and progress, maturity, adulthood, and responsibility, and the social scenarios which regulate identities into national, sexual, and ethnic normativity. They offer new ways of being in the world, life and relationships based on queer temporality that are not necessarily founded on past lessons or future expectations, but rather derive from the desire for the "here and now." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The story of motherhood in popular culture has never been a simple one. Cross-cut by race, class, and sexuality (and, importantly, marital status), interwoven with changing psychological and biological theories and fantasies, tied up with nation-building and citizenship claims, images of motherhood remain both template and signpost upon which we project our desires for kinship and care and our most vexed understandings of womanhood and femininity. This essay examines fictional motherhood in an era of real-life Octomoms and presidential candidates. We argue that a new type of mother has emerged—particularly on TV—that presents a radical departure. From the suburban mom/drug dealer of Showtime's outré seriesWeedsto the vapid 1960s wife ofMad Men, aberrant mothers abound in contemporary culture. But, unlike aberrant mothers of earlier eras, these mothers are by and large heroines, unapologetically non-normative in their maternal functioning. The parenting is cursory at best and often downright neglectful, behavior that has typically resulted in sure death for Hollywood mothers of earlier eras. We examine these images as a challenge to normative familialism and rigid gender ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]