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Hollywood has been instrumental in the construction of Blackness on screen, often perpetuating myths, stereotypes, and negative images about the Black experience, showcasing Black people as aggressive, unloving, and incapable of maintaining a healthy romantic relationship. With more diversity efforts in Hollywood, Black women have become more empowered to reshape those narratives. So, what happens when these women intentionally provide a diverse representation of Blackness? What depictions of Blackness and love are prevalent when Black women drive the story? Using Black Feminist Thought as a theoretical framework, this essay examines the narratives surrounding love in the films The Photograph and Really Love (2020), both written and directed by Black women. Using thematic analysis of the film's narratives, cinematography, casting, sound design, and character development, this study found the films Really Love (2020) and The Photograph (2020) offer a new conception of Black Love in Hollywood. These deliberate considerations demonstrate the intention Black women film writers take in depicting a full expression of Blackness, including romantic and intimate relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines (im)material digital labor essential to the production of closet decluttering videos on YouTube by analyzing two case studies: Leighannsays and Bestdressed. I highlight three interconnected forms of tidying labor, that is, home, data, and waste management, mobilized for influencer work and cultural platform economy. Wardrobe clean-out videos capitalize on both corporeal and affective aspects of housework and content production in the construction and maintenance of the digital self. They also assemble management labor to organize material articles in domestic space, produce/manage multimedia, and construct/amplify digital existence. The essay also discusses the (im)material labor required by the personal and outsourced handling of the disposed’s hereafters as goods and trash outside of the home. Unpacking how closet decluttering video production nests together (im)material tidying labor associated with disparate sectors from home-based platform cultural production to public management of household waste shed lights on imbricated operations of the influencer ecosystem.

Practically Perfect is a two-person show about our experiences growing up Queer and trying to be perfect. It is a performance experiment through which we analyzed our memories of mediated LGBTQI+ characters and by which we document our research on the material impact those media representations had on our Queer identity building. Through Practically Perfect, we theorize performance methods as survival tactics for Queer adolescents in the process of identity building. Further, we assert that it is through the performance of coming-of-age personal narratives that we rewrite our traumas, relearn behaviors, and re-member new ways to grow up Queer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike the original WestWorld film, realized by Michael Crichton during the seventies, the homonymous television series could be considered to be a symptom of the collective acceptance of both the technological singularity and the theories of transhumanism. However, by reformulating some important concepts which derive from a phenomenological approach, the series generates critical insights regarding the transhumanist hypothesis and, above all, on the role played by this hypothesis in the consolidation of a post-industrial society. This essay examines the ways in which this television series built a fertile terrain for the reformulation of some concepts that, in the tradition of Science Fiction, represent solid instruments used to criticize forms of the production of value, labor, exploitation, and exclusion. This essay also proposes a possible relationship between a transhumanist hypothesis and the production of value in a post-industrial society.

The purpose of this review article is to examine theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical bases for integrating travel and tourism and film into critical tourism education, and to suggest examples of film that achieve this integration in classroom settings. These works help viewers understand, among others, the possibilities for and critiques of self-transformation and enlightenment through travel and tourism. Film provides a vehicle for emotional, humanistic accounts, often told from an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary social science perspective. Conversely, critical tourism, based on critical pragmatism, can be used to identify and critique personal transformation as a recognizable travel outcome. Deweyan critical pragmatism can be used to teach reflexivity, or how to reflect, as well as a discursive approach to tourism as students and laypersons discuss these works. The article addresses a growing lack of empathy and desensitization among students and laypersons whose own limited travel experiences, particularly due to post-COVID travel bans, prevents them from grasping the wider spectrum of critical issues related tourism. Finally, the article challenges the dominance of extant pedagogies and their failure for transformative learning, self-critique, and awareness of the condition of others induced by travel or depictions in film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the idea of "cozy wholesomeness" in streaming on the Twitch platform through the example of an LGBTQ+ content creator, her partner, and her development of an ongoing domestic space which welcomed queer audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on a span of streams from November 2020 to January 2021, the article first seeks to define cozy wholesomeness as a streaming process that combines choice of game, style of streaming, and audience interest to form an experience driven by intimacy, sincerity, and active resistance to alt-right mentalities even as the concept itself potentially becomes a product or marketing hook. For this particular streamer, producing a supportive, active chat community driven by cozy wholesomeness inevitably collides with sustaining streaming as a profitable venture—a process compounded by Twitch's own interest in commoditizing queer content as a way of displaying its own apparent diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology invites a reconsideration of organization and organizing by calling attention to mediated forms of value production among loose social collectives outside formal organizational boundaries. While the nascent concept of organizationality holds potential for such a re-conceptualization, the processes through which loose social members become invested in co-orientation and collective effort require further empirical and theoretical exploration. In this paper, we link organizationality research with critical media studies on affect and technology to theorize how affect holds provisional collectives together while promoting new modes of value extraction. Empirically, we draw from an ethnographic study of hackathons – transdigital innovation spaces where participants act with and through technology – and suggest three intertwined processes as part of an affective circuit that stokes and directs affect. The paper's contribution is threefold. First, by analysing how affective circuits bind, integrate and co-orient action among loose members, we contribute to understanding organizationality as affectively constituted. Second, by showing how hackathons leverage desire for community, we offer a critical perspective on affective capture and argue that organizationality involves novel modes of value production. Third, we complement theorizing of hackathons by exploring them as sites of organizationality, focusing on the provisional, relational and affect-rich nature of new forms of organizing in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the past several years, media commentary and cultural analysis has grown increasingly fixated on YouTube as a radicalization hub, particularly around extremist, alt-right content. However, a growing community of leftist YouTube content creators, loosely coalescing into the platform's "LeftTube," have developed dialogic relationships with some of YouTube's most extreme content. This work focuses on one specific LeftTube creator, ContraPoints, to explore how those on the political left engage with YouTube's cultural and technical affordances to challenge alt-right ideology. Through a textual analysis of ContraPoints' top thirty videos, we identified three main discursive strategies: practicing deradicalization strategies on YouTube; establishing alt-right individuals as an intentional audience; and developing a language for escaping alt-right logics. ContraPoints, and her rightful critics, demonstrate how political subjectivities are created and contested within YouTube as both a technical and cultural space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a methodological approach building on advances in mixed-methods communication research to facilitate the integration of quantitative data into qualitative textual analysis. This method allows scholars working in a critical cultural media studies paradigm to incorporate quantitative data into their research to better understand media in an increasingly complicated media eco-system. This paper argues that despite calls for mixed-methods research, there are longstanding ideological and methodological tensions within the fields of Communications and Media Studies that create logistical and conceptual limitations to integrating quantitative methods in a critical cultural media studies context. This paper establishes the need for this intervention, the historical methodological contexts from which it emerges, and walks through how the approach works by looking at two possible studies using the approach in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chunwan, China's annual New Year's television gala, has been the country's most popular show since 1983 (Lo, 2019). Chunwan's performances simultaneously reinforce, disrupt, and potentially provide spaces for changing dominant discourse around queer identities. Specifically, two research questions guide our examination of five Chunwan performances between 2008-2021: (a) How does Chunwan use queer identities to simultaneously reinforce, critique, and disrupt Chinese cultural norms through humor and performance? and (b) How do Chinese social values support queerness in China and Chinese media? Findings demonstrate that while these performances do not directly represent struggles and successes of the queer community, or feature queer characters in positive ways, or focus on queer protagonists, their inclusion acknowledges the existence of queer Chinese identities with regards to gender and sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on five flaws of Christian Fuchs' approach of Web 2.0 economy. Here, Fuchs' views on immaterial production, productivity of labor, commodification of users' data, underestimation of financial aspects of digital economy, and the violation of Marx's laws of value production, rate of exploitation, fall tendency of profit rate, and overproduction crisis are put into question. This article defends the thesis Fuchs fails to apply Marxian political economy to the contemporary phenomena of Web 2.0. economy. It is possible to avoid Fuchs' errors, and another approach is possible to remake Marxism relevant for an analysis of the new media economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue explores the intersection of reactionary politics and fandom. Fandom has traditionally been thought of as progressive, but this has been limited and limiting. Moreover, considerations of the relationship between politics and fandom have especially focused on democratization and new media–enabled participation. However, it is important to expand our understanding to other aspects of politicization. This introduction situates the issue in relation to foundations of fan studies, examinations of political fandom and fannish politics, and growing recognition of inequality and conflict in fandom. These considerations are important in an era in which fandoms have increasingly overtly embraced reactionary politics and reactionary politics has increasingly taken fannish forms. It is this intersection of the reactionary and the fannish that this special issue seeks to unravel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American media has historically favored conservative critiques when reporting about national history exam results. Utilizing the frameworks of critical media studies and collective memory, this mixed methods study analyzes the media responses to the 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) United States history exam. Findings indicate something we call the "Discourse of (Mis)Construction": a cross-partisan media misconstruction about the results and a construction of knowledge by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) by using misleading achievement level terms. Opportunities exist for social studies educators to become better stewards of the field's reputation and credibility by reworking how civic action can address these problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay will deal with the main characteristics of Ozu’s oeuvre, mainly with the interesting relationship that he established with the cinematographic camera. It will be analyzed the way in which his oeuvre deals with the important transformation that the Japanese society underwent during the second half of the last century. In the second part, the essay will deal with Wenders’ documentary film Tokyo-Ga (1983) and his analysis of social transformations in Japan during the Eighties. Following this framework, the effects of video-electronic images on the socio-technological context analyzed by Wenders will be examined. Further, I will inquire into the way in which simulacra began to populate our reality and seemingly replace the real. To conclude, through some reflections on the media condition highlighted by Wenders in Tokyo-Ga, I will also analyze the passage from the video-electronic condition to our current media condition

Critical and communication studies have traditionally neglected the oppression conducted by humans towards other animals. However, our (mis)treatment of other animals is the result of public consent supported by a morally speciesist-anthropocentric system of values. Speciesism or anthroparchy, as much as any other mainstream ideologies, feeds the media and at the same time is perpetuated by them. The goal of this article is to remedy this neglect by introducing the subdiscipline of Critical Animal and Media Studies. Critical Animal and Media Studies takes inspiration both from critical animal studies – which is so far the most consolidated critical field of research in the social sciences addressing our exploitation of other animals – and from the normative-moral stance rooted in the cornerstones of traditional critical media studies. The authors argue that the Critical Animal and Media Studies approach is an unavoidable step forward for critical media and communication studies to engage with the expanded circle of concerns of contemporary ethical thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the film Catfish and the corresponding television program Catfish: The TV Show to articulate how genres of the real create entertainment paradigms built on shame and derision as acceptable modes of programming particularly focused on bodies. Understanding these texts as visual culture narratives grounded in shame produced through “failed” classed, fat, and gendered bodies, I argue that when genres of the real focus on shame as entertainment they implicate individuals, rather than systemically enforced normative identity positions, as wholly complicit in their own sociocultural failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans read and listen to stories not only to be informed but also as a way to enter worlds that are not like our own. Stories provide mirrors, windows, and doors into other existences, both real and imagined. A sense of the infinite possibilities inherent in fairy tales, fantasy, science fiction, comics, and graphic novels draws children, teens, and adults from all backgrounds to speculative fiction - also known as the fantastic. However, when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, we often discover that the doors are barred. Even the very act of dreaming of worlds-that-never-were can be challenging when the known world does not provide many liberatory spaces. The dark fantastic cycle posits that the presence of Black characters in mainstream speculative fiction creates a dilemma. The way that this dilemma is most often resolved is by enacting violence against the character, who then haunts the narrative. This is what readers of the fantastic expect, for it mirrors the spectacle of symbolic violence against the Dark Other in our own world. Moving through spectacle, hesitation, violence, and haunting, the dark fantastic cycle is only interrupted through emancipation - transforming objectified Dark Others into agentive Dark Ones. Yet the success of new narratives fromBlack Panther in the Marvel Cinematic universe, the recent Hugo Awards won by N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor, and the blossoming of Afrofuturistic and Black fantastic tales prove that all people need new mythologies - new "stories about stories." In addition to amplifying diverse fantasy, liberating the rest of the fantastic from its fear and loathing of darkness and Dark Others is essential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects, from a feminist perspective, on a five-year period as Head of a School of Media. It considers the position of media studies within the new academic capitalism and the re-masculinization of the university that this has produced. It considers strategies employed by the field to stake its own claim to that masculinization, in particular the embrace of "the digital." Finally, it describes the challenges this posed for the author, and tactics employed in dealing with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The TV show Sense8 tells the story of eight strangers from all around the world who realize they are connected to each other in a unique way. While taking their first steps of their quest to understand what bonds them and how they relate to one another, they are challenged by powerful people who want to capture them. Their individual journeys become a collective one, and through practicing a love ethic, they grow individually and collectively-an important lesson that can be taught in our classrooms. This article discusses what a love ethic entails and how it relates to restoring a sense of community within our schools and classrooms as a counteraction to neoliberal ideology and practices that harm our schools and atomize our communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of Television and New Media critically examines the ethos of Silicon Valley, imagined broadly, by analyzing its products, discourses, and practices. We argue that, as a technology industry and a cultural force, Silicon Valley’s practices and discourses reflect and produce particular social and economic investments in technology as a tool of empowerment and social change. Overall, the issue argues that the ethos of Silicon Valley privileges disruption over sustainability, sharing economies over union labor, personalized access over public health, data over meaning, and security over freedom. We analyze the ways this ethos extends beyond Silicon Valley itself and shapes the way we think about and act toward labor, security, sexuality, and health. As such, Silicon Valley’s technology products—as well as the way we think about them—affect the social, political, and economic conditions of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay will deal with the main characteristics of Ozu's oeuvre, mainly with the interesting relationship that he established with the cinematographic camera. It will be analyzed the way in which his oeuvre deals with the important transformation that the Japanese society underwent during the second half of the last century. In the second part, the essay will deal with Wenders' documentary film Tokyo-Ga (1983) and his analysis of social transformations in Japan during the Eighties. Following this framework, the effects of video-electronic images on the socio-technological context analyzed by Wenders will be examined. Further, I will inquire into the way in which simulacra began to populate our reality and seemingly replace the real. To conclude, through some reflections on the media condition highlighted by Wenders in Tokyo-Ga, I will also analyze the passage from the video-electronic condition to our current media condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2012, residents of Chino Hills, California--a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles--exposed a maternity hotel in their city. Subsequently, controversy erupted as protesting residents argued that Chinese birth tourism is an immigration loophole, where foreigners took advantage of jus soli birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This paper uses this controversy as a springboard to explore how temporalities--both the past and the future--come to shape politics in the present. Considering reproductive futurism in the contexts of citizenship and migrations, this paper argues that the figure of the fetal citizen emerges as the defining site of struggle between preserving, or exposing, the fantasy of a national future. Reports of panic over Chinese birth tourism, then, show how ''backwards'' racialized citizenship is continually brought to this present struggle, especially vis-a-vis discourses of the ''worthy immigrant'' and ''anchor babies'', to determine who may give birth to citizens in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the emergence of smartwatch models from 2012 to 2015—including the Pebble Watch, Android Wear, and Apple Watch—to explore the relationship between “instants” and “information.” Through a focus on the ways in which smartwatches notify, buzz, and otherwise touch the skin, this article develops the idea of the “haptic instant” as a key feature of this technology. The haptic instant, in calling attention to the delivery of news alerts, e-mails, personal communication, and other notifications to the wearer’s wrist, is part of the larger formation of bodies capable of living in a culture increasingly reliant on computer information systems for the management of daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2010, concerned citizens in India argued that cell antenna signals had heating effects on bodies, and media campaigns compared the experience of living in cities with cell towers as being inside the oven. I argue that mediation of cell towers in newspapers and lifestyle shows as potentially emitting cancer-causing radiation was key to shaping public perceptions about them. Through their disruptive nature, cell towers call into action a technoscience public consisting of a variety of stakeholders, including radio-frequency scientists, cellular operators, journalists, tower builders, activists, municipal corporations, and building owners. Technoscience publics and media publics intersect and shape each other, and this article presents “mediated technoscience public” as a theoretical framework for an ethnographic intervention in media studies. This framework involves the tracking and comparison of media coverage about technological infrastructure as well as the ways humans emotionally perceive and interact with those infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ernesto Laclau’s post-Marxist discourse theory is increasingly utilised within media studies in order to investigate discourses circulating about, within, and through media. Discourse theory has proved itself to be a productive theoretical asset that can yield important empirical insights into the solidification and neutralization of particular discursive regimes. Yet, the critical potentials of Laclau’s theoretical work have often been downplayed or neglected. Instead of offering a fully formed critical theory, Laclau has been relegated to offering a descriptive toolbox in which the underlying critical implications have often either been overlooked or forgotten altogether. This paper seeks to reflect on the potentials and obstacles within Laclau’s work for critical media studies by engaging with the role of Marxism, capitalism and critique. First, the paper addresses the relation between Marxism and post-Marxism by arguing that rather than abandoning Marxism, Laclau actively situates his own work as a dialogue with and against this tradition. Second, the paper addresses the relation between Laclau’s analysis of so-called globalised capitalism and political struggle, which leads to a discussion of class relations and political economy. Third, the paper examines Laclau’s notion of ideology critique and argues that it must be seen as a simultaneously explanatory, normative and practical perspective. Based on these discussions, it is this paper’s contention that it is insufficient to simply appropriate discourse theory as a descriptive research format, but that it must rather be seen as underlined by a radical critique of existing structures of domination and capitalist subordination. The paper furthermore argues that there are parts of Laclau’s work that are problematic for this purpose and needs to receive further attention by future research. By providing an extended discussion of Laclau’s own work, this paper seeks to contribute to the critical application of discourse theory within the field of media studies and contribute to the on-going dialogue between Marxism, post-Marxism, and critical media studies.

This paper introduces the overall framework for tripleC’s special issue “Marx is Back. The Importance of Marxist Theory and Research for Critical Communication Studies Today”. We point out why there is a return of the interest in Marx (“Marx is back”) and why Marxian analysis is important for Critical Communication Studies today. We also provide a classification of Marxian dimensions of the critical analysis of media and communication and discuss why commonly held prejudices against what Marx said about society, media, and communication are wrong. The special issue shows the importance of Marxist theory and research for Critical Communication Studies today.

This article analyzes producer–consumer relations in social media marketing in the Swedish dairy industry. The article discusses how ideas of interspecies intimacy are publicly performed in an interactive process between the dairy industry producers and social media users. Two examples from the Swedish dairy industry were chosen for analysis: one Instagram account and one Facebook account. The analysis shows how the pages are premised on spectacularly visualizing the emotional labor and performances of cows for capital accumulation. The dairy industry’s social media presence encourages the media users to engage in building the perception that Swedish dairy farms represent an idyll where the cows are willing producers of the milk that is taken from them, and the dairy industry is loving, caring, and compassionate. Thus, the social media marketing represents a co-opting not only of the ideals of participation that social media holds but also of the ideals of ethical consumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the expanded text of the Henry Mayer Memorial Lecture presented by Graeme Turner at the University of Queensland in November 2015. In it, he outlines his argument from his book, Reinventing the Media, before going on to draw upon that argument to present a series of issues that need to be addressed by critical media studies in the future: the challenge of a bifurcating field, the thoroughgoing commercialisation of the media, and media studies' drift away from the interrogation of the operation of power in the relations between the media, their audiences and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the depiction of labor in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, paying specific attention to gender and race. It argues that the program’s interest in the historical link between coerced prison labor and enslavement in the United States, as well as the more recent implication of prison privatization in the neoliberal assault on labor rights, is undermined by its privileging of affective and interpersonal dynamics over political solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010-2011, teen TV series set in high schools depicted as many non-straight teen characters in one year as in the preceding decade. Through a discursive textual analysis of closeted, post-closet and recently out teens on five scripted American and Canadian television series from this season, I argue that the closet is consistently framed as a vulnerable, dangerous and violent space in contrast to the safety and acceptance that accompanies coming out and being out in high school. Further, these teen series explicitly present homophobia as an issue of significance in teen lives, while ascribing its existence to individuals. Many versions of this pattern reflect a media trend identified by David Bergman in which homophobia is shown to exist only in the minds of people who are gay. Importantly, these series often assign responsibility for the mobilization of homophobia to non-straight teens. I highlight four tropes concerning the closet that figure prominently: the homophobic and closeted bully; the blackmail of a closeted character; the sidelining of closeted characters; and the ease of coming out in high school. This focus on closeted, post-closet and recently out teens enables a comparison of how non-straight youth are represented in highly differentiated terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article first delineates the transformations of China’s media institutions since the reform and opening up policy of the 1980s and argues that marketization and new media technologies are two important factors in shaping media operations and culture in contemporary China. Then the author introduces the changes in perspective, problematic and research methods in the academic field of media studies in China. The article also uses some recent research articles to illustrate the author’s point about the state of media studies in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on five flaws of Christian Fuchs’ approach of Web 2.0 economy. Here, Fuchs’ views on immaterial production, productivity of labor, commodification of users’ data, underestimation of financial aspects of digital economy, and the violation of Marx’s laws of value production, rate of exploitation, fall tendency of profit rate, and overproduction crisis are put into question. This article defends the thesis Fuchs fails to apply Marxian political economy to the contemporary phenomena of Web 2.0 economy. It is possible to avoid Fuchs’ errors, and another approach is possible to remake Marxism relevant for an analysis of the new media economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ernesto Laclau's post-Marxist discourse theory is increasingly utilised within media studies in order to investigate discourses circulating about, within, and through media. Discourse theory has proved itself to be a productive theoretical asset that can yield important empirical insights into the solidification and neutralisation of particular discursive regimes. Yet, the critical potentials of Laclau's theoretical work have often been downplayed or neglected. Instead of offering a fully formed critical theory, Laclau has been relegated to offering a descriptive toolbox in which the underlying critical implications have been either overlooked or forgotten altogether. This paper seeks to reflect on the potentials and obstacles within Laclau's work for critical media studies by engaging with the role of Marxism, capitalism and critique. First, the paper addresses the relation between Marxism and post- Marxism by arguing that rather than abandoning Marxism, Laclau actively situates his own work as a dialogue with and against this tradition. Second, the paper addresses the relation between Laclau's analysis of so-called globalised capitalism and political struggle, which leads to a discussion of class relations and political economy. Third, the paper examines Laclau's notion of ideology critique and argues that it must be seen as a simultaneously explanatory, normative and practical perspective. Based on these discussions, it is this paper's contention that it is insufficient to simply appropriate discourse theory as a descriptive research format, but that it must rather be seen as underlined by a radical critique of existing structures of domination and capitalist subordination. The paper furthermore argues that there are parts of Laclau's work that are problematic for this purpose and needs to receive further attention by future research. By providing an extended discussion of Laclau's own work, this paper seeks to contribute to the critical application of discourse theory within the field of media studies and contribute to the on-going dialogue between Marxism, post-Marxism, and critical media studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media and communication studies have a tendency of ‘bracketing out’ the social dimension. This is problematic since all media and all communication are located in social contexts. However, calls for strengthening the disciplines’ relation to social theory have been made. To this end, Pierre Bourdieu's sociological thinking offers a fruitful approach of inquiry. This paper explores the epistemological consequences of insisting on the location of media production, content, and use in social contexts in terms of Bourdieu's social theory. A Bourdieusian approach to media and communication involves understanding that media production is always situated in complex, multi-leveled relations of power, be it the journalistic field, the field of cultural production, or the wider social space occupied by the ‘produser’ of mediated content. The perspective furthermore implicates a refusal to succumb to an ‘internalist vision’ when studying communication that is the result of isolating communication from its context of production and consumption, which is where meaning is generated. Finally, it involves studying media use as a classifying practice that is increasingly mediated through the habitus and an agents’ position in social space as the media landscape gains in appeal to persons – as individuals with preferences, tastes, and lifestyles – rather than masses. It is argued that a move towards Bourdieusian media studies ushers the study of old and new forms of media production, content, and use onto paths that provoke critical and enduring questions of the role of media in society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that the BBC’s Sherlock is outwardly a conservative text sedimenting the historical function of Sherlock Holmes as a model of hegemonic British masculinity. However, queer disruptions in the performance of masculinity may be read as, after Butler, destabilizing and revealing the groundlessness of gender constructions. For as Butler has argued, hetero-masculine performativity is “constantly haunted by that domain of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce itself.” Referencing Laclau’s perception of “hauntologies” to texts (adapted from Derrida), I posit that the presence/specter of the queer villain Moriarty can be read as a caesura challenging performed hegemonic masculinity. With the possible death and promise of Moriarty’s return at the close of the current season, the series now stands at a crossroads. It may either revert to the queerbaiting of previous seasons or foreshadow a more radical text. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On popular television, parenting narratives have emerged as a dominant representational paradigm in depicting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) subjectivities as “normal.” However, I argue that the work of normalization in TV programs also operates on figures and relationships related to gay parents. I identify this secondary process as “anxious displacement” in which figures and relationships circulating around gay parents are overloaded with negatively codified social differences and symbolic excesses. This study examines the cultural work of anxious displacement in Modern Family and The New Normal by interrogating how racial excess, cultural capital, queerness, and the extreme are displaced onto characters in the gay parents’ immediate world. Ultimately, anxious displacement instantiates gay parenting as culturally intelligible and legitimate, and in doing so, reproduces potential normative liabilities by reinscribing hierarchies of personhood. At the same time, anxious displacement validates gay parenting, undermines homophobia, and affirms gay masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The surge of U.S. reality television shows focused on “making over” contestants has paralleled the decline of the welfare state, the eradication of Affirmative Action, and the rise of the prison-industrial complex. This article examines MTV’s From G’s to Gents to consider questions of neoliberal governmentality and race. By analyzing the show’s relationship to the prison system, enterprise culture, and heteronormativity, I argue that the show functions as a technology that governs black freedom under neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the ethical implications of the rise of a new style of personality presenter-led wildlife programming in the 1990s, reliant, in part, on digital video and aimed at creating a sense of “liveness.” It takes the BBC series Big Cat Diary (1996) as its focus, looking at how the BBC responded to increased market pressure by creating the first wildlife docusoap. Despite the lightweight connotations of the docusoap format, this series put forward a new ethical practice for representing the lives of individual wild animals. Through an exploration of how ethics are implicated in changing conditions of production and evolving media technologies, it is proposed that debates about the ethics of wildlife documentary need to be recentered on the complex ethical relationships between wildlife documentary makers and the animals and ecosystems they film rather than on issues of audience deception. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article identifies that the current literature on “distant suffering” lacks a nuanced account of the relationship between televised representations of suffering and the audiences that encounter these in their everyday lives. Text-centered studies overemphasize how news narratives cause compassion fatigue, while audience-centered studies enumerate audience responses with inadequate references to the textual elements and social factors that shape these responses. While recent theorizations about “media witnessing” have provided a guidepost in thinking about the ethical consequences of showing and seeing suffering in the media, it however obscures the normative from the descriptive and universalizes the experience of the “witness” it speaks about. To address these gaps and develop a holistic approach to examine televised suffering, the article proposes the use of mediation theory to account for the distinct ethical questions that arise from the specific “moments” of mediation and how they should altogether inform the ethical critique of media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]