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Leandra Medine indicates that she wants the Man Repeller multi-author blog to ‘serve as an open forum for women to draw their own conclusions’ instead of making ‘any sort of feministic statement’. Medine renders feminism as amorphous and an individual choice but she has been widely lauded for offering a feminist engagement in fashion. Her practices and position, as I argue throughout this article, allow her to fashion feminism, including associating feminism with the man repeller style and replacing aspects of second wave and rights-based feminisms with the purportedly more equitable and liberating website ethos of choice and equality feminism. Yet in replacing ‘feministic’ critiques with promises of stylish cultural change and clothing that reportedly repels men, Medine and other Man Repeller authors elide how systemic oppression functions. This ambivalent relationship to feminism, and dearth of intersectional advocacy, prompted a backlash in 2020. Critics interrogated Medine's facile statement about #BlackLivesMatter, the company's lack of diversity and the unsuccessful restructuring of the blog. As a means of analysing Man Repeller, I employ textual analysis, feminist and queer literature and media theory. I define fashioning feminism as a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thinking, including the negation of certain forms of feminism. I assert that attending to the fashioning of feminism can foreground central and developing feminist theories; the appeal, unstylishness and effacement of feminism; and the connection between style and politics. This includes readers’ interrogations of Man Repeller's politics, which are occurring along with contemporary examinations of racism. Since fashioning feminism is a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thought, engaging with its concepts and debates can further the critical study of feminism, nurture feminist conversations and advocate for social change.

The star's image flickers into view in the dark space of the theater. Her face is white, cosmetically enhanced, and overexposed to such an extent that it glimmers across the screen rather than suggesting solid flesh. The faces of makeup tutorial producers fill smaller computer screens and flicker because of YouTube's low resolution and sometimes-staccato delivery. Mary Ann Doane suggests that close-ups generate “fascination, love, horror, empathy, pain, unease.”1 Close-ups also convey beauty practices. Richard Dyer describes how light beautifies Lillian Gish, “bringing out the fairness of her hair; the use of make-up too gives her face a seamless white glow.”2 Dyer links this lightness to the articulation of whiteness and goodness, a topic that is picked up in considerations of the relationship between beauty culture, lightness, whiteness, and racial norms. Studies of the development of lighting and cinematography, including Patrick Keating's work, indicate the ways in which binary gendered white subjects are produced within films.3 In the 1930s, these techniques helped constitute the glamorous white star as beautiful. Carol Dyhouse traces the relationship between beauty and film industries and glamour.4 Anne Helen Petersen argues that film …

Feminist media studies has observed a series of significant milestones in recent years: 2015 marked the fortieth anniversary of Laura Mulvey's landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”; Camera Obscura , a groundbreaking journal in our field, celebrated its own fortieth anniversary in

Women use the #ManicureMonday Twitter hashtag to educate people about hand and nail care, share their nail art and expertise, and look at various hands. Beginning in 2013, the scientist Hope Jahren organized a hashtag hijacking in which scientists who were not in control of or associated with #ManicureMonday disrupted individuals' collaborative conversations about manicures, tried to educate participants, and expressed the scientists' values and interests. The scientists argued that what women's hands do is more important than how they look and that women and their manicured hands are constructed as passive objects on the Twitter feed. Jahren and these other scientists have identified Twitter as useful for their conversations about science and extended their own social capital by microblogging. They also use Twitter as a way to instruct women about objectification and other feminist issues and to intervene in women's interest in their nails, which these scientists believe is frivolous and disempowering. In this article, I address the diverse ways in which these ideas of usefulness, useful media, instruction, and social capital are articulated through #ManicureMonday by performing a close textual analysis of the manicure tweets and the hashtag hijacking. My reading is based on the relationship among feminist inquiries about viewing positions and objectification, the literature on useful media, and conceptions of social capital. I argue that we need to attend to the ways the #ManicureMonday hijacking and other instances of media education may not be useful for all participants.

Photographers, heterosexual brides, and news reporters associate “trash the dress,” or TTD post-wedding photography sessions, with resistance. According to them, TTD changes cultural conceptions of weddings and the visual position of married women. In these sessions, women wear white wedding dresses while strolling in unconventional surrounds, jumping into the water, smearing mud on themselves, and acting like zombies. This detailed study of the ways TTD is associated with resistance, with an emphasis on photographers' practices, contributes to resistance studies and feminist literature by considering how opposition is promised and marketed. For instance, photographers promote TTD images as creative, alternative, and better than wedding photography in promotional blogs and other forums. Claims that TTD politically transforms weddings and women's experiences are in need of critique. Resistance, pleasure, and prestige are intertwined in this cultural activity. It is not completely apt to relate this practic...

eBay promises individuals varied identity positions but renders the most traditional roles—particularly wedding engagements and marriages between a woman and a man. The company indicates that “you can get it on eBay” and the site satisfies desires, fulfills consumer needs, and connects people. Yet, eBay also controls the messy and queer aspects of collecting, and institutes a normalizing structure that compels most individuals to follow eBay's directives, attend to its moral codes, and facilitate community trust. I use close visual and textual analysis and feminist and collecting literature to interrogate how eBay deploys narratives about engagement rings, weddings, and heterosexual unions. I also consider the related ways women sellers list their personal wedding dresses. By providing representations of their weddings and marriages, these women support eBay's normalizing structure and trouble some of its functions. Studying such practices is important because wedding cultures and related rituals ordinari...

eBay underwear and swimwear sellers incorporate gay identities and female masculinities into the eBay site. They indicate that the men depicted in listings are gay, suggest listings that are of interest to gay men, and include unconventional bodily presentations. While eBay asserts its role as a selling platform, gay underwear and swimwear listings are often a byproduct of men's interests in self-display and communication with other men. Their sexual representations conflict with eBay's heteronormative focus and the company often regulates them. I reflect on the political influence gay clothing sellers have when imaging their gym-built bodies, soft flesh, uneven physiques, genital bulges, and flaccid penises. The humanities-oriented methods of close visual, textual, and theoretical analysis assist me in considering over 1000 eBay listings and related profiles from the English-language website. I argue that these sellers deserve critical deliberation because they undermine eBay's normalizing discourses and...