- Home
- A-Z Publications
- International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics
- Previous Issues
- Volume 7, Issue 2, 2011
International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2011
Volume 7, Issue 2, 2011
-
-
Gendered risks and opportunities? Exploring teen girls' digitized sexual identities in postfeminist media contexts
Authors: Jessica Ringrose and Katarina Eriksson BarajasIn debates on young people's engagements with new media, social networking sites (SNSs) have been explored as potentially democratizing spaces allowing a wider spectrum of young users to engage with digital technology than ever before. In relation to gender difference, SNSs are viewed as places that have opened up girls' and women's use of new media, building on earlier claims about how online practices like personal websites and blogging have revolutionized girls' access to and uses of digital technology. On the other hand, there are prominent public debates over children and sexualization, for example, that position young people and particularly girls as at risk of exposure to online content or SNSs that are not age appropriate, and which may contain adult sexually explicit content or pornography, or even put young people at risk from online paedophiles. In this article we try to think through and beyond SNSs as sites of both gendered risk and opportunity, drawing on qualitative data from a UK study of teens' uses of the SNS Bebo. We discuss and trouble what gendered and sexualized risk and opportunity might mean in relation to user-generated content and peer-to-peer networks. We situate peer networks as operating within wider postfeminist, pornified media contexts which may intensify dynamics like sexual objectification of girls' bodies. But we also illustrate how girls navigate such trends in complex ways exploring instances of porno-chic performance and sexualized cyberbullying.
-
-
-
Preteen girls read 'tween' popular culture: Diversity, complexity and contradiction
Authors: Tiina Vares, Sue Jackson and Rosalind GillProliferation of the 'porn-chic' styled woman or girl in postfeminist media underpins contemporary debates about the effects of 'sexualizing' media on girls. Policy reports and popular books frame such media as a significant cause of harm, positioning girls as highly susceptible to their 'sexualizing' representations. However, what is absent from this literature and current debates are the perspectives of preteen girls themselves. In this article we contribute to the debates by reporting on a three-year empirical study of how 71 'tween' girls in New Zealand make sense of the popular culture they encounter in their everyday lives. We argue that our analytic focus on diversity, complexity and contradiction in participants' responses to popular representations of femininity counters many of the claims made about the 'sexualization' of preteen girls in the above literature, in particular, that preteen girls lack the skills to critically engage with the media and will emulate the 'sexualized' styles of advertising and celebrity culture. However, our analysis also illustrates that participants can be both 'critical' readers and 'feel bad' about themselves in response to the same images. It is, we suggest, attention to the multiplicity and variability of participants' responses that enables us to account for both 'agency' and media influence in ways that do not simply reinscribe girls as 'passive victims' of a 'sexualized' media and thus takes us beyond the active/passive binary.
-
-
-
Photographs of the young/young photographers: Generation and the generative power of digital images
More Less'Sexualized' digital images of the young, photos which purport to be of the young and photographs taken by the young present new philosophical and policy challenges of the kind Foucault described in his definition of 'problematics': a combination of the history of ideas and the history of mentalities. This article sets out to describe and analyse 'problematics' associated with the reception of, and public debate about, notable digital images in order to demonstrate the multiple ways in which new technologies are revealing relationships of power and creating the conditions of possibility for policy change in Australia. Among the cited instances are the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) Skype incident and the YouTube Australian Football League (AFL) 'nude photo' scandal; the fight against the distribution of illegal images by the Australian Federal Police (AFP); the generative impact of the 'Henson case'; and young photographers' groups hosted by web communities. All Australian images made, and photography practices referred to, took place between 2008 and April 2011. Earlier feminist approaches to photographic images are tested against newer questions emerging from the use of digital technologies.
-
-
-
Five marriages and a funeral: Constructing the sexually transgressive female on Arab satellite channels
More LessThis article discusses the sexually transgressive female on Arab satellite channels. The analysis, restricted to two very controversial drama series broadcast during the holy month of Ramadan 2010, focuses on the stratagems by which female roles on satellite channels are seeking to be sexually delivered from, to borrow a term from Heidegger, the 'average everydayness' of women's status as downtrodden second-class citizens. The conflation between the actress/role in the first series, Zahra wa Azwajuha al-Khamsa/Zahra and Her Five Husbands, which tackles the issue of unpremeditated polyandry, created a zone of discomfort that shattered the fantasy the kitschy actress was supposed to cater for. The ensuing anxiety and trauma suspends the fetishization of the actress in a moment when she transgresses, albeit symbolically and unwittingly, into the hitherto male domain of polygamy. The second series, Ma Malakat Aymanukum/What your Right Hand Possesses, resorts to the overarching metaphor of women as slaves and concubines, as evidenced by the title, to present a portrait of epistemic, socio-religious and political violence against women, who fight back to reclaim their bodies and identities from slavery. Although the two series could not be more different in terms of their structure, quality of production and dramatic impact, they were met with equal criticism for their perceived breach of religious and social mores and boundaries.
-
-
-
Mapping the feminist political economy of the online commercial pornography industry: A network approach
More LessThe online commercial pornography consists of approximately 4.2 million websites with over 28,000 primarily male users worldwide spending an average of $3000 each second purchasing pornographic material (Ropelato 2007). The development of a robust political economic understanding of the industry is underdeveloped primarily because of methodological limitations faced when studying such a large and amorphous system. The rise of network-based modalities for the production and distribution of pornographic material opens the door for the application of social network analysis (SNA) to fill this methodological gap. Using data sampled from the 2007 and early 2008 business reports, I conduct an SNA of the online commercial pornography industry and describe how it relies on affiliate websites to ensnare the consumer in a series of mutually reinforcing websites designed to reduce consumer choice to extract maximum profit. As opposed to an industry organized to satisfy consumer-driven desire, my research illustrates that at its core, the industry is structured to acquire profit through an antagonistic relationship between (male) webmasters and (male) consumers.
-
-
-
Cultural citizenship and the communicative space of mediated sexual expressivity
Authors: Miyase Christensen and André JanssonThe role of pornography in contemporary media societies constitutes one of the under-researched areas in media and communication studies. The purpose of this article is to explore the potentiality latent in the user-porn-related Internet domains, blogs and forums – as extensions of offline agency and sociality – for motivating communicative action and engagement with civic practice in various forms. In this study, we utilize an interdisciplinary approach that feeds from social, political and cultural theory and we take 'self-pornographic pursuit as cultural citizenship' as a paradigmatic intersection. The discussion is based on our analysis of a variety of expressive venues (some purely online, some amalgamated with the offline) over the course of our preliminary research. Of these, we refer to two Swedish examples: Bodycontact, a sexual dating site, and Dirty Diaries, a feminist film project and the adjacent website, as illustrative of the theoretical arguments presented throughout our discussion.
-
Volumes & issues
-
Volume 19 (2023)
-
Volume 18 (2022)
-
Volume 17 (2021)
-
Volume 16 (2020)
-
Volume 15 (2019)
-
Volume 14 (2018)
-
Volume 13 (2017)
-
Volume 12 (2016)
-
Volume 11 (2015)
-
Volume 10 (2014)
-
Volume 9 (2013)
-
Volume 8 (2012)
-
Volume 7 (2011)
-
Volume 6 (2010 - 2011)
-
Volume 5 (2009)
-
Volume 4 (2008)
-
Volume 3 (2007)
-
Volume 2 (2006 - 2007)
-
Volume 1 (2005)