List of Abstracts

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1. Exploring toxic gaming masculinity through Girlfriend Reviews YouTube Channel

Neta Yodovich, University of Haifa

Jinju Kim, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

Bios

Dr Neta Yodovich is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Haifa, studying cultural policy in a research project funded by Horizon 2020. She completed her PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester in 2020 after studying women’s reconciliation of science fiction fandom and feminism. Her previous studies about female fans and representations of singlehood in popular culture are published in Sociology, Feminist Media Studies, Women’s Studies in Communication and European Journal of Women’s Studies. Her academic interests include fan studies, identity, feminism, and popular culture.

Jinju Kim is a Postdoctoral researcher at UAB. She holds a Ph.D. in Management (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain), an MSc in Art Management (NEOMA Business School, France), and a BSc in Mass Communication and Journalism (Kyungpook National University, South Korea). Her research interests are new media audiences and cross-cultural consumption. This led to her current research focus on big data analysis and computational contents analysis including natural language processing (NLP) in the field of media communication, particularly in regard to audience behaviour with new media.

Abstract

This paper scrutinizes toxic gaming masculinity by examining the successful YouTube gaming reviews channel, Girlfriend Reviews, which provides the perspective of a male gamer’s girlfriend. Through discussing GR, we delve into a prominent trope in gaming: “the girlfriend.” This idiom is common in male-dominated communities, where women are treated with suspicion and belittlement. It connotes the misleading assumption that women fake their interest in video games in order to find a romantic partner or appease their current one. By conducting sentiment and content of 76,146 comments posted on its YouTube channel, we explore the ways in which GR perpetuates or challenges the “girlfriend” persona in the gaming community. We argue that viewers gravitate toward the channel for three significant reasons. The first is the girlfriend being perceived as a supportive backseat gamer: some viewers were initially wary of the channel assuming that videos were created by a demanding, obsessive girlfriend. Ultimately, viewers warmed up to the channel one they realized that the girlfriend was supportive of her boyfriend’s hobby. Secondly, commenters also praised the girlfriend’s lack of knowledge in gaming and explained it made her more “innocent” and “cute.” Viewers reacted positively to the channel because it reflected traditional conceptions of gaming wherein the girlfriend was supportive but not “too involved.” Lastly, the girlfriend was embraced by viewers because she did not express feminist views initially. However, after providing more critical and nuanced analyses of controversial video games, the channel received backlash and toxic comments for pushing so called “PC culture (Political Correctness).” Based on the findings presented in this paper, we argue that the position of “the girlfriend” or backseat gamer provides women an alternative, more accessible pathway into the gaming community. The narrator of GR was able to escape toxicity and retaliation by presenting herself as an unthreatening community member, “the girlfriend”. However, moments of pushback demonstrated, where the slightest shifts from the position of the “uncritical girlfriend” revealed the severity of toxic discourse that is targeted toward women in the gaming community.

2. Evolution of heteronormativity and gender stereotypes through an analysis of the most popular music videos in Spain.

Alvarez-Cueva, Priscila; Figueras-Maz, Mònica; Medina-Bravo, Pilar

Bios

Priscila Alvarez-Cueva is a Ph.D. candidate and researcher at the Communication Department of the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona – Spain. She has a master’s in international studies, Media, Power and Difference (2018). Her research interests include gender studies, popular culture – particularly music –, and youth studies. In her thesis, she explores gender representations in mainstream music, and the role they have in the construction of youth identities. She has done 3-month research visiting at the University of Porto (2020), and has been invited as visiting researcher at the University of Leuven (2022), in the School for Mass Communication Research.

Mònica Figueras-Maz is a Senior lecturer at the Communication Department of the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), Barcelona - Spain. She has a PhD in Journalism (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, UPF), she also holds a bachelor’s in information sciences (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, UAB) and a bachelor’s in sociology (UAB). She is the co-coordinator of the Official Joint Master’s Degree in Youth and Society (University of Girona and UPF) and the coordinator of the JOVIScom (Youth, Society and Communication) research group. Her research lines are related with youth and communication, media literacy and ethics of communication with special attention to gender studies.

Pilar Medina-Bravo is a Senior lecturer at the Communication Department of the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), Barcelona - Spain. She holds a PhD in Psychology (Universitat de Barcelona, UB). Her research interests focus on critical media analysis from a feminist perspective. She is a former coordinator and actual member of the Critical Communication Group (CRITICC) at the Pompeu Fabra University

Abstract

The present study examines the representations of both masculinity and femininity based on an own elaborated system of 11 analytical categories of gender stereotypes and the gender binarism (Connell, 2005; Connell; Messerschmidt, 2005). The different categories of analysis were incorporated by trying, deliberately, to make one stereotype (female) respond to the other (male), and vice versa. The categories of femininities and masculinities were established in accordance with other authors who explored gender representations (Bridges and Pascoe, 2014; Poynting, Noble and Tabar, 2011; Schippers, 2007; Gomillion and Giuliano, 2011; Anderson, 2002). The categories established are divided into two groups, considering western stereotyped construction as a basis for all of them. On the one hand, for femininities, there are: hegemonic, pariah, hybrid, dike, and trans. On the other hand, for masculinities, there are hegemonic, protestant, hybrid, sissy, trans and -as only case in masculinities- assured masculinity. Within this framework, the study carried out qualitative and quantitative content analyses of 50 video clips of the most listened-to songs in two periods (2009 and 2019). Following a postfeminist critical perspective (Gill, 2007, 2017), the study verifies that gender binarism is maintained over time, albeit with important nuances in both years. The results conclude that the most prominent stereotypes are western hegemonic femininity (Conell’s emphasized femininity), associated with romantic narratives; and western pariah femininity that includes elements of greater sexualization. On the other hand, western protestant masculinity is present in most of the songs associated with musical genres such as rap or hip-hop, while occidental assured masculinity is associated with the need to maintain the heteronormative and hegemonic representation of masculinity, even when the sexuality of the artist does not match with it. The study argues that, in ten years, there is an evolution of the heteronormativity among the most popular music videos, where the dominant masculinity stereotype continues to be the heterosexual hegemonic model, in both the romantic and sexual context, while the representation of femininity shows some confrontation with the traditional model. This study contributes to other works on masculinities and femininities as it establishes categories that may be applied to different cultural products and social realities

3. The Intersection of Politics, Gender and Media: Female Politicians in Popular Israeli Women’s Magazines

Einat Lachover

Bio

Einat Lachover is an associate professor at Sapir Academic College. Her work is dedicated to critical analysis of the encounters between gender and a broad range of media forms and contexts, such as: gender construction of news production; gendered discourse in news media; gender ideologies in popular media; and girlhood and media. She published in international journals, such as: Communication Theory, Journalism, International Journal of Communication, Communication Culture and Critique, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Children and Media, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Journal of Gender Studies, Israel Affairs, NASHIM, The Journal of Israeli History. ORCID identifier is 0000-0002-6503-6675 einatl@mail.sapir.ac.il

Abstracts

Current trends in popular and celebrity politics interrogate the intersection of politics, gender, and media. In an international context, two recent examples of women in power appearing on the cover of a women’s magazine reveal the persistent cultural tension between women in power and femininity. They also reveal the double-edged sword of women politicians using popular media platforms and feminist messages in the process of self-branding. The first is Sanna Marin, Prime Minister of Finland, who appeared in October 2020 on the front cover of a local popular women’s magazine wearing a trouser suit with no top beneath it and found herself at the center of a debate over sexism. The second is Kamala Harris, the first woman of color elected vicepresident of the United States, whose appearance in January 2021 on the front cover of Vogue embroiled the magazine in a “whitewashing” controversy. New evidence reveals changes in both the media representation of women politicians and the role of women's magazines in promoting global feminist ideas. In light of this, as well as the emerging trend in Israel of women politicians appearing on magazine covers, the present study seeks to examine how Israeli women politicians have been represented in popular Israeli women’s magazines over the past 15 years. The study is based on an interpretive analysis of the text and images on 17 front covers of three popular Israeli women’s magazines and the main profile articles accompanying them representing a variety of Israeli women parliamentary politicians. The findings indicate a complicated terrain of negotiation and join recent media representation studies that point to a change in how women politicians are portrayed in the media, focusing on the qualitative aspects of the coverage. On the one hand, in terms of rhetoric, the women politicians are represented in Israeli popular women's magazines as distinct and empowered political figures, and moreover often as feminist figures. But on the other hand, the visual images reveal a stereotypical feminine and sometimes sexual objectification of the women politicians. Based on Susan Douglas’s (2010) concept of "enlightened sexism" I suggest that the feminine or sexual visual representation serves to soften the potential threat of the politicians' messages relating to existing gender roles. I further explain this contradiction with reference to the thesis of gendered mediation, the agency of women politicians, Israel’s gendered sociopolitical context, and the role of political discourse in popular women’s magazines.

4. Portrayals of the shero

Ana-Nzinga Weiß

Bio

Ana-Nzinga Weiß is research associate and doctoral candidate at Freie Universität Berlin at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies in the division for journalism studies. As Marie-Sklodowska-Curie fellow she is employed in the project “G-Versity – Achieving Gender Diversity” funded by the European Union. She studied Communication Science and Economics at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and completed her Master’s degree at University of Copenhagen in Cognition and Communication. Her research interests include the representation 67of marginalized groups in audio-visual media content. In her dissertation she employs an intersectional perspective to analyze the relation between marginalized groups and the production of hegemonic knowledge in German public journalism. E-mail contact: ana-nzinga.weiss@fu-berlin.de

Abstract

Viewed from a social constructivist perspective, gender and its connotations of masculinity and femininity are not fixed but, as a discourse, a product of social and historical circumstances depended on societal power relations that change over time (e.g. Butler, 2004, p. 212; Foucault, 1990, pp. 49-58). Societal and media discourse are linked and strongly influence each other. Especially popular culture, like films and television series, has the power to draw broad interest to events (King et al., 2019, pp. 9-11) and contribute to the creation of meaning in society (Mikos, 2008, pp. 23-31). My focus lies on gender depictions in superhero films – currently the most commercially successful action films (e.g. Roblou, 2012, p. 76; Tasker, 2015, pp. 65-68; p. 180). Traditionally superhero films relied on classical gender role divisions by depicting a physically strong male hero and a rather passive woman (e.g. Tasker, 2015, pp. 65-68; p. 180). This depiction changed over time especially in films published in the second decade of the 21st century. The films Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel (published in 2017 & 2019) are the first two superhero films that show a female superheroine to save the world as lead of a film (King et al., 2019, pp. 102-105; Garcia, 2019). Using a discourse analysis, I investigated how the superheroines are depicted in these two films.

5. Female Masculinity and Transgressive Temporality: How Orange is the New Black Recontextualizes Prisoner Agency

Jaspreet K. Nijjar

Bio

Jaspreet K. Nijjar is an AHRC-funded PhD student in the Department of Social Sciences, Media, and Communications at Brunel University London. Through an analysis of the U.S. women's prison drama, Orange is the New Black (2013-2019), her PhD aims to further understanding of the global Prison Industrial Complex by synthesizing ideas around narrative with feminist theories of embodiment. She has written for journals including Communication, Culture & Critique and The Journal of Men’s Studies, and currently serves as Conference & Events Officer for the Feminist Studies Association.

Contact Details

Email: jaspreet.nijjar@brunel.ac.uk

Abstract

While women of color are disproportionately being criminalized, incarcerated, and exploited across the U.S., immensely popular twenty-first-century women’s prison dramas are simultaneously being proliferated worldwide, presenting humanizing portraits of the lives, communities, and inequalities embedded in the global Prison Industrial Complex. Examples include Britain’s Bad Girls (ITV, 1999–2006) and Australia’s Wentworth (SoHo, 2013–), although North America’s Orange is the New Black (OITNB; 2013-2019) is arguably one of the most notable and contemporary in this respect. Streamed to over 190 countries and boasting a long reign as Netflix’s most-watched original series, OITNB centers a vast array of racialized queer women as they struggle to navigate the penal system.

This paper argues that Dayanara “Daya” Diaz – one of OITNB’s central, incarcerated Hispanic characters – is seen to embrace memories and experiences of the past, as well as plans and hopes for the future, both of which condition her performance of disorderly female masculinity. In this sense, Daya’s image presents innovative, critical commentary on an important but overlooked dimension of prisoner agency – that is, one’s ability to orientate their temporal gaze back and forth to defy the slow monotony of heteropatriarchal and white capitalist prison regimes. Propagating menial, often unpaid, and feminized labor, these regimes aim to keep incarcerated women rooted to an unpromising, mind-numbing present by controlling and weaponizing the flow of time (O’Donnell, 2014).

More specifically, I show how Daya engages in violence, intimidation, and criminal leadership to nurture her emergent drug business and, in turn, resist Litchfield’s gendered educational and vocational programs. Implicated in an illicit counter-economy, Daya’s archetypal masculine qualities emanate a sense of ambition – ambition that blatantly opposes the confinement and exploitation threatening to define her future, just as poverty and criminalization have colored her past. Hence, this paper’s findings address a crucial gap in writing on experiential carceral time, which often centers how prisoners block the pain of a long sentence by mentally anchoring themselves to the present (e.g., Cope, 2003; O’Donnell, 2014). While these insights are invaluable, it is equally vital for research to acknowledge that, in some cases, a prisoner may actively embrace thoughts of both the past as it shapes their present struggle, and a relentlessly advancing future given weight by anxiety, yearning, and expectation.

References

Cope, N. (2003). It’s no time or high time: Young offenders’ experiences of time and drug use in prison. The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 42(2), 158–175. doi:10.1111/1468-2311. t01-1-00273

O’Donnell, I. (2014). Prisoners, solitude, and time. Oxford University Press.

6. Emergent remediations of gender on Spotify’s Lorem playlist

Veronika Muchitsch

Bio

Veronika Muchitsch (veronika.muchitsch@sh.se) is a postdoctoral research fellow in Gender Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden and at the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo, Norway. In her postdoc research investigating remediations of gender on Spotify playlists, she has been particularly interested in formations of genre and gender on playlists advertised as ‘genrefluid.’ In her doctoral research, she introduced the concept of vocal figurations to theorize the gendering of voice in twenty-first-century pop music in processes of voicing and listening, through a tripartite analytical lens of vocal technique, studio technology, and multimodal electronic mediation. She has also written on vocal negotiations of postfeminist neoliberal femininity in the early-twentieth-century work and reception of Beyoncé.

Abstract

In October 2020, Spotify released a 30-second promotional clip for its playlist Lorem, which has received widespread media attention and singled out as a reflection of the increasingly ‘genrefluid’ listening habits of young audiences. The video combines clips of eight of its most featured musicians in Zoom-call aesthetic to a colorful collage. The artists describe what the playlist is to them, and how it feels, or, how it makes them feel. Seemingly all members of Generation Z, the musicians sport a colorful visual aesthetic including neon colored hair, baseball caps, and jumpers in primary colors and pastels. The artists recurringly describe the playlist in terms of a community between artists and fans, and as a world of its own. Lorem is also characterized in affective terms—it is described as having ‘the best vibes’ and prompts another musician to ‘danc[e] in the kitchen’. Openness and fluidity are emphasized throughout, and the video ends with the negation of the initial question as another artist wonders, ‘I don’t know what Lorem isn’t.’ Whereas the video and other marketing materials have stressed fluidity and openness and have been hesitant to define the playlist’s musical orientation, Lorem’s core audience has been characterized as young, diverse in terms of gender, but primarily femaleidentifying. In this paper, I examine how the multimodal characteristics of Lorem remediate gender, and I examine the discursive function of fluidity in these remediations. I investigate the metaphor of fluidity in the context of broader post-identity discourse proliferating in twenty-first-century popular media culture, and I discuss the increasing commodification of genderfluid identity in mainstream marketing (Cannon, 2021) and post-demographic algorithmic systems of algorithmic recommendation such as music streaming (Seaver, 2021) as two central contexts. Mobilizing Brock’s (2018) model of critical technocultural discourse analysis, I analyze the multimodal remediations of gender emerging through marketing materials and the playlist’s visual and textual design. In a system of monetization, where music streaming companies do not own their contents, but pay royalties to record companies and rely on advertising deals, playlist curation has become a central means for Spotify to exert its ‘platform power’ in relationship to the record industry, investors, and advertising partners (Prey, 2020). I discuss how playlists also become sites for affective and multimodal remediations of gender, in a twenty-first-century popular music culture continuously characterized by gender inequality

7. #VermelhoEmBelem: Conflicted femininities in the context of a Portuguese feminist hashtag campaign

Sofia P. Caldeira & Ana Flora Machado

Bios

Name: Sofia P. Caldeira

Affiliation: CICANT, Lusófona University (Portugal)

Contact information: sofia.caldeira@ulusofona.pt

Sofia P. Caldeira is a researcher at CICANT, Lusófona University. She holds a

Communication Sciences PhD from Ghent University, Belgium (2020), funded by the

Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

Her research focuses primarily on feminist media studies, social media, self-representation

practices, politics of gender representation, and everyday aesthetics. Sofia’s research has been published in journals such as Social Media + Society, Feminist Media Studies, and Information Communication & Society. She currently serves as Vice-Chair of ECREA’s Digital Culture and Communication section.

Ana Flora Machado is a PhD student in Culture Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal. She is currently completing her research on the female gaze, through the analysis of photographic self-representations and selfies, articulated with Visual Culture, Media Studies and Feminist Critical Theory. She holds an MSc in Marketing and Business Management from Aston University, where she completed her thesis in male representation on advertisements. Currently, she is involved in several research projects, while managing a wine company in the Douro Region.

Abstract

In January 2021, during the campaigns for Portugal’s Presidential elections, far-right candidate André Ventura directed a public sexist insult to the Left-Bloc candidate Marisa Matias, one of the two female candidates in the run. Steaming from his conservative and catholic perspective, Ventura’s insult called into question Matia’s feminine presentation, linking her use of red lipstick to a perceived lack of professionalism and implied sexualization, thus reiterating the common trend of attacking female politicians in gendered terms (Krook & Restrepo Sanín 2019).

This insult was met by the Portuguese public with a feminist hashtag campaign (Jackson, Bailey & Foucault Welles, 2020). #VermelhoEmBelem (translated as #RedInBelem) was, at the time of writing, one of the few Portuguese feminist hashtag campaigns to reach widespread visibility and garner both national and transnational support. This campaign quickly moved beyond the realm of party politics, being widely circulated in Portuguese media, adopted by ‘ordinary’ users on social media, and even attracting celebrity supporters, thus entering the realm of popular feminism (Banet-Weiser, Gill & Rottenberg, 2020).

Following a feminist media studies perspective, this paper offers a holistic analysis of the #VermelhoEmBelem movement, grounded on a direct unstructured observation (Given, 2008) of the hashtag and its cross-platform presence – across Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok – complemented by an analysis of website articles and online newspaper stories about the movement.

This paper explores how #VermelhoEmBelem was grounded in gendered practices of photographic self-representations, showcasing people of various genders with their lips painted red, a reaction to and reclamation of Ventura’s insult. The analysis emphasises the role of the body in digital feminist protests (Baer, 2016), bringing forward the competing constructions of femininities contained within the hashtag, showcasing how the gendered beauty look of red lipstick can hold different meanings: from inappropriate femininity, to revolutionary statement, subversive gendered act, or everyday beauty choice. Yet, this analysis also foregrounds the backlash received by the movement, marked by instances of hashtag appropriation and hijacking (Jackson & Foucault Welles, 2015) in which gendered insults, over-sexualisation, and homophobic insults underscore the negative connotations that can be associated with femininity.

This paper thus explores how, through representations of femininities, #VermelhoEmBelem can mobilise a complex mix of feminist solidarity, anti-fascist sentiments, and discourses of feel-good postfeminist empowerment, highlighting the tensions in the movement between its ability to open public debates about the deeply entrenched sexism of Portuguese society, while struggling to have a measurable political impact in the realm of Portuguese elections.

References

Baer, H. (2016). “Redoing feminism: digital activism, body politics, and neoliberalism.” Feminist Media Studies, 16 (1), 17—34.

Banet-Weiser, S., Gill, R. & Rottenberg, C. (2020). “Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in conversation.” Feminist Theory, 21 (1), 3–24.

Given, L. (2008). The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods. Los Angeles and London: Sage Publications.

Jackson, S. J., Bailey, M. & Foucault Welles, B. (2020). #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press [ebook].

Jackson, S. J. & Foucault Welles, B. (2015). “Hijacking #myNYPD: Social Media Dissent and Networked Counterpublics.” Journal of Communication, 65, 932—952.

Krook, M. L. & Restrepo Sanín, J. (2019). “The Cost of Doing Politics? Analyzing Violence and Harassment against Female Politicians.” American Perspectives on Politics, 18 (3), 740—755.

8. The Construction of Obedient Ultra-Orthodox Femininity in Religious Digital Enclaved Media: Anatomy of a Backlash.

Malki Poryes and Dana Kaplan

Bios

Malki Poryes is a Ph.D. candidate researching the formation of a Haredi Generation Z in the Department of Education at Ben-Gurion University. She is a social activist working to prevent employer abuse of women, owns a still photography studio (specializing in portrait and food photography), and teaches photography at various high schools.

Dr. Dana Kaplan is a cultural sociologist, specializing in intersectional class analysis, middle class in Israel, food studies as well as gender and sexuality. Dana is a senior teaching faculty at the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication, The Open University of Israel is a senior fellow at the Mandel Scholion Research Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In her ISF-funded research project, she studies the cultural history of Israeli beauty. Her book "What is Sexual Capital?" with Eva Illouz is forthcoming in Polity Press.

Abstract

Within the field of religious communication studies, there is a growing interest in

patterns of online behaviors and digital media dynamics of fundamental groups. Recent studies of ultra-Orthodox mediatization in Israel find a stable dialectic between

communities' segregation from and assimilation in the surrounding secular culture,

resulting in various enclaved media practices. These socio-technological pushes and

pulls among ultra-Orthodox communities have typically been linked to broader cultural processes of bounded Israelization, and consequently, the relaxing of gender

imbalances. Following this theory of enclaved media but aiming to expand it, this paper focuses on the construction of femininity in digital ultra-Orthodox media. We ask, does the theory of bounded assimilation fully explain current gender relations among ultra-Orthodox populations and their enclaved media practices?

Using ethnographic vignettes as well as semantic and discursive online ethnography

(DCOE) we analyzed Shmura BaMabul, the largest and most popular online

community of ultra-Orthodox workers in Israel, with a membership of some 15,000

women. Closely reading 30 posts (and threads) written by working women, we detail

the nuanced construction of a new obedient ultra-Orthodox feminine subject.

Shmura avows to provide its devoted prosumers a much-needed spiritual guidance in

the face of mixed-gender, careerist and secular workplaces that threat to damage their

in-group self-value. Three recurring themes were found:1) Reinforcing men's control

in the domestic sphere; 2) Cultivating the cultural Otherness of ultra-Orthodox women

in secular spaces; 3) Expanding the scope of the sacred by self-restricting one's

engagement with digital spaces.Literally: reserved in the flood. This is an emic terminology for the permissive secular culture that stretches far beyond the ideological boundaries of the ultra-Orthodox society in Israel. It alludes to Noah's Ark that served as protection against the biblical flood.

Our findings suggest that at the same time that Shmura encourages ultra-Orthodox

women's cultural production (e.g., poetry, confession stories) it also exerts a massive

control over their minds, bodies and assets. Paradoxically, then, these women enter

highly competitive positions but must actively resist experiencing them as self-fulfilling careers. They do so by narrating themselves as strong-willed Torah-martyrs who are nevertheless doomed to fail and be tempted by secularity.

This study shows how an ultra-Orthodox obedience is structured bottom-up. It provides a space for the voluntary re-submission of ultra-Orthodox professionals to patriarchal authority, by delineating sharp boundaries between the spheres of production and

reproduction. Shmura is but one ultra-conservative response to a broader cultural shift in women's actual working patterns, leisure practices and growing economic autonomy.These mediated gender dynamics provide a backbone for broader conservative social trends of a gender backlash.

9. Representations of Queer Parenthood on Greek Tv Series

Stefanos Kelekidis

Bio

Stefanos Kelekidis is a pre-doctoral researcher at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), where he just started his PhD on media and gender studies under the supervision of Prof. Begonya Enguix Grau. He holds a BA in Audio and Visual Arts (Ionian University) and a Master’s Degree in Popular Culture Studies (Turku University). His research interests are popular culture, television studies, social movements, media and gender studies. He belongs to the MEDUSA research group – Genders in Transition: Masculinities, Affects, Bodies and technoscience. Contact details: kstefanos@uoc.edu & stefkele7@hotmail.gr (+30) 6972076157 & (+34) 633178169 C. de Pallars, 135, 08018 Barcelona, Spain

Abstract

Every year more and more queer people become parents around the world. Increasingly present in social media, television series, movies and media news, LGBTQ+ parents are more visible today than ever before. This paper will be concerned with televised representations of queer parenthood in Greece. Riggs (2012, 218) suggests that "what is needed in relation to future representation of LGBT parents in the media are truly diverse samples of participants" and thus my proposal will explore how wide the umbrella of LGBTQ+ parenthood opens on Greek television series and more particular in Κάπου Σε Ξέρω (You Look Familiar, 2001- 2002), Δυο Μέρες Μόνο (Two Days Only, 2005-2007), Η Τούρτα της Μαμάς (Mom’s Cake, 2020-). Through a close reading of the queer characters in those Greek television Series I hope to identify the ways non-heteronormative sexualities and gender are presented as following the heteronormative and/or subversive to it. By the means of a close reading of the main non-heteronormative characters of three Greek TV series, I will argue that representations of queer parents on television, that is social visibility, may serve as LGBTQ+ activism, but can also reinforce heterogendered and heterosexual norms. My key research question is: In which ways the presence of queer parents on Greek television challenges heteronormative values of family and promotes equality regarding parenthood in Greece? The way in which non-heteronormative parents are portrayed on Greek television can increase queer visibility and social recognition of queer families. This is a world dominated by an awareness of social change and this has affected the ways we can and should look at queer representations on the Greek media. Drawing on queer theory, this paper will aim to explore if and how the changing landscape of the Greek television can play an essential role in reframing gender and sexual stereotypes in a changing national culture.

References: Riggs, D. W. (2012). Paradoxes of visibility’: Lesbian and gay parents in the Australian print media. Jindal Global Law Review, 4(1), 201-218.

10. Gendered Machines in Film and Television: How ‘Post-’ Femininities and Masculinities Challenge the Gender Binary

Katerina Papakyriakopoulou

Bio

Katerina Papakyriakopoulou is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the Department of Communication and Mass Media of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her thesis examines the gendered machine in science fiction film and the ways it contributes to transgressing the boundaries of sex and gender. She obtained her Master’s in Cultural and Film Studies in 2016 and her Bachelor’s in Communication and Mass Media. She also has a Piano Degree from the National Conservatory of Athens. Her academic interests include feminist film theory, gender studies, posthumanism, women in film and visual arts. Contact details Email: katerina.papakyriakopoulou@gmail.com Telephone: +30 6971760443, +44 (0)7940203991

Abstract

Motivated by the representation of humanoid robots in film and television during the past decade, this theoretical study examines the role of emerging femininities and masculinities in revisiting the gender binary. By drawing on feminist film theory and focusing on the cyborg and posthuman discourses, this work combines a close reading of gendered representations and body aesthetics in film and television with an analysis of identity construction through the masculine/feminine dipole. The gendered cyborg has been a common trope in science fiction narratives and a favourite topic in feminist discourse, particularly concerning how its representation exposes the artificiality of femininity and masculinity as cultural constructions. The selected examples are derived from two films – Ex Machina (Garland, 2014) and I’m Your Man (Schrader, 2021) – and one television series – Westworld (Joy, Nolan, 2016-). Both films explore the romantic relationship between a human and a robot, when the first is selected to test the Artificial Intelligence of the latter. The sexes are reversed in each film; in Ex Machina, a man tests a female android, while in I’m Your Man, a woman evaluates a male robot. While the two films set the ground for a fruitful comparison between feminine and masculine cyborgs, Westworld represents entire spaces – more specifically, huge theme parks – in which both female and male androids exist and interact with humans. The selection of these cultural texts is explained by the focus on the following: a) how the construction of ‘new’ femininities and masculinities is related to the robots’ sexual dimension and interaction with humans, b) how the body aesthetics of androids reflect existing stereotypes of flawlessness and the fear of perishability, c) how the narratives can be discussed in the context of intersectional feminism due to their depictions of ethnicity and race, in tandem with gender, and d) how the ethical implications relating to the representation of verbal, physical and sexual abuse towards female nonhuman bodies could be examined through the prism of the #MeToo movement and offer insights on the aestheticization of violence. These factors will be analysed by studying the relevant scholarship, with a focus on the theoretical works by Mary Ann Doane on Technophilia (1999), Janet Bergstrom on Androids and Androgyny (1989), and Patricia Melzer on Alien Constructions (2006), along with parallel readings of the recent bibliography relating to technofeminism.

11. Alternate femininities & masculinities in subcultural music: Gender, sexuality, and digital culture in Palestine

Dr Polly Withers

Bio

Dr Polly Withers is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Middle East

Centre, and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications, at the

London School of Economics. Dr Withers’ interdisciplinary work explores how media and popular culture mediate and/or challenge gender and sexuality in the Middle East. Her current research explores how commercial advertisements (re)shape gendered identities in the Palestinian West Bank. Dr Withers is also writing a monograph about the gendered politics of alternative music in Palestine and its diaspora, based on her PhD and postdoctoral studies.

Contact: Dr Polly Withers, p.withers@lse.ac.uk, LSE Middle East Centre (PAN 10.01C,

Pankhurst House, Clement’s Inn, London, WC2A 2AZ).

Abstract

Feminist media studies routinely ignores how popular music shapes and is shaped

by gender and sexuality. Instead, researchers often focus on the ways that social media

fosters digital femininities and/or contemporary feminist movements. While we therefore know much about the intersections between current-day femininities, masculinities, and digital culture, we are much less able to theorise how music contributes to such formations. Moreover, while some recent studies do focus on non-global north cases (e.g. Dosekun, 2020), scholars largely overlook the ways in which popular culture and media practices produce femininities and masculinities in the everyday contexts of the global south. In this paper, I address this gap. Drawing on over two-years (2012, 2014, 2015, 2017-2018) of ethnographic research with musicians, DJs, and fans in Israeli-occupied Palestine’s

‘alternative’ music scene, I explore how young adults reimagine Arab femininities and

masculinities through subcultural participation. My argument is two-fold. First, I suggest that musicians make, perform, and circulate (via YouTube, Twitter, Instagram etc.) songs that transgress gender and sexuality norms. In online and offline spaces, musicians’ question and play with heterosexual marriage and patriarchal gender roles. As representations, such digital and embodied aesthetics disrupt frames that absent gender non-conformist Palestinians from the Palestinian polity. Furthermore, given Israeli restrictions on Palestinian mobility, social media is a particularly important space for Palestinian youth to access and share such reinvented gendered constructions. In this first sense, then, digital culture and musical performances play crucial roles in fostering different gender politics in Palestine.Second, however, while these productions ‘do’ critical identity work in Palestine, as digital objects in global flows they are open to capture by capital (cf., Dattatreyen, 2017, 2020).The videos with widest visibility centre lyrics and performances of liberal, modern, and individuated subjects in control of their own ‘empowerment’ (cf., Banet-Weiser, 2018).

Music artists are detached from local feminist histories, and instead used to showcase

globalisation’s capacity to ‘liberate’ young adult’s (and especially young women’s) choice- based agency (cf. Gill & Donaghue, 2013). When musical feminisms from Palestine enter on-line circuits of exchange, they thus risk co-optation to a neoliberal politics of representation in denial of structural oppressions.

The paper therefore argues that music plays a crucial, yet contested, role in the formation and representation of gender politics in Palestine. Neither dystopic nor utopian, music, and in particular its digital ‘afterlife’, make room for gendered critiques that are nonetheless tamed and spectacularised by global capital. I thus conclude that music offers feminist media studies a central, yet overlooked, resource for understanding how femininities and masculinities emerge across everyday contexts in the twenty-first century.

References

Aouragh, M. (2012) Palestine Online: Transnationalism, the Internet, and the Constructionof Identity. London: I.B.Tauris

Banet-Weiser, S. (2018) Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham &London: Duke University Press

Dattatreyan, E.G. (2017) “Small Frame Politics: Public Performance in the Digital Age”, inMedia as Politics in South Asia, Udupa, S. & McDowell, S. (eds.), London: Routledge, pp. 21-36

Dattatreyan, E.G. (2020) Digital Hip Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi. Durham & London: Duke University Press

Dosekun, S. (2021) Spectacular Femininity, Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press.

Gill, R. & Donaghue, N. (2013) “As if Postfeminism Had Come True: The Turn to Agency in Cultural Studies of ‘Sexulaisation’ in Gender, Agency, and Coercion. Thinking Gender in Transnational Times, Madhok S., Phillips A., Wilson K. (eds) London: Palgrave Macmillan

12. Social Media and Otherness: The case study of the beauty community “Live Tinted”

Iphigenia Tepetidi & Angeliki Gazi

Bios

Iphigenia Tepetidi is a graduate journalist. She holds a Master's degree in Information Society, Media and Technology from the Department of

Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University (2018-2020), as well as a Bachelor degree in Mass Media, Panteion University, Greece (2013-2017). During her studies, she gained a genuine interest and experience in research on the

fields of Identity and Otherness within digital communities. Her MA thesis drewon a case study of a digital community, where she sought to comprehend how Otherness was presented in a digital community and whether its content could

affect the identity of the user/member of the community.

Email: iphigenia.tepetidi@gmail.com

Αngeliki Gazi is an Assistant Professor in Research Methods at the Department of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens.Her research interests concerns the fields of Identity, Emotions, Relationships in Radio, Television, Internet - Interpersonal, Intergroup Communication, Identity and Emotions via Μediated Experience Applications, Social Media, Mobile Phones,Locative Media - Personal Relationships in Technopsychological Systems and Hybrid Environments. She is a member of the International Editorial Board of the “Journal of Radio and Audio Media”, Broadcast Research Association, Routledge ed. and a member of the International Editorial Board of “The Radio Journal”, Intellect Ltd., UK., a founding member of the Division: Media Psychology and Technology, of Hellenic Psychological Association (https://elpse.com/meswn-kai-texnologias), founding member and former member of the Scientific Board of Social Computing Research Center, Cyprus University of Technology (https://www.socialcomputing.eu), a member of Scientific Committee of Groupe de Recherches et d’ Etudes sur la Radio (GRER), a founding member and former ViceChair of the Radio Research Section of European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA).She has published articles in refereed international journals, three books and sheparticipated in international conferences.

Email: a.gazi@panteion.gr

Abstract

If until recently, the primary accused of the promotion of edited, in the name of perfection, images and the creation of stereotypes were Traditional Media (TV, magazines, newspapers), it did not take too long before the rapid growth of the Internet and more specifically, of Social Media to transfer to these specific environments the standards that applied to the traditional means of communication. Their great level of importance lies in the fact that they allow users, among other things, the manifestation of their identity and the experimentation with it, while at the same time the communication with Others offers different stimuli. It could be argued that Social Media are in continuous dialogue and interaction with the person and society.

The present paper draws on a case study of an online, Instagram community and it aims to explore the connection between Social Media and the promotion of otherness. “Live Tinted” is a community, whose main goal is to bring into the spotlight of the beauty industry and beyond, individuals who embody otherness and the unrepresented. Having a sense of beauty in the centre of the discussion, the community urges its members to share their personal experiences on the journey in search of their identity. Content analysis is being employed on the posts (photos and audio-visual content) of “Live Tinted” to comprehend how Otherness is presented on Instagram and whether its content affects the identity of the user and member of the community. The virtual community seems to choose to promote individuals of different backgrounds, religions and distinctly different external characteristics. Through digital storytelling, they share different personal stories about their identities. In this way, they achieve the identification and commitment of the members to the community. The members of the community also show differences. They come from different countries of the world, but share similar personal experiences, strengthening the work of the community.

13. Stay-at-home fathers' masculinity on Chinese social media

Fei Huang

Bio

Fei Huang is a Chinese-English interpreter/translator and third-year PhD candidate in Chinese and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. Her research interests include masculinities, gender studies, and family life in contemporary China. Her current research explores stay-at-home fathers in contemporary China.

Abstract

The image of stay-at-home fathers (SAHFs) has recently appeared and circulated widely on social media in China. While several studies have examined discourses of men and masculinities in popular culture since the late 2000s, media representations of this particular gender role remain largely unexamined in the China context. This paper uses articles on WeChat subscription accounts (微信订阅号 wenxin dingyuehao) as its primary sources to examine how SAHFs are represented in today’s digital China, so as to contribute to academic debates on how Chinese masculinities are being constructed and reinvented in social media.

WeChat enjoys a dominant position within Chinese social media and is typically the place where textual materials on SAHFs first appear, before later being referenced on other platforms. There are also multiple types of WeChat subscription accounts, including state-owned, digital news, and individual content creators’ accounts. I selected articles based on their quantifiable widespread appeal and reception (as confirmed through ratings and circulation/readership figures) and significance for the construction of masculinity and fatherhood (i.e., texts associating the role of SAHFs with masculinity and fatherhood, featuring insights from actual SAHFs).

I identify three key themes in the construction of SAHFs’ masculinities from the selected articles: class specificity and the centrality of work in their conceptualisation of masculinity; the emergence of a dual identity for men as both full-time fathers and part-time workers; and increased awareness of child development as a key factor for men to assume the role of SAHFs. Through the analysis of these three themes, I identify a paradox in the social media representation of SAHFs, that while SAHFs are represented as caring men who herald a paradigm shift in traditional familial gender roles, narratives about them presented by others and SAHFs themselves still reproduce patriarchal ideologies when negotiating family matters and social identity as men. My discussion of the paradoxical representation of SAHFs on social media offers an understanding of how the digital world constructs new possibilities and allows gradual shifts in gender performance, while sustaining patriarchal ideologies and values in contemporary China.

14. Single motherhood and digital intimate publics – Mapping mediated spaces and practices online

Dr Irida Ntalla (her/she) FHEA

Bio

Dr Irida Ntalla is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Middlesex

University in London, Department of Media and the Programme Leader for the MA Media Management. She teaches areas of media and creative industries, media and art management, digital cultures and gender studies, audience theory and research.

She has published in journals such as Social Media and Society and Culture, Theory and Critique. Irida completed her PhD from City, University of London and is a grant holder of the AHRC-funded project ‘New Media, Audiences and AffectiveExperiences’ and she has been part of a number of research projects on cultural institutions and technological change, audience research and media. Irida have an extensive experience in the cultural industries, and she has managed a range of media and education-based projects with a focus on social engagement, digital technologies and creative arts, theatre education, heritage, archives and documentary practice.

Dr Irida Ntalla (her/she) FHEA

Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications

Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries

Middlesex University

Email: i.ntalla@mdx.ac.uk

Abstract

This paper discusses findings of a pilot study that aims to identify, and map mediated

spaces (social networking sites, online groups and apps) and practices of intimacies

and their publics in the diverse communities of single mothers largely based in the

UK context. The study of digital intimacies covers a variety of practices such as

community formations, body and gender, dating, kinship, love and friendship

mediated in and through social media and technologies. Importantly, ‘digital intimate

publics create shared worldviews and shared emotional knowledge’ (Dobson

2018:2). The aim of this paper is to provide a preliminary understanding of digital

engagement practice and identify specific use of social networks and apps.

Methodologically, a wide distributed survey is utilised to trace and map digital spaces

of sociality, care, sharing and support, digital storytelling and interactions to identify

where identities, representations and subjectivities of single mothers form and take

place. Single motherhood is far from a unified entity, but the perspectives that frame

what a ‘single mother’ entails today are multiple and highlight the political stakes at

play (Matapanyane 2016: 2). The literature around single motherhood is limited,

mainly focusing on fixed representations and heavily heterocentric, hence the need

to challenge hegemonic discourses in constructing maternal ideologies is crucial with

increasingly working on more diverse subjective experiences of ‘mothering in the

edges’ (Bardruddoja and Matapanyane 2016). The findings and new insights of this

study are placed in the intersections of scholarship of digital and post-intimacies and

motherhood studies aiming to explore further how single mothers use online spaces

and platforms to negotiate identities and belonging, develop support networks, share

public and private experiences considering ethics of care. To trace such online

spaces, where representations and subjectivities take place can mobilise paradoxical

understandings of the qualities of these intimacies publics as political and

transformational, and the infrastructures of such intimacies as exploitative forms of

social reproduction.

Keywords: single motherhood, social networks, digital intimacies, publics

References

Badruddoja R. and Matapanyane M. 2016. New Maternalisms’: Tales of motherwork

(dislodging the unthinkable). Demeter Press.

Matapanyane, M., 2016. Motherhood and Single-Lone Parenting: A 21st Century

Perspective. Demeter Press.

Dobson, A.S., Carah, N. & Robards, B. 2018. Digital intimate publics and social

media: Towards theorising public lives on private platforms. In A.S Dobson, B.

Robards & N. Carah (Eds.) Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media. New York:

Palgrave.

15. A short history of femininities in Greece made of popular television series

Aleka Stamatiadi

Bio

Aleka Stamatiadi is a PhD candidate in Journalism and Mass Media Communication at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She examines the popular television culture of modern Greece and in particular the case of the television channel “Mega”. She holds a BA in Communication and Media, University of Athens, and has studied Political Communication at the same university at Master’s level. Her research interests revolve around popular and Greek television culture, the relationship between the public and the private, mass media and digital journalism and sexualities. She works as a journalist and communication manager in Greece.

Contact: alekastamatiadi@gmail.com

+30 6936626866

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze portrayals of women’s roles in popular television series as negotiations of social constructions of femininities in modern Greece. As television fiction offers a fruitful field for societal values and roles to be expressed, the article refers to the most watched television series of the Greek television station “Mega channel” from 1990 to 2017. Greek society’s juncture and media landscape provoked a delay for the commercial television but when it happened, in 1989, Greek television fiction found a remarkable success, showing the popularity of domestic productions in Greece. As domestic television fiction productions in Greece were the most popular, it is possible to draw consumptions on Greek societal norms Acknowledging the context of Greek society these years and applying methodologies of textual and critical discourse analysis on television texts, the analysis

highlights the potential of media and in particular television fiction to express, reinforce or challenge systems of social hierarchies based on differences of gender. In general, women’ roles in television fiction conceal and reveal their sexual preferences and desires, playing both victims and villains, housewives or mistresses, nice mothers and funny girls, or passionate “drama queens”. Regardless the genre, comedies or drama series, basic elements are similar: the importance of Greek family, strict and traditional ethical codes, the romantic wedding, motherhood or vice versa the dangerous woman’s sexuality are found in the discourses about femininities. The most popular Greek television series of “Mega channel” television station show that social context of television production frames and negotiated with television fiction. From a historical perspective, watching women’s roles from one television series to another, from year to year, focusing on the representations of femininities, it is outlined a version of “top-down” history of representations of femininities

in the Greek context.

16. “They Were Too Fragile”: Questioning Femininities and Resilience in Russian Doll

Sarah Lahm

Bio

Sarah is in her second year as a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds. She received her BA and MA in American Studies at the University of Graz, Austria, and she has always been intrigued by the narrative strategies and particularities of serial television, as well as question about what the term television means in the twenty-first century. Sarah is currently working on her PhD thesis, which aims to shed light on television’s entanglement with the complex and contradictory aspects of neoliberal feminism and radical, intersectional, socialist feminism in a US American context.

Sarah Lahm

PhD research student, School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds

mesl@leeds.ac.uk / +44 7521 407809

Abstract

While the ripples of movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and #StopAsianHate are still moving across the post-recession US American cultural landscape during an ongoing global pandemic, the idea of resilience seems omnipresent in the vocabulary of social movements, but also within neoliberal feminist discourses about the self. Due to this ubiquity of the term resilience and the weight it carries for the individual in our times, it is imperative to investigate the ways in which resilience operates within current popular television narratives, where its presence seems equally pervasive.

This paper will map out the fluctuating meaning and role of individual resilience in the context of neoliberal feminism, as it has been theorised and expanded in recent years (Rottenberg, 2018;McRobbie, 2020; Banet-Weiser, Gill and Rottenberg 2020), while also considering its socially transformative power in radical feminist struggles against systemic oppression. A significant number of half-hour popular comedy-dramas led by resilient (yet precarious3⁄4see Wanzo, 2016) females have sprung up in the past years in the United States. Consequently, this paper is

particularly interested in the role of resilience in recent serial narratives. It will therefore also engage with recent scholarship on resilience on television, such as Kristyn Gorton’s 2021 article “’Don’t let the bastards grind you down’: Feminist resilience/resilient feminism in The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 20173⁄4).”

I will explore the role individual and collective resilience plays in the narrative structure of Russian Doll, a current Netflix series that premiered in 2019. Nadia Vulvokov, a software designer in her thirties, is trapped in a system that kills her repeatedly and yet renders her so resilient that there is no escape from the deadly Groundhog Day-esque loop. Her simultaneous vulnerability and imposed resilience (not being able to die, she is resurrected much like the protagonist of a computer game) turns her into a subject akin to Gill and Orgad’s bounce-backable woman (2018). Thus, Russian Doll is emblematic of the push and pull between neoliberal/individual and radical/collective feminisms. This conference paper will focus on the ways in which Russian Doll‘s serial narrative is entangled

with current feminist discourses, especially in its rendering of the tensions between resilience as a collective effort and an individual responsibility. The series will serve as a case study in shedding light on questions about twenty-first century femininities, feminisms and resilience in times of a neoliberal crisis, as well as in mapping the complex role of resilience on TV.

17. From Male Tears to Women’s Shopping Carts: Grooming Neoliberal Female Consumers through Depictions of Masculinity in Crisis in Men’s,Grooming Ads

Kai Prins, M.A.

Bio

Kai Prins (they/she) is a PhD student studying rhetoric at the intersections of gender, bodies, and performance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kai’s research uses feminist and queer theory and methods to critique depictions of and resistance to normativity and neoliberalism on the drag stage, in social media (especially related to fitness, wellness, and health), and in consumer advertisements. Kai is a former marketing professional and an award-winning drag and burlesque performer, known as Will X. Uly (pronounced “Will Actually”).

Contact:

kprins@wisc.edu

kaiprins.com

@performingwoman

Abstract

If the marketing arms of men’s grooming companies are to be believed, masculinity has been in increasing crisis since #YesAllMen/#MeToo – but luckily, they have a fix: from Dove’s “dadvertising” (Leader, 2019) to images of men crying (Axe/Lynx), performing “feminine” grooming behaviors, like shaving their legs and taking bubble baths (Dollar Shave Club), and atoning for “toxic” behaviors like bullying and sexual assault (Gillette), soap and razor commercials targeting cisgender men have taken up (pro)feminist messaging. Unlike metrosexuality, which appealed to a specific subset of men and eschewed making sociopolitical claims related to the purchase of grooming products, these new ads indicate a shift in purpose and audience. “Menvertising” has garnered praise for inclusivity and attention to the winds of gendered social and political change (Pando-Canteli & Rodriguez, 2021); however, I ask: who – and of what – are these ads meant to persuade? In our neoliberal brand-led culture (Gill and Kanai, 2019), advertisements perform a “pedagogical function,” demonstrating the proper affect of the “citizen consumer” (Banet-Weiser, 2012, p. 39, 42). But there exists no “interview where Tarana Burke talks about how she really hopes #MeToo can be used to sell loads of triple-blade razors with really macho names one day” (McCarthy, 2019), so where does the feminist marketing of the “crisis of masculinity” fit in with neoliberal consumer citizenship? I argue that the implicit message of these commercials is to engage women in the production of and attendance to (hegemonic) masculine crisis through brand affinity and purchasing. Becausem“women control 30% of the world’s wealth and the majority of its shopping trollies,” it matters whether “women [start] judging men on their blade choices” (McCarthy, 2019). This paper

explores the implications of making women accomplices in the masculinity crisis through advertising and asks, does “menvertising” forward feminist political goals or simply make business sense?

References:

Banet-Weiser, S. (2012). Authentic™. New York University Press.

Gill, R., & Kanai, A. (2019). Affirmative advertising and the mediated feeling rules of neoliberalism. In M. Meyers (Ed.), Neoliberalism and the Media (pp. 131-146). Routledge.

Leader, C. F. (2019). Dadvertising: Representations of fatherhood in Procter & Gamble’s Tidecommercials. Communication Culture & Critique, 12(1), 72-89.

McCarthy, J. (2019, January 15). What creatives make of Gillette's dividing ad on toxic masculinity. The Drum. https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/01/15/what-creatives-make-gillette-s-dividing-ad-toxic-masculinity

Pando-Canteli, M. J., & Rodriguez, M. P. (2021). “Menvertising” and the Resistances to New Masculinities in Audiovisual Representations. International Journal of Communication, 15, 21.

18. The rise of hate journalism: toxic masculinity, misogyny and homophobia in Greek far right media

Eugenia Siapera

University College Dublin

Lambrini Papadopoulou

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Bios

Eugenia Siapera is Professor of Information and Communication Studies and head of the ICS School at UCD. Her research interests are in the area of digital and social media, platform governance and hate speech, racism and misogyny. She has written numerous articles and book chapters. Her most recent books are Understanding New Media (Sage, 2018, second edition) and Gender Hate Online (2019, Palgrave, co-edited with Debbie Ging). She is currently working on the third edition of Understanding New Media and on an edited volume on Radical Journalism (with George Souvlis and Seamus Farrell, under contract with Routledge).

Lambrini Papadopoulou is Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication and Media Studies, Faculty of Economics and Political Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her publications concern the political economy of media, alternative journalism and media cooperatives. She has taken part at various European projects regarding Press Freedom and is currently working on the 2022 edition of the Media Pluralism Monitor.

Abstract

This study focuses on ‘hate journalism’, a term we use to describe a new kind of journalism which is ideologically close to neo-fascist, and ethnonationalist political positions, aiming to reproduce and reinforce society’s most conservative, patriarchal and stereotypical values.

Focusing on Greece and specifically on Makeleio, a popular far right journalistic outlet, this research aims to identify the way(s) that hate towards women and gay people is produced, constructed and mobilized. To do so, we collected and analysed 96 print editions (each containing approximately 30 articles) of Makeleio during May–August 2018 and complemented the analysis with materials from the website Makeleio.gr, ranked number 16 in Greece by the web analytics company Alexa. Subsequently, we analysed the materials through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which focuses on the way social power, dominance and inequality are enacted, reproduced, legitimated or challenged by text and talk in the social and political context.

Our initial findings showed that Makeleio makes use of two related practices, conspiracy theories and scapegoating, to construct a narrative in which Greece as essentially a nation of ethnically Greek, Christian Orthodox, heterosexual men, is under attack by a corrupt world system. These practices concern –among others- the alleged usurpation of the power of ‘real men’ by homosexuals and women. Specifically, we found that Makeleio is attacking not only women but also the idea that women have a place in public life. Women are described as cunning and crafty, manipulating men. Their power is located mainly in their success in ‘seducing’ men. Makeleio has very often referred to prominent women as ‘whores’ (‘poutanes’) and ‘sluts’ (‘tsoula’). With regards to homosexuality, it is presented as a despised and sick vice that is in total contrast to the ideal of the heroic masculine Greek. Gay men are always referred to using homophobic slurs, the pejorative use of female pronouns, and through descriptions of sexual acts. Makeleio essentially represents homosexuals and women as ‘others’ deserving of hate. At the same time, the ideal Greek male is constructed in paradoxical terms as an honest patriot, upfront, and family oriented, but also as cunning, able to outwit others, virile and not averse to violent punishment and discipline of others.

Ultimately, this study showed that hate journalism is not opposing, or being at the margins of the mainstream, but rather radicalising mainstream nationalist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic views, taking them a few steps further along the same path. At the same time, it amplifies them by expressing them in less moderate and more radical forms. In doing so, it validates the feelings of its readers, who recognise themselves and their practices and vernacular in all this. It is worth noting, finally, that the success of this outlet in a very tough environment for journalism in Greece entails the possibility of emulation, since selling hate has proven to be a recipe for financial sustainability.

19. Contemporary Children’s Biographies: How are children responding to ‘empowering’ stories of ‘inspirational’ women?

Louise Couceiro

Bio

Louise Couceiro is an ESRC-funded PhD researcher at the School of Education at the University of Glasgow. She has a BA in English Language and Literature, an MA in Gender Studies and an MRes in Sociology and Research Methods. Louise has a strong interest in gender theory, literature, creative methods and children’s education. Her current project explores how a group of children respond to and engage with collective biographies about women published since 2016. Prior to beginning her doctorate, Louise worked in education and has taught in the UK, China and Australia.

Abstract

Since 2016, children’s nonfiction books about women have proliferated rapidly in the United Kingdom and beyond. If you step into any bookshop, you are likely to find a shelf or an entire section devoted to biographies that present stories of women’s achievements throughout history. In the UK, Kate Pankhurst’s Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World (2016) paved the way, selling more than 52,000 copies by the summer of 2017 (Flood, 2017). However, it was arguably the publication of Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls (2017) that prompted an explosion of children’s biographies about women. The book was translated into dozens of languages and quickly sold more than a million copies worldwide (Laity, 2018).

This paper will begin with a brief overview of the literary, socio-cultural and academic contexts from which these biographies have emerged. I argue that the latter part of the 2010s, which witnessed the ‘watershed’ cultural phenomena of the MeToo movement, the advent of Women’s Marches, and the implementation of gender pay gap reporting legislation in the UK, offered a burning platform that enabled these books to rise with particular force and popularity. Objects of ‘popular feminism’ (Banet-Weiser, 2018), these biographies present narratives of ‘empowered’ women. The implication of their framing is that readers will consume the texts; recognise and appreciate the diversity of representation; and be inspired to achieve empowerment as well.

Yet, the question remains, how are young readers actually responding to these books? Following this contextual overview, I will share some of the findings from my PhD study, which explores how a group of eight children in the UK respond to and engage with four collective biographies about women published since 2016. Data was gathered through a series of group reading sessions, individual interviews and arts-based activities. My analysis, which combines reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) with insights from discourse analysis, incites valuable questions regarding the opportunities and pitfalls of presenting ‘empowered’ women as world-changers in need of emulation. My initial analysis suggests that these young readers are acutely aware of the inspirational intent driving these publications, and their responses to this ‘call’ to be inspired into action are surprising, complex and multi-faceted.

References

Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham: Duke University Press.

Braun, Virginia and Clarke, Victoria. 2021. Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide. London: SAGE Publications.

Favilli, Elena and Cavallo, Francesca. 2017. Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. London: Penguin Books.

Flood, Alison. 2017. 'Read like a girl: how children's books of female stories are booming', The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/11/read-like-a-girl-how-childrens-books-of-female-stories-are-booming (Accessed: 25-11-2021).

Laity, Paul. 2018. 'The triumphant return of Rebel Girls: 'We are proud our book has become a symbol of resistance''. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/24/elena-favilli-francessca-cavallo-interview-rebel-girls-2 (Accessed: 25-11-2021).

Pankhurst, Kate. 2016. Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World. London: Bloomsbury.

20. Femininities within celebrity culture

Myrto Tsiaktsira

Bio

Myrto- Marina Tsiaktsira has completed her Bachelor Degree in Communication and Mass Media Studies (NKUA) and a Master’s Degree in Marketing (AUEB). Parallel to her bachelor degree, she worked as a journalist in documentary production. She worked for 4 years as a Project Manager at HPD Innovation Lab and she is currently working as an Events Planner at PwC Greece. She is a PhD student at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and her research interests include celebrity studies, postfeminism, commodification and social media. Myrto’s research explores the construction of femininity via celebrity culture. She enjoys studying foreign cultures and she speaks six languages.

Tsiaktsira Myrto

Department of Communication and Media Studies

School of Economics and Political Sciences

National Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

E-mail: m.tsiaktsira@gmail.com

This research aims to conceptualize how femininity is constructed via female A-list celebrities, as well as microcelebrities today. Contemporary female celebrity is formed within a context of postfeminism, commodification and neoliberalism. In recent debates about the ever- growing prominence of celebrity commodification, a number of scholars have started to focus on the new era of “Insta-nt fame”and self- branding ((Marwick, 2013), while recent feminist theorists of celebrity study its significance within the broader neoliberal project, where popular culture plays an important role in which the “successful girl” discourse of neoliberalism is regenerated (Homes and Negra 2011). Celebrity culture, along with other popular media, develops new ideals that have to do with “have it all” femininity centred around social mobility and compulsory success, self-reinvention and transformation through consumption (Turner, 2006). The new public self that is formed is both dependent on and deeply identified with public identity, as internet media is changing celebrity culture as a whole, by transforming the ways that people relate to celebrity images, how celebrities are generated, and how celebrity status is performed (Marshall & Redmond, 2016). This thesis aims to contribute to a small but growing body of empirical work which concentrates to the specific ways in which young women and girls make use of celebrity within their everyday lives and processes of identity construction. Femininity presented in social media by celebrities or micro- celebrities, is often criticised and identified with overexposure, unrealistic female lifestyle and attitudes, distorted body image, as well as false communication between them. Thus, it requires a careful analysis of their exposure on social media, their interaction with audiences and their identity construction online. All A-list celebrities and micro- celebrities that will be examined represent different kinds of femininity and engage in a different way with audiences. I have built and established a background about the construction of femininity in Greece and Ι suggest how those female A-list celebs correspond to them. My focus is to present a more nuanced picture regarding the commodification of A- list celebrities (Eleni Menegaki, Vicky Stavropoulou, Eleni Foureira), which have been chosen, as they all present different aspects of femininity. Eleni Menegaki started as a bimbo, Vicky Stavropoulou represents the narrative of theugly duckling-turned ‘swan’ amongst a plethora of tall, skinny, ‘traditionally beautiful’ women” and Eleni Foureira is and Albanian singer who is young, thin, athletic with “alien” beauty. The main focus of my research can be summed up in a key question: How femininity is constructed through female celebrities online and how do audience perceive their content? Micro-celebrities chosen have repeatedly occupied the world of social media with their content (Ioanna Touni, The Classy Savage-Nicole Despotopoulou-, Konnie Metaxa and Mara Samartzi) and are always in the limelight of blogs. The main goal is to examine how “attention economy” works through them and how their audiences perceive the role of celebrity culture in the construction of femininity. I will present the findings of a few open-ended face-to-face interviews with men, women and teenage girls about their favorite and least favorite female celebrity and micro-celebrity. In the case of micro-celebrities, the research audience will be narrowed to teenage girls, because this is the main audience that follows and interacts with them mostly, as well as engages with online practices of gossip and “drama” between them.

References:

Fairchild, C. (2007) Building the Authentic Celebrity: The ‘Idol’ Phenom- enon in the Attention Economy. Popular Music and Society 30 (3), pp. 355–75.

Holmes, Sue and Negra, Diane (2011) In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, London: Continuum.

Marshall, P. and Redmond, S. (2016) A companion to celebrity. UK: John Wiley and Sons.

Marwick, A. E. (2013) Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social

Media Age. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Turner, G. (2006) The mass production of celebrity. International Journal of Cultural Studies. 9 (2), p. 153-165.

21. America, Masculinity, and Postfeminism in the Audiovisual Works of Lana del Rey

Dr Nathalie Weidhase, University of Surrey

Bio

Nathalie Weidhase is a Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Surrey. Her research focuses on (post)feminism and femininity in popular culture, and she has published on women in popular music, celebrity feminism, and Brexit and the royal family. Her current work is concerned with the intersections of populism and gender in popular culture and media.

Abstract

In popular music, notions of romantic love are gendered, racialised, and socially constructed (de Laat, 2019). This paper is concerned with constructions of love, gender, and national identity in two audiovisual works of Lana del Rey. Her songs subvert the postfeminist narrative and imperative that happiness lies in heterosexual relationships often because they feature “point-of-view character perspectives within songs that are frequently in thrall to destructive embodiments of masculinity”(Barron, 2018: 64). These men are not just embodiments of a particular type of masculinity, but also, as this paper argues, represent complex embodiments of America. Arguably, America functions as a

character as much as a setting in del Rey’s songs (Aronoff, 2017), and a certain postracial sensibility has been attributed to her work. This paper argues for an exploration of the tensions between these two elements. Taking a closer look at her lovers and notions of romance in ‘Born to Die’ (2012) and the short film Norman Fucking Rockwell (2019), this paper explores the ways in which men serve as abject Others that construct a certain type of Americanness, and against which del Rey negotiates her

relationship with the American Dream. Del Rey draws on key imagery from fashion and culture in these negotiations. In her work, men and masculinity serve as an abject Other against which not only postfeminist femininity is crafted (and sometimes ruptured), but they serve to construct a complex and complicated image of Americanness that is both steeped in a critical sense of nostalgia and equally deeply rooted in contemporary American popular culture. As such, Del Rey’s work expresses a deep unease with regards to American national identity, particularly in the 21st century. A vocal critic of President Trump on social media, del Rey’s musical work represents a broader, more metaphorical

critique of contemporary America. This paper argues that del Rey’s work gives insight into the complex relationship between gender, national identity and popular culture, and how these relationships are negotiated through audiovisual media.

References

Aronoff, K. (2017) ‘Lana Del Rey’s America’, Dissent 64 (4): 11-15.

Barron, L. (2018) ‘Postmodern Theories of Celebrity’, in: Elliott, A. ed. Routledge Handbook of

Celebrity Studies. London: Routledge.

De Laat, K. (2019) ‘Singing the Romance: Gendered and Racialized Representations of Love and

Postfeminism in Popular Music’, Poetics, online first:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304422X18303280

22. Losing Cruise Control: Disenchantment of Tom Cruise’s Star Image in Eyes Wide Shut.

Defne Tüzün

Bio

Defne Tüzün earned a Ph.D. in English from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2011. She received a B.A. in Philosophy from Boğaziçi University in 1998, and an M.A. in Film and Television from Istanbul Bilgi University in 2002. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Radio, Television and Cinema Department at Kadir Has University, Istanbul. Her research focuses on film theory and criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and narratology.

Abstract

Eyes Wide Shut purposely undercuts the spectators’ pleasure by frustrating their emotional and erotic investment in the diegesis. Tom Cruise’s star image is a primary means that Eyes Wide Shut uses to sabotage its purported eroticism. The film invites its spectators to libidinally invest in Cruise’s “extraordinary” star image, that of being masculine, energetic, youthful, successful, and heroic with “an indefinable something special” (Dargis 2000, 21) that goes beyond his good looks and sexual appeal. However, his star image is incoherent and ambiguous: it is also ordinary in that it embodies an everyman quality and personality, representing the average white male. The film reinforces this ambiguity, at first highlighting the extraordinariness of Cruise’s image but later undermining it by revealing its artificiality and constructedness.

Eyes Wide Shut utilizes Cruise’s star image in order to heighten its verisimilitude and to authenticate its story. Yet through the course of the film, the sexual frustrations and the symbolic failures experienced by the fictional character of a self-confident doctor cause a disenchantment of Cruise’s screen persona, which is inescapably endowed with fantasies and fictions about his sexuality and masculinity. Cruise’s former body of work is inevitably inscribed on his actual body and it is almost impossible to separate the two entirely. Eyes Wide Shut emphasizes the character’s “ordinariness” and “impotency” in both literal, sexual and symbolic terms as it makes the audience contemplate the constructedness of this “extraordinary” image. The star image of Cruise, that is produced through films, advertising, marketing, news releases, interviews, and commentaries is polysemic in the sense that it is saturated by “complexity” and “contradictoriness” (Dyer 1998, 63). Tom Cruise’s star image constructed through his films represents success, masculinity, heterosexuality, and virility. As an “idealized heroic, heterosexual and all-American white male” (Redmond 2014, 44), he embodies honesty and integrity. Yet from early in his career, the actor’s heterosexual virility has often been questioned.

There has been endless speculation about Cruise’s sexual identity and orientation, his marriages, his adoption of two children, and his relationship with his biological daughter. Thus, his normative masculine image is a fragile one, and counterimages are also produced through paratextual media representations. In other words, what this constructed image represents is constantly contested through the media. Just as Tom Cruise does not have control over his constructed image, which is marked by ambiguities, contradictions, and ambivalence, viewers of Eyes Wide Shut soon realize that Bill Harford only seems as if he controls the narrative, but he most emphatically does not. Although the course of events seems to be directed by Bill, in fact, what really drives the film’s narrative is actually the desire of his wife, Alice, which is played out in a fantasy about a naval officer.

Dargis, Manohla. 2000. “Ghost in the Machine.” Sight & Sound 10, no. 7 (July): 20–23.

Dyer, Richard. 1998. Stars. London: British Film Institute.

Redmond, Sean. 2014. Celebrity and the Media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

23. “Sky-High, Matte Black Faux Snakeskin Heals”: Construction of Femininity through Clothing in Jacob Tobia’s Sissy

KAROLÍNA ZLÁMALOVÁ

Bio

KAROLÍNA ZLÁMALOVÁ (she/her) is currently in the second semester of the PhD program Literatures in English at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. She holds a Master’s degree in English Language and Literature from the same university. In her PhD research, she concentrates on queer, gender, and femme aspects in contemporary American immigrant life writing. Her dissertation is preliminarily titled Masculinities, Femininities, and Queerness in Contemporary North American Immigrant Queer Life Writing.

Contact: Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Department of English and American Studies, A. Nováka 1, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic. Email: zlamal.karolina@mail.muni.cz

Abstract

As an area of constant tension between one’s body and gender identity, and between the gender identity and one’s environment, clothing plays a crucial role in life writing of nonbinary individuals such as Jacob Tobia. In their 2019 memoir Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story, Tobia discusses growing up as a genderqueer male-bodied individual, for whom clothing serves as a way of expressing their femininity. This femininity is abject, nonhegemonic femininity, which does not allow them access to the limited and policed kinds of accepted femininities. On the contrary, because they challenge the connection between sex, gender, and sexuality, they are very visibly other and create gender trouble (Butler).

Considering this complexity of queer femininity, the present paper discusses how clothing as a tool of constructing femininity is approached and discussed in the memoir Sissy. Furthermore, it identifies the kind of femininity Tobia embraces. Instead of trying to pass and convince, by exaggerated attention by their clothing and by the type of clothing they wear – overly feminine, decorative, and attention-catching – Tobia embraces the type of femininity that is deemed lesser and viewed as “ironic and theatrical” (Dahl 59). Tobia discusses in detail what they wore for specific occasions, such as “sky-high, matte black faux snakeskin heals” (220) to the reception in the White House. While also describing struggles, more often they portray the satisfaction and happiness connected with such clothing. They also reclaim derogatory terms as sissy or slut. By calling themselves a slut who never got laid (288), they separate the representation from the actual behavior. By proudly and enthusiastically “embracing the ridiculous, abject, and demeaning images of women circulated by the heteronormative culture” (Harris 2023) they consciously forgo their “claim to dignity,” because it is “a small price to pay for undoing … the authenticity of naturalized identities and hierarchies of value that debase” them (Halperin qtd. in Harris). Tobia approaches their situation with humor and conviction for the cause, loudly proclaiming willingness to forego their claim to dignity for the realization of their femme identity.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. 1990. Taylor & Francis, 2006.

Dahl, Ulrika. “Turning like a Femme: Figuring Critical Femininity Studies.” NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, vol. 20, no. 1, 2012, pp. 57–64.

Harris, W. C. “‘Still Raped Over Here’: Gay Male Femininity and the Rewards of Camp Ambivalence in Richard Day’s Girls Will Be Girls.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 66, no. 14, 2019, pp. 2021–2052.

Tobia, Jacob. Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2019.

24. Parenting, Privacy and Commodification: Celebrity Sharenting on Instagram

Francisca Porfírio

Bio

Francisca Porfírio is a Communication Sciences PhD Student at Universidade Lusófona of Portugal with funding from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (ref.: 2021.07777.BD). Francisca has a master degree in Communication Sciences from Catholic University of Portugal and a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from ISCTE-IUL. Contact Details +351 962 558 364 a22105766@alunos.ulht.pt

Abstract

Images of children and their family lives are increasingly depicted by their parents in their social media accounts. This practice, called sharenting (Marasli et al., 2016; Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2017), has become of increasing interest because of the popularity of social media and the visibility it has afforded children (Dobson & Jay, 2020). When parents share photographs and information about their children, they often face privacy issues (Steinberg, 2017; Chalklen & Anderson, 2017). However, the debates about this topic show us that sharing images of children is not the crux of the matter but rather how, when and how often they do it. Even though discourses about parenting are diverse, advertising or sponsorship make it difficult to distinguish between the representation and exploitation of children (Leaver, Highfield, & Abidin, 2020). Although this practice of sharing aspects of parenting online has been strongly associated with the figure of the child's mother (Jorge et al., 2021; Archer, 2019; Jerslev & Mortensen, 2018), recently, also the male parental figure has been exploring his social media to present himself as a father (Ranson, 2015; Rowland & Correia, 2018). Therefore, and with the aim of reflecting on the values of motherhood/fatherhood, as well as on gender roles today, the paper seeks to explore the representation of micromicrocelebrities (Abidin, 2015) - children who inherit their parent's fame - on Instagram, a popular platform for sharing content about children and families (Dobson & Jay, 2020). It also intends to discuss these practices at the intersection with commodification - specifically, understand how they are represented in these contexts, which categories of brands are associated with children, according to their gender and the gender of the celebrities, focusing on the content where some kind of advertising or partnership is reflected. Additionally, the paper investigates issues related to privacy and the body of children intersecting them with Instagram's own moderation policies. Through content analysis of posts, instastories, IGTV and Reels of eight Instagram accounts of female (4) and male (4), Portuguese celebrities over three months (January to March 2022), the paper will provide an in-depth portrait of the phenomenon of sharenting, according to the gender of parents and children, drawn with regard to three key themes: 2 contexts and frequency of representation of children on the platform; privacy and Instagram policies; commodification and advertising/partnership. Keywords: Celebrities, Sharenting, Instagram, Parenting, Privacy, Commodification.

25. “I would like to be just straight.” A norm critical analysis of the ‘gay concern’submissions sent by Finnish boys and young men to the online service of sexual health - (This talk will not be offered)

Sanna Spišák PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher in Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (IDA, SRC 2019–2022/2025), Media studies, University of Turku, Finland

Maria Vihlman Lic.Soc.Sc., Specialist in Clinical Sexology (NACS), Doctoral student in Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (IDA, SRC 2019–2022/2025) & Rethinking sexuality: A geopolitics of digital sexual cultures in Estonia, Sweden and Finland (Östersjöstiftelsen 2020–2022), Gender studies, University of Turku, Finland

Bios

Sanna Spišák (PhD, University of Turku) is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (IDA) project, funded by The Strategic Research Council (SRC) at the Academy of Finland. With an interest in mediated sexualities, sexual ethics, sex education, and young people's intimate practices in digital media, she is the Vice Chair of the Finnish Media Education Association and has published in leading academic journals such as Sexualities, Social Media + Society, Childhood and Young.

Maria Vihlman (Lic.Soc.Sc.) is a Doctoral Candidate at the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies, University of Turku, Finland, a practicing clinician (Specialist in Clinical Sexology, NACS), and a trainer and clinical supervisor in sexology, currently working in projects Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (The Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland) and Rethinking sexuality: A geopolitics of digital sexual cultures in Estonia, Sweden and Finland (Östersjöstiftelsen). Their ongoing Ph.D. research focuses on digital intimacies in a Finnish NSFW online community

Abstract

In this presentation, we build on data consisting of 8057 questions about sexuality that were digitally submitted by young people in Finland during the years 2017–2019 to experts on sexual health at the Sexpo Foundation1 . When we organised our extensive material through reflexive thematic analysis methods to explore and narrate specific perspectives and topics from which young Finnish people seek an adults’ guidance, we noticed a systematic and recurring pattern that appeared among submissions that concerned sexual orientation. From 326 submissions regarding sexual orientation (4 % of all submissions), 58 submissions (18 % of all sexual orientation related submissions) came from individuals who defined themselves as boys or young men and who told being deeply concerned about emerging desires, thoughts, reactions or sexual 1 Sexpo Foundation is a non-governmental non-profit organisation working in the fields of sexuality, relationships and health and runs an online service well known and frequently visited by Finnish adolescents. Their online service offers inclusive and comprehensive health and sexuality information and help of various kinds: in the form of online static content such as sexuality, health and relationship articles, guides and factsheets, and interactive content such as question and answer forum where young Finns’ questions are published anonymously and answered by a trained sexual health counsellor. behaviours they interpreted as “homosexual”. Intriguingly, such worries were not present in submissions regarding sexual orientation sent by Finnish girls or young women. We named this recurring submission pattern as ‘a gay concern’. We explore the gay concern submissions as vignettes into young men’s lived sexual experiences through a norm critical analysis. As a society, Finland has committed to gender equality and sexual rights are rather well guaranteed within the Finnish legislation. However, even though Finland is considered a model for sexual equality in many occasions, our data show a considerable gap between the upper-level Equality Acts and political measures to reduce sexual discrimination and young individuals’ everyday realities and possibilities to live in their sexual truth within a cis/heteronormative society. We argue that the everyday possibilities for Finnish boys and young men’s sexual self-determination is limited due to the distribution of life chances, cultural and societal norms, and default values regarding gender, sexuality and their interlinked relationships. Our data illustrates that young men’s sexual identification options are restricted, maybe even more so than young women’s, because of first, the stigmatised position of male homosexuality to heterosexuality and second, an idea of a fixed and unambiguous sexual identity. The gay concern impacts young individuals’ well-being negatively. We suggest that queer political thinking and norm critical approaches help make visible those cultural and social taken-for-granted understandings, practices and structures concerning sexuality that have concrete and material consequences in individuals’ and communities’ everyday lives. By suggesting a relentless grassroots organizing and advocacy work alongside upper-level juridical and political measures, we encourage the audience to reflect with us possible means to enhance young people’s prospects to feel at peace in themselves. Keywords: heteronormativity, homosexuality, norm critical approach, boys, sexuality, equality, sex education

26. Implementing Digital Sexual Violence Workshops for Under-18s during the COVID-19 Pandemic in England and Ireland.

Dr. Debbie Ging (Dublin City University) and Prof. Jessica Ringrose (Institute of Education, University College London)

Bios

Debbie Ging is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the School of Communications at Dublin City University. She teaches and researches on gender, sexuality and digital culture, with a focus on digital hate, online sexual abuse, anti-feminist men's rights politics and the incel phenomenon. Debbie is an internationally recognised expert on the manosphere, and has published over 40 journal articles, book chapters and reports. She is co-editor with Eugenia Siapera of Gender Hate Online: Understanding the New Antifeminism (Palgrave, 2019). Debbie is Ireland Corresponding Editor of the journal Men and Masculinities and is a member of the Editorial Board of New Media and Society.

Jessica Ringrose is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education at the UCL Institute of Education. She is an internationally recognized and widely cited expert on gender equity in education and youth digital sexual cultures and has worked with The UK Home Office, The Department for Education, The Mayor of London, the Association of School and College Leaders (and more) informing policy and practice. She’s undertaken funded collaborative research in the UK, Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. She was the 2020 recipient of The American Educational Research Association (AERA) Distinguished Contributions to Gender Equity in Education Award.

Abstract

Online sexual abuse and violence have become an urgent global problem for women and girls, and in particular for poor women, women of colour and LGBTQ women. From the existing research on image-base sexual abuse (IBSA) - often referred to as ‘revenge porn’ or ‘sexting gone wrong’ - we know that women and girls are much more likely than men and boys to receive unsolicited sexual content (cyberflashing) to be pressured into sending sexual images (nudes), and to face slut-shaming and victim-blaming if their sexual images are shared non-consensually. Online sexual harassment and abuse is an especially urgent issue for young people, for whom digital spaces are key sites of communication, identity formation, self-expression and sexual interaction. The situation has become more extreme during COVID-19, with rates of online abuse and harassment rising considerably as young people have been forced to spend more and more time online. Since the beginning of the pandemic, in the UK, 25% of girls have experienced at least one form of abuse, bullying, or sexual harassment online (Plan International UK, 2020).

In the context of schools, there has been a largely inadequate and ineffective response to online sexual abuse and, in particular, image-based sexual harassment and abuse. Schools are not equipped to deal with the gendered harms that arise from non-consensual image sharing because they lack sufficiently nuanced policies at the intersection of digital literacy, e-safety, and sexual harassment (Ringrose, Regehr and Milne, 2021). This paper reports on the findings of a cross-national study conducted in England and Ireland, which explored pedagogical interventions into the continuum of online and offline sexual violence amongst young people in schools. The respective studies used participatory workshops and focus groups as well as online surveys to explore young people’s experiences of and attitudes towards online sexual abuse and harassment. We also studied how students responded to two workshops developed to raise awareness about gender and sexual violence and intervention strategies. The findings point to the widespread normalisation of digital sexual violence in school peer groups. The participatory research also offered important spaces for young people to critique and challenge sexual violence both online and at school. We make a number of concrete recommendations, pointing in particular to urgent paradigm shifts in sexuality and relationships education and digital safety initiatives.

References

Plan International UK (2020) THE STATE OF GIRLS’ RIGHTS IN THE UK Early insights into the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on girls.

https://plan-uk.org/file/plan-uk-state-of-girls-rights-coronavirus-reportpdf/download?token=gddEAzlz

Ringrose, J., Regehr, K., & Milne, B. (2021). Understanding and Combatting Youth Experiences of Image-Based Sexual Harassment and Abuse.

https://www.ascl.org.uk/ibsha

27. ConCel: Mapping the Dynamics and Online Spread of Incel Ideology

Dr. Debbie Ging (Dublin City University), Dr. Lewys Brace (University of Exeter), Dr. Stephane Baele (University of Exeter)

Bios

Dr. Debbie Ging is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the School of Communications at Dublin City University. She teaches and researches on gender, sexuality and digital culture, with a focus on digital hate, online sexual abuse, anti-feminist men's rights politics and the incel phenomenon. Debbie is an internationally recognised expert on the manosphere, and has published over 40 journal articles, book chapters and reports. She is co-editor with Eugenia Siapera of Gender Hate Online: Understanding the New Antifeminism (Palgrave, 2019). Debbie is Ireland Corresponding Editor of the journal Men and Masculinities and is a member of the Editorial Board of New Media and Society.

Dr. Lewys Brace is a Lecturer in Data Analysis at the College of Social Sciences and and part of the University of Exeter's Q-Step Centre, where he specialises in data science, extremism, terrorism, cybercrime, and Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT). He holds a PhD in Complex Systems Simulation and has expertise in artificial life, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, and criminology/policing. Lewys’ research currently focuses on online extremist radicalisation and the development of computational research methods for the social sciences. He is a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and the lead for the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence's Security and Policing theme.

Dr. Stephane J. Baele (Ph.D. Academie Louvain – University of Namur, Belgium; MA University College London, UK) is Associate Professor and co-Director of the Centre for Advanced International Studies (CAIS). He is also currently the academic coordinator for the International Summer School in International Relations. His research chiefly focuses on the role of language in political violence and (in)security, from a multi-disciplinary perspective, but also on International Relations theories. Exploring a wide range of empirical cases, this work makes use of both qualitative and quantitative methods, has been supported by external funders like CREST or NORFACE, and appears in very different journals from across the social sciences spectrum.

Abstract

In recent years, male supremacist and anti-women formations have become more prevalent online. In particular, considerable attention has been focussed on the incel (or involuntary celibate) community due to a number of high-profile mass killings in the United States, Canada and, more recently, the UK. Incel ideology is a misogynistic formation, whose male proponents blame women for their lack of sexual activity. It operates in the virtual space of the ‘Incelosphere’, a loose conglomerate of online communities spread across various digital platforms. This paper presents the findings of the Con.Cel project, a collaborative study which tracks the spread of incel rhetoric within and across online communities, digital platforms and geographical spaces. We use both interpretive examination of textual and image content and advanced computational methods to map the Incelosphere and to track its dynamics of contagion along four key axes:

1. Radical contagion: the dynamics through which the most extreme ideas gain (or lose) traction within the Incel subculture.

2. Platform contagion: the ways in which Incel ideology spreads across different digital platforms.

3. Ideological contagion: the pathways by which InCel subcultural practices have contributed to - but also drawn from - other extremist ideologies to create a ‘cross-pollination’ of ideas, chiefly with aspects of the online far-right.

4. Geographical contagion: the geographical spread of the Incel movement, with the aim of evaluating its prominence in the UK and the Republic of Ireland.

The aim of this research is to understand more precisely how the four main contagion processes listed above define the evolution of an online movement which has been linked to several incidences of gender-based terrorism over the last decade. While the majority of research conducted to date has focused on the analysis of static datasets captured from a singular platform, this study tracks the movement and transfiguration of incel ideology across several pivotal pathways. Such a detailed and dynamic examination enables us to better understand how and why young men become radicalised into this ideology, how its ideas are communicated internally and externally (linguistically and through images, e.g. memes), and how they spread and manifest across other platforms, groups and geographical spaces.

28. The construction of femininity through consumption of rhinoplasty of the “negroid nose” among Brazil’s new middle class

Carole Myers

Bio

Carole Myers is a doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, where she researches Latin American cultural studies in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures. Her main research interests include beauty, race, class and gender in Brazil, with a specific focus on discourse analysis (interviews and social media) on the consumption of rhinoplasty. Carole is a part-time lecturer for the Open University.

PUBLICATION: (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2022), Chapter “The cultural politics of femvertising of beauty: social media and rhinoplasty of the “negroid nose” in Brazil” included in the edited book collection by Joel Gwynne: “The Cultural Politics of Femvertising”.

Contact details: Carole.myers@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk Carolemye00@gmail.com Tel: 00 44 7833 439207

Abstract

This paper explores the intersection of race, consumer culture, and female beauty standards and practices in Brazil. It analyses the phenomenon of consumption of rhinoplasty of the negroid nose as a site where new economic and cultural realities meet in the construction of femininity. It argues that motivations of women seeking rhinoplasty are governed by racialised beauty norms that value and validate articulations of empowerment through consumption. Drawing on interview material and social media analysis, it uses the voices of Brazilian women for this discussion. The likelihood of many Brazilian women of African ancestry realising their hopes and dreams seemed greater from the early 2000s onwards in the wake of exponential economic growth, a development that saw the emergence of a new middle class, one which was more racially diverse than the traditional white bourgeoisie. The subsequent increase in overall levels of consumption saw the number of rhinoplasty surgeries grow substantially as women from Brazil’s new middle class tried to reach their beauty goals, thus constructing femininity by achieving beauty, something considered a right in Brazilian culture. The rigidity of Brazilian standards of beauty in relation to the nose means that rhinoplasty surgeries typically adhere to dominant beauty ideals, which exclude women from black and non-white backgrounds despite 50% of the Brazilian population declaring itself to be nonwhite. The root of these beauty ideals is linked to white privilege and black inferiority established since colonialism and subsequent uneven development, leaving black women at the bottom of society. Recalling racial hierarchies of beauty, in medical practice rhinoplasty surgery is delineated according to phenotype and, as such, there is an implicit grading of nose type, in that a Caucasian nose is considered the most beautiful and desirable whereas the negroid nose is undesirable and needs to be changed. Carole Myers University of Manchester carole.myers@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk This paper explores how the hopes and desires of women with a negroid nose are linked to notions of beauty while examining this site of consumption and the struggle between their increased economic power and the prevailing structural hierarchies of race, class and gender, thereby contributing to debates on hierarchies of power through the lens of beauty (Edmonds 2010; Jarrín 2017; Hunter 2021, Craig 2002; Caldwell 2007). I place the lived experiences of the women at the centre of this research, as they strive to express agency and autonomy in their quest for beauty capital.

29. ‘Yes, You Are a Misogynist’: Building Feminist Consciousness through Digital Critical Pedagogy

Eugenia Siapera, UCD

Dimitra Mitka, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Bios

Eugenia Siapera is Professor of Information and Communication Studies and head of the ICS School at UCD. Her research interests are in the area of digital and social media, platform governance and hate speech, racism and misogyny. She has written numerous articles and book chapters. Her most recent books are Understanding New Media (Sage, 2018, second edition) and Gender Hate Online (2019, Palgrave, co-edited with Debbie Ging). She is currently working on the third edition of Understanding New Media and on an edited volume on Radical Journalism (with George Souvlis and Seamus Farrell, under contract with Routledge).

Dr. Dimitra Mitka, is a post-doc researcher and a Digital Media lecturer.She holds a PhD degree in Journalism and Digital Mass Media, as well a Master’s degree in Communication, Culture & New Media both from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is also a qualified translator and has been awarded scholarships by the Greek State Grant Authority (ΙΚΥ) for her doctoral studies. Her main research expertise lies in the science of Digital Media with emphasis on Environmental Communication, Digital Marketing and Social Media. She is also occupied with media literacy and media - gender issues. She has worked as adjunct lecturer teaching Digital Media Strategies, New Media, Environmental Communication and has participated in the supervision of many undergraduate dissertations.

Abstract

The proposed paper focuses on the case of ‘Yes, you are a misogynist,’ a popular Facebook page, whose purpose is to share and reflect upon patriarchal gender relations, misogyny, and anti-feminism in Greece. Since Greece ranks at the bottom of the European Institute for Gender Equality’s Index for Gender Equality, it is important to understand feminist actions and their potential contribution to gender equality in Greece. In the last decade, feminist action in digital media proliferated, offering feminists opportunities to organise, agitate and intervene in the public sphere. Movements such as #metoo gave rise to discussions of ‘hashtag feminism’ and its discontents. In focusing on the ‘Yes, you are a misogynist’ page, we seek to understand how digital feminist activism operates in the context of a deeply patriarchal setting and its actual and potential contribution to gender equality. Methodologically, we apply digital ethnography alongside discourse analysis in order to identify who the page posts are addressing and what publics are constructed; and secondly, to understand the main concerns for the page and its followers. Building on the work of Mendes et al. (2019), we consider this page as a digital pedagogical platform. Our preliminary findings indicate that the work the page and its contributors are doing is closer to critical pedagogy ideals (Freire, 1970) than the loosely connected affective (counter)publics of digital activism. In particular, we find that the publics summoned, the various posts and interactions with page contributors (admins and followers) involve feminist praxis (action/experience and reflection), dialogue and peer-to-peer exchange, knowledge co-creation and ‘conscientization’, that is, the process of recognizing internalized structures of oppression and building a critical awareness of social reality. In our discussion, we interrogate the extent to which digital feminist critical pedagogy triggers political action or whether a different or additional kind of social labour and political organising is necessary. We further question the role that Facebook plays in setting limits to feminist actions/reflections while profiting from them. We conclude by reflecting on the tensions between Facebook and its ideology of liberal individualism, the feminist publics of the ‘Yes you are a misogynist’ page, and the deeply entrenched patriarchy and ultra conservative values dominating Greece.

References

Freire, P. (1996[1970]). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

Mendes, K., Ringrose, J., & Keller, J. (2019). Digital feminist activism. OUP.

30. Queer turns in middle age: the solution to Hollywood’s post-40 syndrome?

Esme Fransen

Bio

Esmé Fransen is a PhD student at the University of Stockholm. Her research interests include queer reception, queer female stardom, and audience-industry relations in Hollywood. Currently, she is working on a project exploring the interaction between queer politics, reception strategies, and market structures in the construction and (re)negotiation of lesbian icons in contemporary Hollywood.

Contact

esme.fransen@ims.su.se

Abstract

In 2009, just a year shy of turning 40, Rachel Weisz announced in a Vanity Fair España interview her desire to become a lesbian icon. The steps to becoming one, as implied in the interview, were to first acknowledge her lesbian audience – something that same interview did – and to then play a lesbian character in film, a step completed less than nine years later with the film Disobedience (Sebastián Lelio, 2017). By the time she played her second queer role in The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018), Weisz had not just queered her on-screen roles but also her overall star image, effectively profiling herself as one of the major lesbian icons of her time.

Weisz’ path, of course, was far from unique, even if the announcement of her desire was unusual. In recent years, Hollywood has seen an large number of heterosexual female stars turn to lead roles in lesbian romance films. While ‘playing gay’ has long been seen as a prestigious display of acting skill or a way to create more roles for women, the degree to which the lesbian fantasy of their roles is drawn into the actresses’ overall star image marks a notable difference. But balancing this with a mainstream appeal is no easy feat: if she leans too heavily into the lesbian fantasy, her sexuality may be put into question to a degree that affects her mainstream appeal; yet if she distances herself too much from it or too obviously uses it for marketing purposes, the queer female audience may feel baited and reject her.

This paper explores the rise of a queered yet heterosexual femininity in the images of middle-aged female Hollywood stars. Through a case study of Rachel Weisz and Cate Blanchett, two actresses who have taken distinctly queer turns after the age of 40, I argue that the purposeful queering of heterosexual female stars serves as an effective marketing strategy to subvert heteronormative expectations tied to age and gender. Coopting the increasingly visible queer female audience’s interpretative strategies, these stars can ensure the survival of their careers without adjusting their roles to what Hollywood has deemed appropriate for women in middle age. In doing so, they not only expand their overall market value, but also restructure the way both femininity and queerness can resonate within Hollywood’s ideological structures.

31. “It’s my place, it’s where I can be myself.” – women’s negotiations of the pleasures of using a Finnish NSFW platform

Maria Vihlman Lic.Soc.Sc., Specialist in Clinical Sexology (NACS), Doctoral student in Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (IDA, SRC 2019–2022/2025) & Rethinking sexuality: A geopolitics of digital sexual cultures in Estonia, Sweden and Finland (Östersjöstiftelsen 2020–2022), Gender studies, University of Turku, Finland - (This talk will not be offered)

Bio

Maria Vihlman (Lic.Soc.Sc.) is a Doctoral Candidate at the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies, University of Turku, Finland, a practicing clinician (Specialist in Clinical Sexology, NACS), and a trainer and clinical supervisor in sexology, currently working in projects Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (The Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland) and Rethinking sexuality: A geopolitics of digital sexual cultures in Estonia, Sweden and Finland (Östersjöstiftelsen). Their ongoing Ph.D. research focuses on digital intimacies in a Finnish NSFW online community.

Abstract

Online spaces are in many ways crucial for erotic self-expression, sexual exploration, and creating and maintaining intimate relationships, not least due to the global pandemic and the social distancing initiatives. Public discussion around women, sexuality, and online spaces usually focuses on risks women face in these environments ranging from harassment to exploitation and abuse. As crucial as these viewpoints are, there is an urgent need to also draw on women’s experiences of pleasure to imagine and build safer spaces for sexual existing, as stated by Carole S. Vance already in 1984. Alastonsuomi.com (“Naked Finland”, est. 2007) is a Finnish NSFW image-based gallery and social networking site catering to diverse user motivations and erotic tastes and having over 115 000 registered users in a country of 5,5 million inhabitants. Founded on an empirical investigation of Alastonsuomi.com, the paper focuses on the women users’ views on the significance of the platform for their pleasure, sexuality, and sociability, exploring how gender structures the possibilities to inhabit and enjoy the online space and is structured in the process of the platform use. The study is based on digital ethnography on Alastonsuomi.com involving participant observation and conducting a total of 31 interviews with the platform users during 2020-2021. Sixteen of the interviewees self-identified as a woman or gender-nonconforming woman. Although official gender statistics of Alastonsuomi.com are unavailable, women form a clear minority of the user base primarily consisting of (heterosexual) men, resulting in the users’ views of the platform being both “a heaven for women” and overtly misogynistic. The women participants concertedly underline the value of the sexualized platform space for their pleasure, sexuality, and sociability. Three interconnected themes emerge: the pleasure of being seen as a sexual being without being shamed; the pleasure of seeing a variation of bodies and sexualities also outside normative standards; and the pleasure of belonging and connecting meaningfully with others in ways both sexual and not. During the interviews, the platform's significance unfolds not separately from but in connection to the adversities women face in both online and offline environments. This highlights the importance of recognizing the ambiguity of spaces for negotiating and researching gendered online pleasures. Keywords: digital intimacies, NSFW, online platforms, pleasure, sexuality, women

32. A Girls' Eye-view. Exploring girlhood media representations through the lens of Italian female adolescence

Romana Andò romana.ando@uniroma1.it

Leonardo Campagna leonardo.campagna95@gmail.com

Bios

Romana Andò is an Associate Professor of ‘Sociology of Communication and Fashion’ and ‘Audience Research’ at Sapienza University of Rome, where she is the Head of the international Master Programme in Fashion Studies. Her research interests concern audience studies: media consumption practices, fandom practices, TV engagement and social television, fashion consumption; fashion sustainability, girlhood and gender studies. From 2020 is Co-Investigator of the AHRC-funded project ‘A Girls’ Eye-view: Girlhood on the Italian Screen since the 1950s’, coordinated by Danielle Hipkins.

Leonardo Campagna is a PhD student in the History of Europe PhD Program at Sapienza University of Roma and a research assistant for "A Girl's Eye view", a project by the University of Exeter and Sapienza University of Rome.

His research interests are: Italian LGBTQ+ history, queer theory and gender studies, fashion and its relationship with contemporary politics.

Abstract

In recent years we have observed a significant shift in representations of girlhood compared to similar content in the nineties and early 2000s: in the last few years the OTT (Over the Top Television) services, in particular Netflix, have in fact released many TV series which show teens, whose sex, sexuality, and gender are not taboo subjects. And this trend has been promptly appropriated by Italian TV networks and cinema industry. Actually these Italian TV shows question many crucial issues with respect to girlhood studies: at a general level they stress the representation of female adolescence within media culture and the multiple possibilities of appropriation open to young people as their personalities evolve; it also emphasizes the actualization of girl friendship as a postfeminist idea of sisterhood (Winch 2013). They obviously put the issues of sex and sexualisation in the spotlight, but more generally they lead us to reflect on the aesthetic pleasures and pleasurable experience of teen film (Colling 2017). At the same time, they speak to more recent work that tries to show how teen television expresses ‘affective dissonances’ with regard to ideals of postfeminist girlhood (Dobson and Kanai, 2018).

The aim of this paper is to present the first insights of a research project, A Girls' Eye-view: Girlhood on the Italian screen since the 1950s funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK. Thanks to the participation of 6 Italian high schools from different cities (small and large) and regions (from north to south), we have collected over 70 interviews with girls aged between 14 and 19 years old and coordinated a series of focus groups (1 or 2 for each school). From a methodological perspective, this first step can be framed as a qualitative approach; but our goal has been to render this project very participatory, by involving students and teachers in its evolution and by including younger female viewers in the analysis of contemporary film texts: as Alison Harvey has recently summarized, reflection and iteration should form the two keystones of any feminist research project (Harvey, 2019)

As our results demonstrate that TV shows and films such as Baby, Skam Italia, Anni da cane (Dog Years), 18 regali (18 presents), Mare fuori etc particularly provide female adolescents with many different points of temporary attachment, points of suture within media discourses; in other words they can select and combine different kinds of female role models creating a sort of bricolage of personalities that is strongly consistent with the idea of an identity under construction, tentative, contradictory, but open, productive and definitely experimental.

33. Troubled Stars and Queens of Re-Invention: Intimacy, ordinariness, and self-transformation in the celebrity health narratives of Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez

Fredrika Thelandersson

Bio

Fredrika Thelandersson is a lecturer and post doc researcher in Media and Communication Studies at Lund University, Sweden. Her research is broadly situated in the fields of Media, Culture, Gender, and Affect studies, with particular focus on sad affects in popular culture and on social media. Fredrika is currently working on a book about discourses around mental illness in women’s magazines, celebrity culture and on social media platforms, which is forthcoming with Palgrave MacMillan. She is also involved in several research projects about media and mental health in the Scandinavian context.

Abstract

Since the mid-2010s, mental health and illness have been increasingly visible in media and popular culture. In the world of celebrity media this means a growing outspokenness around mental illness diagnoses, substance abuse and trauma. The early days of internet driven celebrity reporting was characterized by speculation about how sane or “crazy” a certain female celebrity might have been (as in the infamous 2007 breakdown of Britney Spears or the “unhinged” behavior of Lindsay Lohan). In the contemporary mental health aware media landscape, however, female celebrities are speaking out and owning their diagnoses, addictions, and traumas in ways that map conveniently onto neoliberal ideals of femininity and entrepreneurship.

This paper presents two case studies from my forthcoming book on 21^st century media and female mental health. It analyzes the celebrity health narratives of pop stars Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez. Through these cases I discuss the increasing ordinariness of celebrities, who now have to maintain the relationship to their fans via myriad social media channels that puts excessive focus on intimacy and “realness,” a framework within which being open about mental illness becomes an enhancing feature of an “authentic” brand rather than something to be ashamed of.

Lovato’s celebrity health narrative shows how mental distress can be successfully folded into a celebrity brand and enhance its market value, as she has been able to make a literal profit off of work that utilizes the tragic events in her life while reinforcing a neoliberal ethos of self-work and self-transformation. But this cannot be read only through a cynical lens that highlights the profitable elements of her suffering, because in sharing her story fans who have been through similar things are able to connect with and give support to each other. Gomez’s health narrative can be read in a comparable way - she waited to share her struggles until the than detracted from her celebrity brand (her own makeup brand prominently features mental health advice in marketing campaigns). But at the same time, in the act of speaking publicly about her issues she also opened up new spaces for talking about things like depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. The analysis of these health narratives shows how market-friendly mental illness awareness and supportive conversations around mental distress exist in tension with each other in the world of celebrity media.

34. Acceptance within the binary? Social media and gender fluidity in Norway

Luise Salte

Bio

I am a PhD Candidate, teaching and researching staff at the Department of Media, Culture and Social Sciences at the University of Stavanger, Norway. My phd-project concerns emerging digital social spaces in a public sphere perspective. Currently I focus on visually oriented social media such as Instagram and Tik Tok. I especially consider counterpublic positions, (popular) culture and perceptions of online space(s). Previously, I have researched hijab debates in the Norwegian society in a rhetorical citizenship perspective. My studies are mainly qualitative, and while media oriented, I am interested in a range of topics concerning public sphere workings.

Contact details:

luise.salte@uis.no

Department of Media and Social Sciences

University of Stavanger

Kjell Arholms gate 41

4021 Stavanger, Norway

Abstract

The case for this study is chosen based on an observation of a possible “silencing” of non-binary gender realities as a binary transgender experience gains recognition in Norwegian society. While there has been an increase in attention and sensitivity to binary transgender experiences in the Norwegian public, there is seemingly a lack of attention to non-binary gender experiences. Pilot-interviews with two Norwegian public trans men, seen as often participating in public debates regarding questions on gender heteronormativity, provides the preliminary material for the observation.

Using Instagram (/Tik Tok) and the Norwegian society as cases of emerging multimodal social media in digital societies, this study hence aims to grasp how non-binarity discourses manifest in increasingly digital public spheres with a rise in recognition towards gender fluidity in the binary sense. The research question steering this study hence concerns how non-binary discourse manifest on Instagram (/Tik Tok), employing an exploratory methodology (currently moving from hashtags, to snowball sampling between (publicly available) creators).

Preliminary findings suggests that there might be a tendency of gender fluidity acceptance within a binary gender model closely connected to traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, and that main mobile social media cultures works (re)productive of this tendency in maintaining classic stereotypical notions of “male” and “female”. This thus illuminates (lacking) ontological contests, disguised as “full” gender liberation.

The study address that prevailing limitations might exist for non-binary people in particular when the accepted transgender experience is the one concerned with “correction surgery”. In accepting and acknowledging the possibility of being “born in the wrong body” (actually the name of a Norwegian popular tv-show aiming to increase acceptance of transgender experiences), needing to move between the one gender to the other seen from the majority’s perspective, the gender structure is maintained. Such requirements to exist within the binary, as either male or female, depicts problems to the otherwise liberating turns in societies where binary transgender people are recognized as subjects before the law. Moreover, this might be amplified if the dominant success narrative relating to transgender experiences and realities are traditional gender stereotypes closely connected to femininity and masculinity. Hence, this study illuminates and investigates possibly limiting and excluding effects of hegemonic discourses, how mobile social media might enable or

35. Femo-nationalism, racial capitalism and intersectional contradictions: representations of racialised sexual difference in the UK and Germany

Dr Christy Kulz

Dr Naaz Rashid

Bios

Dr Christy Kulz is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Technical University in Berlin researching migration and intersectional, affective processes of racialisation and inequality in urban spaces of Europe. Previously Christy was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge and is author of “Factories for Learning. Making race, class and inequality in the neoliberal academy”. (email: crkulz@hotmail.com)

Dr Naaz Rashid is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex. She is author of “Veiled Threats: Representing the Muslim Woman in Public Policy Discourses” and her research is focused on the intersections of race, gender, class, and religion in urban spaces.

(email: n.rashid@sussex.ac.uk)

Abstract

In Sex and Secularism (2017) Joan Scott suggests that “…racialized sexual difference is a structural dimension of secular modernity and its capitalist economy; it is at the heart of the regulation and reproduction of the identities of Western European nation states.” (Bracke 2018). Representations of such racialized sexual differences as well as sexualised racial differences permeate the media and popular culture as well as the wider political landscape characterised by rising nationalism.

In Femonationalism, Sarah Farris analyses the apparent paradox visible in Western Europe in the convergence of feminist and far-right parties in propagating anti-migrant and anti-Muslim sentiment. Farris argues that the focus on Muslim women, as part of a broader civilisationist discourse, is underpinned by the logic of capitalism; there is an economic rationale behind the idea of Muslim women as redeemable subjects as they can function as an army of labour.

This paper will focus on political campaigning and media coverage in order to explore the representation of emergent racialised femininities and masculinities in this climate. It will begin by looking at how forms of neoliberalism and nationalism interact with feminist politics within each national context and specifically how this is used to mobilise gendered anti-Muslim racism (Islamophobia) and anti-migrant racism and xenophobia. We will interrogate how colonial tropes of unveiling and civilisationist ideals about liberating ‘oppressed women’ work in tandem with notions of white women as a civilising force (through a discussion of ‘imperial feminism’ in the UK and/or the bearer of appropriate ‘biodeutsch’ children in Germany). The paper will argue that this is not restricted to actors on the right of the political spectrum, highlighting the role of centre-right- and left-wing political parties and discourses in fostering and normalising gendered Islamophobic views/anti-Muslim and anti-migrant racism. We will then examine the representation of emergent femininities and masculinities, particularly in relation to sexualised racial differences as exemplified in the moral panics surrounding the ‘grooming scandals’ in the UK and the Cologne New Year’s Eve attacks in Germany. As Farris suggests, this is an “unresolved conflict between ex-colonial subjects and Western European nationalisms” which manifests itself by foregrounding “male migrants as a sexual and sexist threat and female migrants as passive objects to be assimilated to models of western womanhood” (2017:77)

36. Beam_me_up_Softboi – collective subjectivities

and emotional masculinities in online spaces

Dr Poppy Wilde

Bio

Dr Poppy Wilde is a Lecturer in Media and Communication at Birmingham City University. Her work focuses on what it means and how feels to be posthuman, by exploring how posthuman subjectivities are enabled and embodied. She has conducted autoethnographic projects exploring the lived experience of MMORPG gaming with particular focus on the avatar-gamer as an embodiment of posthuman subjectivity. In her current work she is extending this to explore posthuman conceptions of death; the contemporary media fascination with zombies, considering this as a posthuman preoccupation; and posthuman analyses of contemporary media, from Queer Eye to the icon Lady Gaga.

Abstract

Softboi, or softboy, is a term that has come to mean a man who embodies a variety of less-than-desirable traits, but tries to turn this into a manipulative play for the attention of (predominantly hetero-) romantic prospects. Unlike his predecessor, the fuckboi, the softboi is often open about his undesirable attributes, and weaves these “flaws” into his charms. Often discovered through dating apps, the softboi articulates and crafts his subjectivity through text messages and online profiles, which both promise and deliver on undesirable behaviours. Presumably, for some, this is a successful dating technique. However, others become the unwitting entertainment for friends, families and networks of those on the receiving end of their messages. In this paper, I employ a textual analysis of the Instagram account beam_me_up_softboi to explore the articulation of emotional masculinity through the softboi further.

Beam_me_up_softboi is made up of screenshots from an unknown number of contributors, capturing and calling out softboi behaviour. Through this account, I argue that the softboi is denied validation. The softboi speaks of a generation in crisis, and a form of toxic masculinity (Banet-Weiser, 2018; de Boise, 2019) whose only way to operate is by acknowledging its own toxicity. The softboi therefore both exists within and outside of the current visibility and critique of a ‘toxic masculinity’. Except, in contrast to the macho toxicity identified by such discussions, the emotional exploitation that the softboi represents is interesting in its use of a form of feminist “woke”-ness, wherein the softboi demonstrates an understanding of gendered norms and stereotypes, and displays a vulnerability that might have previously been considered feminine, while still engaging in sexism and misogyny. The practice of naming and shaming softboi behaviour on Instagram (rather than the public shaming of individuals) perverts the intended affect of desire or pity, instead creating networked affects of humour, mockery, and disdain. Unlike public shaming, the collective subjectivity of “softboi” operates as a reminder of the postmodern scepticism of self, whilst also “othering” those who engage in softboi behaviour. Individuality of the softboi is refused, and networked affect denies the perpetrator the manipulative power they desire. I consider the collective subjectivities from a posthuman lens; as an assemblage of entities that intra-act in ways that allow certain subject positions to emerge, and negates others. This paper is single authored, but part of a larger project with Dr Adrienne Evans of the Postdigital Cultures Network, Coventry University.

37. Aging Male Melodrama and the Post-Soviet Generational Conflict

Teet Teinemaa

Bio

Teet Teinemaa works as a lecturer in Film Studies at Tallinn University. He received his PhD from the University of Warwick. Teinemaa serves as the co-editor of Baltic Screen Media Review and his articles have appeared in journals such as Film International and Studies of Art and Architecture - Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi. He is the convenor of an international MA programme Literature, Visual Culture, and Film Studies. His research interests are post-Soviet masculinities, ageing, and nostalgia in Eastern European film.

Email: teinemaa@tlu.ee

Abstract

The representation of changing masculinities in the Eastern European cinemas have lately received considerable academic attention (see Király 2021; Györi 2021; Durys 2021; Kalmár 2017; Mazierska, Mroz, and Ostrowska 2016; Goscilo and Hashamova 2010). The reasons for this interest are manifold. There still exist a notable gap regarding the understanding of gender on the screens of the European East, while gender relations in the countries of the region have gone through significant changes due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rapid implementation of the logic of market economy. The most dominant terms emerging from the debate regarding changing masculinities on the Eastern European screens are the “crises” of masculinity, generational conflict, and male melodrama as the key genre via which the former two anxieties are played out.

Generational conflict suggests a relation to age(ing) as often the swiftly changing socio-cultural environment of these countries, causing the “crises” of masculinity, is explored in the films through the fraught relationship between fathers and sons, grandfathers and grandsons, or via all three generations (see also de Cordova 1990: 260). Yet, the intersectionality between age and masculinity often finds itself in a peculiar double bind. As Kristen Springer and Dawne Mouzon put it: “most research on hegemonic masculinities focuses on younger men and most datasets of aging adults do not include measures of masculinity. This two-pronged omission renders older men relatively invisible” (2019: 183). This is all the more problematic given that generational difference regarding masculinities clearly illustrates the unstable nature of masculinities and thus can be argued to lay at very heart of the supposed crises of masculinity. This paper looks into a particularly understudied part of the Eastern European cinema, the Estonian Cinema, and via close textual analysis will explore several male melodramas to illustrate how the films apply the melodramatic mode to criticise dominant forms of masculinities and offer more caring alternatives. As such, (aging) male melodrama is seen as an important site in which masculinities are renegotiated and where models of less domineering masculinities are offered to the wider public.

38. Glory: Deconstructing the Older Gay Man in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

Josep M. Amengol, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha

Bio

Josep M. Armengol is Professor of American literature and Gender studies at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. He has published on literary representations of masculinity in prestigious academic journals such as Signs, MELUS, Critique, Men and Masculinities, the Hemingway Review, Journal of Gender Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, among others. His latest books include Debating Masculinity (Men’s Studies Press, 2009), Richard Ford and the Fiction of Masculinities (the winner of the 2010 AEDEAN literary scholarship prize), Queering Iberia (2012), Embodying Masculinities (2013), Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World (Palgrave, 2014), Masculinities in Black and White (Palgrave, 2014, awarded with the ‘Javier Coy’ prize for best monograph by SAAS), and Masculinities and Literary Studies (Routledge, 2017). He is also one of the main Editors of the academic journal Men and Masculinities, as well as co-editor of the “Masculinity Studies” series at Peter Lang. Currently, he coordinates a EU-funded research project on masculinities and aging in contemporary European literatures and cinemas (www.mascage.eu)

Email: JoseMaria.Armengol@uclm.es

Abstract

If (older) gay men have recurrently been stereotyped as hypersexual and as sexually voracious, they have also been represented as weak and effeminate, miserable and lonely, and as less manly than their heterosexual counterparts (Goltz; Freeman). Quite often, as Goltz reminds us, the two stereotypes intersect, as in classic films such as Death in Venice, Gods and Monsters, or Love and Death on Long Island, to name but a few, where ageism and homophobia combine to judge intergenerational relations as inappropriate and gay characters as “dirty old men” eager to recover their lost youth. Given these negative images, it is no wonder, then, that both youthism and ableism have become part and parcel of contemporary gay culture, which may also be linked to the few positive cultural images available of aging or disabled gay male bodies (Goltz). This paper will demonstrate, however, how (auto)biographical narratives of older gay men, or “egodocuments,” may be useful to rethink such traditional (mis)conceptions, focusing on Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar´s film, Pain and Glory (2019), as a (semi-)autobiographical re-vision of traditional representations of gay men’s aging. While Almodovar’s protagonist and alter-ego, Salvador Mallo, appears as “prematurely aged” (Curtis and Thompson) due to bodily pain and disability, the film also travels back and forth from Mallos’s childhood and youth to his maturity. This shows aging not only as a life-course experience, but also helps redefine it as a “queer” rather than linear or “straight” experience (Halberstam), allowing for both “pain and glory” to coexist in old age.

39. Popular Personas, Alternative Motherhoods: Instamoms in Turkey

Emel Uzun Avci, Burcu Şenel Alpuğan

Bio

Dr. Emel Uzun Avci is an assistant professor in Department of Radio Television and Cinema at Faculty of Communication, Hacettepe University in Ankara-Turkey. She has completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in the Department of Sociology in 2016. She studied on Turkish nationalism and Kurdish Question through the personal narratives of lay Kurds and Turks living in Turkey. She gave lectures on political history of modern Turkey, narrative inquiry, sociology of communication and political communication. (MSc Communication Sciences, Ankara University, Ankara-Turkey), (BA Public Relations and Publicity, Ankara University, Ankara-Turkey). Her academic interests are nationalism/everyday nationalism, narrative, storytelling, popular culture, everyday life.

Email: emeluzun5@gmail.com

Mobile: 00905373456317

Burcu Şenel Alpuğan is a Ph.D. Candidate, writing her dissertation about new media, biopolitics and popular culture in Department of Communication Sciences at Faculty of Communication, Hacettepe University in Ankara-Turkey, and works as a lecturer at the same department. (MSc Communication Sciences, Hacettepe University, Ankara-Turkey), (BA English Language and Literature, Hacettepe University, Ankara-Turkey). Her academic interests include gender/LGBTI studies, ethnography/media ethnography, everyday life studies, popular culture, new media studies and digital storytelling.

Email: busenel@gmail.com

Abstract

Motherhood is a phenomenon constructed in sociocultural and economic terms as much as referring to a biologic and bodily experience. Its meaning and the practice of “mothering” change according to the society and time, gain new attributes bringing together different norms, requirements and toolboxes. In relation, motherhood is a “trend” topic also in Turkey, where womanhood, motherhood and family are the topics constantly raised by the official discourse, struggling to construct the norms and fix their meanings in alliance with neoliberal patriarchal and neoconservative ideals. However, as both the discourse and everyday life are the sites of struggle, we fortunately come across and produce alternative narratives of motherhood, raised by both the organized and ordinary voices. Social media platforms are the significant meeting points where we can hear the mixture of all these voices and reach the tools to produce our own narratives and representations.

Instamoms, the influencer mothers of Instagram, are good examples both for using new media devices and creating their own motherhood representations. Within this context, in this paper, we aim to concentrate on the narratives of three Instamoms in Turkish Instagram, who openly claim that they try to create an “alternative” narrative of motherhood and also representation of Instamoms, whose Instagram contents mostly reproduce the patriarchal and neoliberal ideology, as it is shown in several researches conducted in relation to influencer mothers in Turkey. Together with our one-year daily observations of three Instamom’s platform practices, the contents they share and their everyday interactions with their followers on Instagram, we will analyze their motherhood narratives within the framework of three interrelated notions: feminist theory, new media and neoliberalism. We will structure the analysis upon the subtopics such as the general impression of mothers’ being “expert” of child care, division of domestic labor, work and career life, body and the beauty myth together with the creation of needs and consumer culture. In conclusion, with this analysis, we aim to explore how these women bargain with the hegemonic motherhood and femininity and what kinds of tactics and narratives they use on this way. We consider this analysis and paper as part of an attempt to share and discuss more about “different” kinds of motherhoods, distort the hegemonic discourse, hear and understand the diversity in women experiences and open new paths for the possibility of alternative motherhoods.

Keywords: motherhood, Instagram, feminism, neoliberalism, narrative

40. Traditional values discourse and representations of women and LGBT+ individuals in the pro-Kremlin media

Valentyna Shapovalova, PhD Fellow, Section for Media Studies, Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen. vasha@hum.ku.dk

Bio

Valentyna Shapovalova is a PhD Fellow in the Media Studies section of the Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen. Her project is a theoretical and empirical exploration of the traditional values discourse in the contemporary Russian media online, including the state-controlled as well as independent outlets. Critically exploring this hegemonic discourse, Valentyna attempts to illuminate and question the role of the Russian state in the domestic mediated processes - with particular focus on gender and sexuality. Valentyna’s main research interests include gender and the media; digital disinformation and propaganda; feminist media studies; non-democratic media systems; and critical discourse analysis.

Contact: vasha@hum.ku.dk

Abstract

Traditional values have become one of the main pillars in the ideological structure of Russia in the last decade (Stepanova, 2015) and are continuously used as a veil in governmental attempts to promote conservative gender norms and heterosexual practices (Muravyeva, 2018). Traditional values have moreover previously been described as a component in the strategic (re)masculinization of the Russian national identity (Riabov and Riabova, 2014, Voronova, 2017), where stereotypically masculine traits are continuously assigned greater value, with the traits traditionally understood as feminine being downgraded (Riabov and Riabova, 2014). With the mainstream media in Russia being employed as a tool for dissemination of state narratives (Oates, 2016), this article is preoccupied with empirically examining how the heteronormative discourse of traditional values shapes the representations of women, and the feminine, as well as LGBT+ individuals, in the domestic pro-Kremlin media. In an attempt to nuance and critically assess these media representations in the contemporary Russian context, I employ Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992), and approach traditional values as hegemonic and discursive, with a lot of the arguments surrounding gendered topics being portrayed implicitly. The data sample consists of online articles from three large pro-Kremlin media outlets, and covers topics of domestic violence and LGBT+ issues, as well as a case study of the International Women’s Day celebration on the 8th of March. The analysis lagely illustrates a mediated naturalization of certain normative gendered behaviors as well as heterosexuality, and a rejection and silencing, albeit often implicit, of the others, according to the heterosexual matrix (Butler, 1990) and in line with the traditional values discourse. However, the analysis also illustrates that empirical outliers occur, in which the traditional values discourse is countered, and representations are more nuanced.

References

Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London:

Routledge.

Fairclough, Norman (1992). Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press

Muravyeva, M. (2018). “Should women have more rights?” Traditional Values and Austerity in Russia. Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.

Oates, S. (2016). Russian media in the digital age: propaganda rewired. Russian Politics 1: 4, pp. 398–417

Riabov, O. and Riabova, T. (2014). The Remasculinization of Russia? Problems of Post-Communism, 61(2), 23–35.

Stepanova, E. (2015). ‘The Spiritual and Moral Foundation of Civilization in Every Nation for Thousands of Years’: The Traditional Values Discourse in Russia. Politics, Religion & Ideology, 16(2–3), 119–136.

41. I am Woman: Trending TikToks and Intersecting Gender Expressions

Alicen Rushevics, M.A.

Bio

Alicen Rushevics is a second year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Earning her M.A. in philosophy at Gonzaga University in 2020, Ali’s research has predominantly focused on rhetorics of trauma, grief, and violence, especially in how these discourses situate and construct identity across generations. While her interests have mostly remained in theoretical considerations of these discourses, recently she has been drawn to the ways they intersect in digital spaces.

Abstract

In Fall of 2021, Emmy Meli performed her song “I am Woman” on TikTok. Now viewed over 32.4 million times, the fully released song has topped charts on Apple Music and Spotify for US listeners. Echoing the 1970’s feminist call of the same name, “I am Woman” has inspired thousands of videos throughout TikTok, often focusing on the lyrics: “I am woman. I am fearless. I am sexy. I’m divine. I’m unbeatable. I’m creative. Honey, you can get in line. I am feminine. I am masculine. I am anything I want.” In relation to these lyrics, videos often depict different gender expressions, though are most closely associated with femininity or womanhood. As social media has changed the ways we communicate globally, TikTok, with its multiple modalities for expressing meaning, affords expanded discursive representations of identity. By exploring the “I am Woman” trend, started by @emmymelimusic on October 20, 2021, this paper aims for an empirical exploration of intersecting expressions of identity through the unique affordances of the TikTok platform.

As of January 2022, over 500,000 videos have been made using the original “I am Woman” sound, and thousands more using the few different iterations of the sound. In response to a popular comment on the original video, Emmy Meli made a “nonbinary version” titled “I am Human” which used the same lyrics but replaced “woman” with “human”. This sound has since garnered over 12,000 videos. TikTok videos are not just organized by hashtags, like other social media platforms, they are arranged by sound or filter, and shown on a user’s algorithmic “For You” page. The ability to use this sound with videos or pictures offers a rich rhetorical space for creative meaning-making. After interacting with many of these videos, and being shown iterations of it on my “For You” page, some patterns have emerged at the intersections of different identity expressions. One of the most viewed videos using this sound is by @shinanova, an Inuit creator out of Canada. In December of 2021, Shina Nova received her facial markings, a traditional Inuit act, and made a video of that process using the “I am Woman” sound. Shina Nova’s video has since been viewed over 30 million times, and since sparked conversations about revitalizing cultural expressions of gender. This paper will explore patterned intersections of body size, trauma experience, sexual orientation, and ethnicity with gender expression as performed through TikTok videos.

42. Redpilling as microfascism: the archaic roots of emergent patriarchal knowledge and action

Jack Z. Bratich

Bio

Jack Z. Bratich is professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. He has written dozens of articles, book chapters, and essays about the intersection of popular culture and political culture. He is author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008) and coeditor, along with Jeremy Packer and Cameron McCarthy, Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality (2003). His recent work includes

“From pick-up artists to incels: Con(fidence) games, networked misogyny, and the failure of neoliberalism” (2019, co-authored with Sarah Banet-Weiser) and On Microfascism: Gender, War, Death (Common Notions, 2022).

Abstract

Redpilling is the claimed practice of “waking men up” to the realities of power in contemporary society. The RedPill worldview was birthed in the digital “manosphere” and could initially be found among pick-up artist forums, Men’s Rights Activist communities, and incel-oriented platforms. Redpilling from the outset was an appropriation of feminism, a form of masculine consciousness-raising, awakening men to the perniciousness of feminism and inspiring them to restore patriarchal order.

This paper argues that Redpilling as an emergent form of masculine self-knowledge invokes and re-enacts archaic patriarchal pacts. Redpilling is a gendered rite of passage that revives older initiation rites through knowledge imparted by other men, specifically in hostility to women. Specifically, this paper investigates Redpilling as an education of the affects, training men to transform themselves through misogynistic dispositions based on resentment, fear, insecurity, and nihilistic fun.

While Redpilling has been linked to post-truth types of misinformation, I argue that its cultural form is much closer to traditional (avowed) types of truth production, specifically becoming a true man.

Redpilling is less about information and more about transformation, an awakening in which revelation is experienced as a passage to a new mode of existence—not just changing your mind but changing your life.

Redpill is an initiatory revelation resulting in subjective transformation, what I deem to be a central component of microfascism. Studies of fascist culture have highlighted the importance of subjective renewal along with its eliminationist aspects. This revival at fascism’s subjective core involves masculinized ritual elements—separation, imitation, and internal codes, all of which are tied to death and rebirth, thus comprising a fundamental homi-suicidal tendency.

Such an analysis has implications for how we think of the manosphere in general. The manosphere is simultaneously a subset of the internet and an effort to become the entirety of the internet. It mimics the archaic sphere of masculine secret societies that first separate themselves from women through initiatory patriarchal pacts and then project themselves through society as patriarchal order. The manosphere signals patriarchy not just in its content (men’s rights, revival of patriarchal abstractions, toxicity) but in its sovereign form as initiation and expansion/imposition.

Ultimately, emergent masculinities through Redpilling explicitly and implicitly position themselves in the legacy of fascist war bands (ancient Männerbunde and modern squadrismo). Their emergent qualities indicate a new terrain and set of tools in a longer-standing war on women.

43. Love and Cancellation: The Queer Beauty Community on YouTube

Prof. Dr. Misha Kavka, Media Studies Department, University of Amsterdam

Bio

Misha Kavka is Professor of Cross-Media Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on gender, celebrity and affect in relation to television, film and media technologies. She is the author of Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy (2008) and Reality TV (2012), and the co-editor of volumes on transnational reality television, gothic culture and feminist theory. She is on the editorial board of Celebrity Studies journal, and is the co-author, with Rachel Berryman, of articles exploring vlogging and intimacy.

Contact: Misha Kavka

Media Studies Department

Turfdraagsterpad 9

1012XT Amsterdam

Netherlands m.kavka@uva.nl

Abstract

The phenomenal growth of the self-described ‘beauty community’ on YouTube has been in train for over a decade, producing millions of make-up tutorials, product reviews, cosmetic industry partnerships and even self-branded lines. Aside from representing a major content genre on YouTube, the beauty community has also proved to be a key site for examining the overlap of celebrity, commodification and self-disclosure that has underpinned the rapid rise of influencer culture. Although scholars have addressed issues of gender, class and (to a lesser extent) race in relation to influencers, there has been little sustained attention paid to the role of sexuality in the beauty community, despite the fact that many of the top English-speaking beauty gurus on YouTube – e.g., James Charles, Jeffree Star, Nikkie Tutorials, Manny MUA and Patrick Starrr – are gay men or transwomen. The unapologetic visibility demanded both by the medium (of vlogging) and the means (of wearing make-up) has undoubtedly fed into our current post-dichotomous understanding of gender, given that queer beauty influencers and their avid followers have been central to transforming cosmetics from a tool of feminine normativity into an everyday practice of gender fluidity.

Within this transformation, the complex tactics of mediated intimacy used by beauty vloggers are by now well documented, but events of recent years have been notable for the breakdown of intimacies, both within the queer beauty community and between influencers and their followers. Scandals, call-outs and cancellations have abounded since 2018, with friendship bust-ups (e.g., ‘Dramageddon’ of 2018 involving Jeffree Star, and Dramageddon 2.0 of 2019 between James Charles and Tati Westbrook), accusations of pederasty (James Charles in 2021) and the unearthing of racist tweets and videos (Jeffree Star and Shane Dawson, 2020-21) leading to apology videos, plummeting subscriber counts and loss of commercial contracts. Here, I explore the negative intimacy of commercialised good feelings by focusing on the participatory documentary by Shane Dawson, The Beautiful World of Jeffree Star (YouTube 2019), which tracks the production of Star and Dawson’s outrageously successful ‘Conspiracy’ line at the same time as it uncannily gestures toward the implosion of the commercial, medial and affective community on which they depend. As against the fierce accusations of bad behaviour amongst queer vloggers as well as between vloggers and their (erstwhile) followers, I argue that self-disclosure necessarily over-exposes, thereby repositioning cancellation not as a moral gesture but rather as a social regulatory mechanism enacted through negative intimacy.

44. The Portrayal of an Emancipated Woman in Perfume Commercial

Dr. Viktorija Car: Associate Professor, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Political Science, Lepušićeva 6, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia. viktorija.car@fpzg.hr

Lana Gajger, MA: University of Zagreb, Faculty of Political Science, Lepušićeva 6, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia. lanagajger@gmail.com

Bios

Viktorija Car, PhD, is Associate Professor at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, at the Media and Communication Department of the Faculty of Political Science. She is a Research Fellow of the Social Science Research Center at Mississippi State University, USA. In the focus of her scientific research are media and gender studies, media and human rights, media and minority studies, visual culture and visual media, media narratives, digital activism, public service media. Her CV and bibliography are available on https://unizg.academia.edu/ViktorijaCar

Lana Gajger holds a master’s degree in Journalism from the Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Croatia. After graduating she continues to pursue her passion for interpersonal communication and personal development and becomes Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. She is currently working in the marketing field.

Abstract

The portrayal of a woman in the media landscape has always been connected to the way in which a woman is perceived within society, but also to the way a woman perceives herself. The media have the power to shape our notions of desirability, create consumer behavior trends and even influence, challenge or reject gender norms. That power is often used for marketing purposes. Therefore, the capitalist idea that everything can be sold can also be applied to the feminist movement. While feminism itself has gained new platforms and is experiencing a new upswing due to evolving new technologies, social media, and celebrity feminism – by commodifying feminist values and ideals, advertisers often sell feminism itself carefully packaged as the idea of emancipation. The advertising industry in modern neoliberal societies exploits the concept of emancipated femininity. This process is particularly affected by the activity of female celebrities who promote the idea of woman emancipation.

Given that perfumes are advertised and sold in a way that the protagonists symbolically embody the essence of desirability, the main goal of this paper is to identify the patterns of portraying an emancipated woman. We used narrative analysis to analyze five perfume commercials featuring female celebrities as their main protagonists („J'Adore“ by Dior with Charlize Theron, „Killer queen“ of Katy Perry, Rihanna’s „Reb'l fleur“, „The Girl“ by Tommy Hilfiger with Gigi Hadid and Lancôm’s „La vie est belle“ with Julia Roberts). The categories of analysis are gender norms, aspects of desirability, personality traits, and the behavior of the protagonist. The analysis has shown that the protagonists of the analyzed advertisements are extroverted, assertive, and prone to seeking excitement, competent and success oriented. Their desirability is simultaneously determined by masculine behavior, feminine aesthetics, the rejection of gender norms (except for the slimness ideal), and dominant behavior when interacting with men. The common characteristics shared by all the protagonists in the analyzed commercials are their determination and a pronounced sense of self-awareness and insurgence. Their behavior matches the characteristics of the postfeminist understanding of femininity and supports the fundamental determinant of feminism – the idea of ​​emancipation.

45. Memory and identity in contemporary cinema directed by women, Two first-person works by Mercedes Moncada and Lupe Pérez

Esther Pérez Nieto

Complutense University of Madrid

Bio

Pre-doctoral fellow of the Ministry of Education in the Audiovisual Communication, Advertising and Public Relations Doctoral Programme at the Complutense University of Madrid. She received the First National Award for Excellence in Academic Performance, the Bachelor’s Degree Extraordinary Award, top marks in Audiovisual Communication at UCM, and a Master’s Excellence Scholarship. Her research focuses on contemporary documentary films directed by women in Latin America and Spain. She is also interested in cultural studies and feminist theory. She has published in different academic journals and books in Spanish and in English. Esther is currently teaching at the Faculty of Information Sciences.

Abstract

Mercedes Moncada, of both Spanish and Nicaraguan nationality, grew up between Nicaragua, Mexico and Spain, where she currently resides. She has directed five documentary films. Her first work, La pasión de María Elena (2003) denounces the strains between tradition and justice by telling the tragic story of a Rarámuri woman in Mexico. Since then, the director has used her films to tell stories of injustice and give voice to silenced collectives. In Palabras mágicas (2012) Mercedes combines archival footage and her own memories to reflect on the events of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua that broke out in 1979. Argentinean Lupe Pérez Garcia also lives in Spain. She has directed several experimental short films and three non-fiction feature films. The first of these, Diario Argentino (2006) is a return to her native country, an exploration of what it means to be Argentine. Lupe claims to be dyslexic, not being able to distinguish her right from her left hand. This works as a metaphor for the collective memory of a country that has suffered a dictatorship and has preferred to forget some chapters of its history.

In this analysis, we want to focus on the last two films mentioned, their most essayistic works. (Rascaroli, 2017; Corrigan, 2011; Català, 2014). The two directors use the resources of first-person intimacy offered by the audiovisual essay form to address political aspects of society in different Latin American countries, but from a position of temporal distance. We apply the study approach of situated knowledge, developed by Donna Haraway and defined as "a doctrine of embodied objectivity that accommodates paradoxical and critical feminist science projects" (1991, p. 189). For Sandra Harding (1986), Haraway's ideas represent the postmodern wing of feminist epistemologies, while another approach of study, the feminist standpoint theory, developed mainly by Nancy Hartsock in 1983, must be situated as part of a successor science project. This so-called successor science still aspires to reconstruct aspects of modern science, while feminist postmodernism rejects the existence of an essence of woman and prefers to work with fragmented identities and from an oppositional consciousness, a term coined by Chela Sandoval in 1991. To better understand the creative process of these two filmmakers, we conducted in-depth interviews with them.

46. Safe Ambivalences and Privileged Resistance in Contemporary Hindi Cinema: New Gendered Subjectivities amidst Cultural Unrest in India

Niharika Krishna, PhD Candidate

Dept of Culture, Media & Creative Industries

King’s College London

Bio

I am a third-year PhD candidate at King’s College London. My research investigates gendered subjectivities articulated by recent commercial Hindi films within the context of political and cultural unrest in contemporary India. Coming from a similar social background to the protagonists and target audience of the films I analyse, I use my lived experience and cultural understanding to inform my research on ‘privileged resistance’, particularly through autoethnography, a powerful method in feminist scholarship. I have an MA in Cultural & Creative Industries from King’s, and BA (Hons) History from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University. I grew up in India.

Abstract

India opened its economy to the world through ‘Globalisation, Liberalisation and Privatisation’ policies in 1991, heralding an era of neoliberalism that augmented the nation’s GDP without significantly addressing economic and social inequality. This has produced a new elite – urban, English-speaking, globalised, and prosperous enough to sustain a growing consumerist economy, where women too can participate (provided they continue to manage the household). While Western cultural products find a massive market in India, an increasingly authoritarian government led by Narendra Modi since 2014 has nonetheless inspired Hindu majoritarian nationalism among wide sections of the population, including among these new elites. Meanwhile, homegrown feminist, LGBTQ+ and anti-caste movements have gained ground, often clashing with the government’s vision for an India that embraces global capitalism but remains firmly rooted in traditional Hindu values.

In this contested cultural landscape, commercial Hindi films since 2014 have increasingly featured urban, upper class female protagonists, departing from Bollywood’s ‘hero’-oriented tradition, and articulating what I call ‘privileged resistance’ rooted in neoliberal modes of storytelling. These ‘new women’ of Hindi cinema represent off-screen counterparts aspiring to an idealised femininity arising from both neoliberal values and traditional cultural norms. Using a multi-modal approach (textual analysis, discourse analysis and autoethnography) and conducting a conjunctural analysis, I argue that these filmic female protagonists adopt ‘safe ambivalences’ towards challenging issues such as gendered violence and class division prevalent in contemporary Indian society, retreating into their privilege to avoid discomfort, except when they are demanding greater personal freedom. This paper analyses the concept of ‘safe ambivalences’ through two films, Highway (2014) and NH10 (2015), which force their female protagonists to shed safe ambivalences when they physically leave the city, and to articulate privileged resistance when faced with entrenched attitudes about ‘honour’ and ideal Indian womanhood. Both films discuss and represent violence against women, and each features a privileged, urban woman stuck in the rural hinterland outside New Delhi, where she must navigate a dangerous situation imposed on her by unfamiliar subaltern men. However, the films differ in their treatment of class and the urban-rural divide, as well as the question of who really poses a threat to women’s safety. I argue these films reflect and challenge the urban multiplex audience’s anxieties, clearly attempting to provoke thought about gendered violence and class through their narratives, but they ultimately promote individual solutions through neoliberal modes of storytelling.

47. Aging femininities in popular streaming TV series: Grace & Frankie, The Politician, And Just Like That.

Dimitra Mari.

PhD Candidate at Panteion University of Political and Social Sciences

Bio

PhD Candidate at Panteion University of Political and Social Sciences

Supervisor: Assistant Professor Ioanna Vovou

Officially joined the Academia in late 2021.

Currently working on my PhD Thesis: Sexism and Public Discourse: Media Representations of the MeToo movement in Greece.

Interested in all things feminism & women’s movement, popular culture, political communication, social trends, gender and media studies.

Email: dimitra.mari@hotmail.com

Tel: +30 6974899947

Abstract

When Sarah Jessica Parker and producer Michael Patrick King announced the return of the SATC characters, in a limited series called And Just Like That, they were met with mostly positive responses “but one bitchy response online was people sharing pictures of the Golden Girls. And I was like, ‘Wow, so it’s either you’re 35, or you’re retired and living in Florida” said Michael Patrick King (Vogue, 2021). The show has been exploring the life of women in their 50s as well as trying to tackle its “too white” perspective. Since then, it has been criticized as “woke”, “cringey” and as Poniewozik puts it “the whole production feels as if it speed-read “How to Be an Antiracist” in June 2020” (The New York Times, 2021).

Another show that has explored the lives of septuagenarians, Grace & Frankie, since 2015, has been met with positive reviews and accolades from its second season and onwards. However, as Fiedler and Casey (2020) point out “although, Grace & Frankie is a pioneering text in exploring the lives of older people, the representations of ageing available within the show ultimately reinforces hegemonic ideals of gender, sexuality and identity.”

Lastly, Netflix’s The Politician, while a satire, that has been criticized as much ado about nothing, has been praised about its depiction of women over the age of 70, with actresses Bette Middler and Judith Light joining the cast in season 2. The show has been produced by the trifecta Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, known for their work on Glee, Scream Queens and American Horror Story.

According to the 2021 report of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender on Media “Women Over 50: The Right to Be Seen on Screen”, 1 out of 4 characters who are 50+, are women in film and television. So, there you have it: ageing women rarely appear on screen and when they do, they are very much criticized for doing it the wrong way. But is there a “right way” for feminine aging representation after all? Or the important note that is missing, would be to be represented in any case? In this paper we will explore the characters of the mentioned shows, their origins, portrayals, the reviews they received and the plot holes of the reviews themselves: why women characters of any age have to be nice or likeable? Why female emotion or imperfection is mostly indigested?

Words: 400

References

Amanda Fiedler & Sarah Casey (2020): ‘I played by all the rules! Why didn’t

you tell me there weren’t any rules, it’s not fair!’: contradiction, corporeality, and conformity in Grace and Frankie, Continuum, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2020.1798876

Geena Davis Institute on Gender on Media. 2021. Women Over 50: The Right to Be Seen on Screen”. Next 50 Initiative.

The New York Times. 2021. Accessible at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/arts/television/review-and-just-like-that.html . Read on 11/1/2022.

Vogue. 2021. Accessible at: https://www.vogue.com/article/the-cast-of-sex-and-the-city-opens-up-about-aging. Viewed at 11/01/2022.

48. ‘We’re not misogynistic c*nts…’: theorising the homosocial dynamics of men’s private online chat groups and their defensive talk about ‘lad culture’ in the UK

Dr Craig Haslop & Dr Fiona O’Rourke

Bios

Senior Lecturer in Media, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

Dr Haslop’s research explores questions about the representation and power of gendered and sexual identities in the media. He is Principal Investigator for two funded research projects, which both explore issues relating to masculinities and forms of online harassment.

Academic profile: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/communication-and-media/staff/craig-haslop

Email: Craig.Haslop@liverpool.ac.uk

Dr Fiona O’Rourke

Honorary Research Associate, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

Fiona O'Rourke is currently working as an Independent Researcher and is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Liverpool. Her research critically examines the relationship between social identifications, inequalities, discriminatory practices and agency, particularly in relation to race and gender.

Academic profile: https://liverpool.academia.edu/FionaORourke

Email: F.O-Rourke@liverpool.ac.uk

Abstract

In recent years, research has established clear links between sexual harassment towards women and ‘lad culture’ on UK university campuses, which centres around drinking, sport, and pack-like behaviours (Jackson and Sundaram, 2020). While lad culture exists in a range of contexts across the UK (Jackson and Sundaram, 2020), there is little research beyond university campuses which examines young men’s experiences of laddish identities and its potential links to misogyny, especially in online spaces. In this paper, we address this empirical gap using data from 15 focus groups and 29 interviews conducted in 2020 with young people aged 18-25, across all four UK nations. We found that initially men respondents distanced themselves from ‘laddish’ identity and its negative associations through defensive discourses. However, further discussions revealed that these respondents participated in laddish and misogynistic behaviours, and that private online chat groups (in various apps including WhatsApp), were a key location for these practices. To theorise the role of these spaces as part of emergent young masculinities in the UK, we draw on Hammarén and Johansson’s (2014) conception of the term homosociality, which is often used to describe social relations between men that uphold hegemonic masculinity. They argue that homosociality operates in two ways: vertically, where bonds are made through homosocial competition; and horizontally, where homosociality describes intimacy and closeness between men. They suggest that possibilities of horizontal homosociality for men have become less taboo, exemplified by the increasingly popularised idea of the Bromance (Hammarén and Johansson, 2014: 9), which challenges versions of hegemonic masculinity that are heavily policed by fear of the feminine or homophobia. Building on this theory in the digital context, we highlight how private online group chats form a space where our respondents mostly exercised vertical homosociality, through a range of competitive practices, including the sharing and rating of images of women. In this way, we argue that performances of laddish masculinity, which drive vertical homosociality, are still prioritised over horizontal homosociality, such as expressions of emotional connection, which are often reserved for one-to-one discussions. This, we argue, reduces the potential for horizontal homosociality to publicly challenge versions of hegemonic masculinity, which thrive on vertical homosocial competition between men, such as those which promote misogyny by positioning women as a form of currency.

49. Destigmatizing Kinks: Alien Erotica in Netflix’s Sex Education

Olga Derzioti

Bio

I am a second year PhD student at the NKUA Communications and Media Department, under the supervision of Professor Liza Tsaliki and my PhD is funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation. I hold an MSc in Gender, Media and Culture from the LSE and my thesis title is “Transnational Queer Cinema: Expanding solidarity across borders – queering the global sexual rights regime”. The research focuses on the newly emerging queer film production of both diasporic- exilic and non-western filmmakers and its ability to disrupt the unequal cultural flow and enable the formation of supportive queer communities based on the subjects’ shared experiences. My work explores the cinematic representation of non-western queer subjects and their lived realities, in relation to questions of sexual citizenship and homonationalism. Μy research interests include postcolonial feminist studies, transnational feminist epistemologies, sexuality and queer film studies.

E- mail: olga.derz1@gmail.com

Abstract

The Bristish series Sex Education has notoriously sparked enthusiasm due to its celebration and visibility of sexual identities in all forms. The development of the character of Lily constitutes a focal point of Season 3. Particularly, Lily’s vivid interest in writing sexual outer space stories is entangled in her sex life and highlights issues of public shame related to sexual fetishes.By using as a starting point the fact that sexual rights and claims do not exist a priori in nature, but are produced through social relations and the needs of different identities, this analysis will argue that the representation of the character’s kinks entails the ability to broaden the understanding of her sexual identity and contributes to the destigmatization of her sexual practices.

Sliding away from the stereotypical representation of kinks, the narrative of the series as well as the mise en scène and aesthetical features of the character deploy a multidimensional approach towards Lily’s sexual fetishes that transcends the “silliness” which is commonly attributed to similar characters by the Hollywood- trained eye. This paper will trace the ways in which Sex Education’s representational treatment towards Lily’s love for alien erotica invites the viewer to escape from the mainstream spectatorship of sexual fetishes and thus challenges the monolithic stigmatization of her sexual desires as “quirky” and “funny”.

This analysis seeks to add to the existing efforts of reconceptualizing the discursive framework of the media representation of sexual fetishes by taking under consideration subjectivities that are traced at the bottom of the sexual behaviour hierarchy and do not fit the pre-established pattern of the legitimate sexual citizen. Therefore, the examination of the representation of sexual fetishes in the series offers a way to theorize and expose a critique to their exclusion and current status.

50. Perceptions of hate speech in Greece and Cyprus: How journalism students, young journalists “citizen journalists” and NGO representatives discuss the phenomenon

Despina Cochliou, Stamatis Poulakidakos, Marina Rigou, Stylianos Papathanassopoulos

Bios

Dr. Despina Cochliou is an Assistant Professor in Social Work at the University of Nicosia. Her research interests lie in the field of social policy planning and management. In this respect has researched and written in various fields such as trafficking and exploitation, asylum and migration as well as guardianship policies for unaccompanied children.

Stamatis Poulakidakos is Assistant Professor in Political Communication at the Department of Communication and Digital Media, University of Western Macedonia (UoWM). His research interests focus on political communication, propaganda, refugees/immigrants, social media and the public sphere, political advertisements, social movements, and other media related issues.

Stylianos Papathanassopoulos is Professor in Media Organisation and Policy at the Department of Communication and Media Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has written extensively on media developments in Europe and especially on television issues. His research interests are on European communications and new media policies as well as political communication. His latest book is: Among 4 Screens (Athens: Kastaniotis, 2020, in Greek).

Marina Rigou is Assistant Professor of Journalism, Politics and New Media at the Department of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Athens. She has also been a journalist for more than 35 years and has worked for many organisations such as Greece's Public Broadcaster - ERT, Flash Radio, Action24 TV, Flash.gr, OW.gr, The Independent, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, Global Post and many others. Her research interests focus on new media, politics, journalism, e-governance and political communication. She has written many scientific papers on media, politics and society and a book titled "From Digital Revolution to Digital Surveillance. New Media, Public Sphere and Politics" (Athens: Sideris, 2014, in Greek).

Abstract

Online hate speech seems to be a growing problem in Greece and Cyprus that can be attributed to societal attitudes towards specific groups, the evolution of online media, lack of awareness and of appropriate tools to recognise and counter hate speech. Professionals and citizen journalists are producing content containing hate speech both intentionally, to gain visibility and unintentionally because they are not in position to effectively recognize it.

For the purposes of the SOphiSM project, we initiated a research aimed at mapping the phenomenon of (online) hate speech. Through the implementation of a mixed methods approach, with the conduction of 30 semi-structured in-depth interviews and four focus groups in Greece and Cyprus with journalism students, young journalists, citizen journalists, and NGO representatives we have come up with some rather interesting findings concerning the causes of hate speech and issues emerging when seeking to tackle it.

More specifically, our research has provided us with information that can be consolidated in four major topics: a) on how hate speech and its causes were defined, b) personal perceptions on hate speech and the harm it causes at a personal and social level, c) the context/actors of online hate speech, and d) limitations and recommendations in countering hate speech, especially in the fields of journalism and public communication.

The results revealed that certain groups of people such as women, refuges and LGBTQI are mostly affected by hate speech while the inadequacy of legal frameworks in both countries facilitates rather than counters hate speech. More specifically women as a group irrespectively of their identity are most commonly afflicted to criticism and hate speech due to deep-rooted social perceptions of their role and subordinate position in the society.

The SOphiSM projects’ major aims were to (a) consolidate and add to the existing pool of data on hate speech online in Greece and Cyprus; (b) improve media literacy and skills to identify and counter hate speech online, and to create anti-hate speech messages; (c) create tools designed to target the particularities of online hate speech in the participating countries.

53. Two Greek-Australian Men - Author and Journalist – talk about Migrant Masculinity in Contemporary Australia

Fotis Kapetopoulos

Bio

Fotis is journalist and audience engagement manager for Neos Kosmos (English edition), Australia’s leading Greek Australian media. Fotis is the secretary of Independent Multicultural Media Australia (IMMA) and is a board member of the Melbourne Press Club. He speaks at various national and international forums and conferences.

He has been in arts and media since 1990s, first as Director of Multicultural Arts Victoria and, later headed Kape Communications.

Fotis is a Smithsonian Institution Washington DC, Intern and Asialink arts management recipient. He spent time working at the Singapore Arts Council. He also was Multicultural Media Adviser to former Victorian Premier, Ted Baillieu.

He holds a BA Honours in politics, an MA in marketing, and is a PhD Candidate in media.

Abstract

In this talk I will engage in a critical autoethnographic ‘dialogue’ with Greek-Australian Christos Tsiolkas, author of Loaded, Dead Europe, The Slap, Barracuda, Damascus and now, 7 ½.

This conversation will be curated through the lens of Greek Australian media outlet Neos Kosmos, and myself as a journalist and peer. I will use my interviews with Tsiolkas in Neos Kosmos such as It’s all about a little Class, (2013) and Christos Tsiolkas talks about ‘Damascus’: The dawn of a new creed (2019 and bind them to media and multicultural theories on narrating true stories, culture, gender, and race.

“Man, it takes balls to write like a woman now,” I say and we both fall apart in laughter at the madness.

“I did not think about that as an issue regardless of ‘woke’ puritans, I do not give a fuck,” Tsiolkas says. (Kapetopoulos: 2019)

Sons of Greek immigrants in our 50s, once transgressive and radical, we are now migrant bourgeoise. Tsiokas is queer, I’m straight, but we never labelled each other: we were hedonists and ‘proudly masculine’. Tsiokas’ works reflects on culture, class, ethnicity, gender, and sex, among many of us second and third generation immigrant Australians. His books don’t moralise yet are moral. He has no virtuous conclusions but is full of virtue. Tsiolkas’ works are visceral, the reader smells and feels sex, bodies are sexualised and made corporeal - hairy bellies, cocks, and pussies, and “vinegary cum”. They reveal the complex and messy nature of masculinity in contemporary Greek-Australian culture.

As a journalist for Neos Kosmos I have talked to Christos often over the last seven years. In the interviews, I show how multicultural media provide alternate narratives to mainstream media and academic ‘theologies’ of sex, gender and race.

Tsiolkas and I reflect on our ageing, our bodies, our sexuality, our ethnicity, and our shifting political values. This through multicultural Greek Australian media, in a way that it could never be done in Anglosphere media.

Daniel Ahadi (2018) when writing on multicultural media, talks of “cultural pluralism” (Fraser 1992: Young 2019) to argue for its essentiality:

“[T]o ignore particularistic group affiliations is to deny humans the right to engage in social, economic and political processes as they see fit.” Ahadi (2018)

Employing Habermas (1989), Ahadi argues that the rise of multicultural media reflects how “immigrants that remain excluded from bourgeoisie public sphere,” shift into the middle class in their own media. In the role of maintenance of Greek migrant culture Neos Kosmos, as Matsaganis and Katz (2011) say, played “symbolic role” in their appeal to the “emotive aspects of resettlement” (Matsaganis, Katz 2011).

Neos Kosmos (2020) provides an “emotional basis through reportage and discussion”, on cultural events, literature, celebrations of life and death, community politics, and politics of Greece and of Australia. Tsiolkas is the perfect gauge of migrant class, sex, and gender intersectionality. Through the interviews with him I map the transition from tolerant and open literary, academic and culture spaces, to more authoritarian, and puritanical one in the Anglosphere.

We become two Greek-Australian men, sons of immigrants, talking about our own generation’s masculinity.

References

Ahadi, Daniel: Disputing the Digital Persian-Language Community

Radio in Stockholm and the Continued Relevance of Analog Media in the Digital Age” in

Sherry S. Yu, and Matthew D. Matsaganis Ed. Ethnic Media in the Digital Age Published September 30, 2018, by Routledge Taylor & Frances Group

Matsaganis, Matthew. Katz, Vikki & Ball-Rokeach, Sandra ED. Understanding Ethnic Media: Producers, Consumers, and Societies SAGE Publications, Inc., 2011

Kapetopoulos, Fotis. Christos Tsiolkas talks about ‘Damascus’: The dawn of a new creed in Neos Kosmos 2019 https://bit.ly/3o3hixX

54. Kirsty Fairclough- The World’s A Little Blurry: The Female Pop Star documentary and the construction of celebrity femininities.

Bio

Dr Kirsty Fairclough is Reader in Screen Studies at the School of Digital Arts (SODA) at Manchester Metropolitan University. Kirsty researches in the interdisciplinary areas of celebrity studies, the audio-visual mediation of popular music and gender representation in film and television.

Kirsty has published widely on popular culture and is the co-editor of The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop (Routledge), The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment (Bloomsbury), Prince and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury), The Legacy of Mad Men: Cultural History, Intermediality and American Television. (Palgrave), Music/Video: Forms, Aesthetics, Media. (Bloomsbury) and author of the forthcoming Beyoncé: Celebrity Feminism and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury) and Pop Stars on Film (Bloomsbury).

Kirsty’s work has been featured on BBC 2, BBC 4, Channel 5 and in The Guardian and Creative Review amongst others. She is the co-curator of Sound and Vision: Pop Stars on Film and the curator of In Her View: Women Documentary Filmmakers film seasons at HOME, Manchester and is Chair of Manchester Jazz Festival, Manchester's longest-running music festival.

Abstract

From Five Foot Two (2017) starring Lady Gaga to Demi Lovato in Dancing With The Devil (2021) and Billie Eilish’s The World’s A Little Blurry (2021), documentaries on female pop stars have been released with increased frequency in the past decade. Many of the world’s most famous female artists - Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, MIA amongst others have allowed fragments of their onstage and offstage lives to be filmed and released for public consumption as part of the bolstering of their brand.

Unlike earlier examples of the form which were often much ‘softer’ in their depiction of difficulties of the working life of the artist, more recent releases have provided a much more raw insight into the relentless scrutiny of famous women’s bodies, the ensuing mental health tolls, fear of cancel culture and observations on the illusion of female power in the music industry.

Using a range of examples, this paper will examine the complexities of the construction of celebrity femininities, body aesthetics and disciplinary gendered norms as portrayed through the pop star documentary. It will argue that more recently there has been a shift to the pop star using the documentary form as a way to exert narrative control over their industry and media treatment through the guise of unguarded authenticity.

It will explore how little has changed since the 2010s when female stars were hounded, anointed and denigrated and how the construction of femininities via the pop star documentary provides new insights into the appearance of power under the impossible weight of being a woman in the public eye.

55. Title: “Send Nudes?”: a sex-positive approach to adolescent digital expressions of sexuality

Giselle Woodley and Carmen Jacques

Bios

Giselle Woodley is a PhD Candidate and researcher under the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University. Giselle possesses a background in Sexology, Arts and Media. Giselle currently teaches with the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry and the School of Design and Built Environment at Curtin University. She has experience with teaching engaging and working with young adults both locally and abroad. She is particularly interested in reducing sexual violence and promoting relationships and sexual education (RSE), especially in terms of building respect, empathy and healthy relationships.

Carmen Jacques is a Research Assistant in Edith Cowan’s School of Arts and Humanities. Carmen recently completed her PhD focussed on the ongoing lives of survivors of terrorism. She has previously worked as a Research Assistant on several ARC grants with Anne Aly and Lelia Green. Carmen has published her paper, Trauma seeks trauma: One journalist’s experience of terror echoes back to WWII, and more recently she has written for The Conversation and been interviewed by The Briefing on the need for a Peace Park at the site of the 2002 Bali Bombing. Currently, Carmen is working on the everyday impacts of media use in households and their children (age 1-17).

Abstract

This paper explores teenagers’ perceptions of harm experienced in relation to the consensual sharing via digital means of adolescent expressions of sexuality. It suggests that researchers, educators and other adults might adopt a ‘sex-positive’ approach to adolescents’ digital expressions of sexuality since fear-based narratives have led to the repression, and shaming of some young people’s early sexual experiences. Such sexuality-denying approaches can negatively impact teenagers’ perceptions of sexuality, general well-being, and can prompt sex shame while undermining teens’ capacities for developing and validating age-appropriate trusting relationships. Researchers explore sexting as a part of young people’s modern-day courting rituals and as a means for owning and express their evolving sexual identities. This study was conducted by an international research team as part of an Australian Research Council grant, Adolescent perceptions of harm from accessing online sexual content. The paper contributes to debates around sex education, and policy and law-making around adolescents’ sexual attitudes and behaviours.

56. “The promise of hair. New practices and visualizations of masculinity through the use and broadcasting of beard enhancing products on YouTube. Tobias Raun

Bio

Tobias Raun is an Associate Professor in Communication Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. He has published a book on Transgender Videoblogging (Routledge 2016), and co-edited a book on Mediated Intimacies (Routledge 2018). He works in the intersection between gender studies, cultural studies and new media studies. His current research project is Plastic Masculinity: New Forms of Mediatized and Biomedicalized Masculinity, which so far has resulted in three publications: “The mediatization of self-tracking. Knowledge production and community building in YouTube videos” (2021), ”Showing progress. Defining self-tracking as an aesthetic audio-visual genre” (accepted 2022), and “Plastic masculinity. Analyzing masculinities in times of change” (in review).

Abstract

This paper analyses a group of male YouTubers, who track and trace their use of the medical product, Minoxidil to enhance beard growth. Minoxidil was initially used to treat people with high blood pressure, but as a side effect it was discovered that the drug was sprouting hair, which led to the release of the drug in 1990 as a topical solution to regrow hair (Haiken 2000: 403). However, it was not until 2016 that men experimented with using the drug to enhance beard growth, documenting and broadcasting the process on YouTube. Today, documenting and discussing the effects of Minoxidil on YouTube has turned into a particular kind of self-tracking video genre, and a community has formed around these videos (Nebeling Petersen and Raun 2021).

In this paper I want to focus on the expressed motivations for starting Minoxidil, and the promises that are attached to the ability to grow a more substantial beard. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s book “The Promise of Happiness” (2010) I explore the norms, ideals and longings that ‘stick’ to having a beard by looking into the broader cultural history of facial hair and grooming (Barber 2016). Minoxidil as a pharmaceutical is also part of a fairly new targeting of men as consumers of biomedical products and technologies (Clarke et al. 2010, Szymczak & Conrad 2006). As Kristin Barber notes, it was not until the 1990s that men’s aesthetic-enhancing consumerism took off with “hair transplants, steroids, plastic surgery, gym memberships, and libido-enhancing drugs'' (Barber 2016: 39). Thus, men too are increasingly told that they are in need of repair and improvement in order to become valuable in culture. The increase in beauty products as well as medical and surgical interventions for men testify to a male preoccupation with self-optimization which is also present in the YouTube videos, as the use of the Minoxidil is often combined with the use of beard grooming products and a focus on sculpturing the body through (weight)training and/or clothing. In that sense, growing a beard via Minoxidil is, as stated by the vlogger Urban Hussar Style, a “vehicle of change”, both physically and mentally, and the driving force is a complete and continuous “self-improvement” (Urban Hussar Style, 2019a & 2019c).

I also want to engage with the way in which the male body is displayed in these YouTube videos, and how that connects to various kinds of body-work that men are also increasing conducting online for value creation within neoliberal austerity (Hakim 2020). How is straight, cisgender masculinity both reproduced and renegotiated when objecting themselves to the evaluating gaze of the camera and the audience on YouTube? And is the self-tracking video a particular way in which it is culturally legit for cisgendered heterosexual men to publicly talk about low self-esteem and vulnerability?

Literature

Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press.

Barber K (2016). Styling masculinity: Gender, class, and inequality in the men's grooming industry. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Clarke AE, Mamo L, Fishman J, Shim J and Fosket JB (2010). A theoretical and substantive introduction. In Clarke AE, Mamo L, Fosket JR and Shim JK (eds.) Biomedicalization. Technoscience, health, and illness in the U.S. Durham & London: Duke University Press, pp. 1-44.

Hakim J (2020). Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield International.

Haiken E (2000). Virtual virility, or, does medicine make the man? Men and masculinities, 2(4): 388-409.

Nebeling Petersen, M. and Raun, T. (2021). The mediatization of self-tracking Knowledge production and community building in YouTube videos. MedieKultur: Journal of Media & Communication Research, 37(71), pp. 161-186.

Szymczak JE & Conrad P (2006). Medicalizing the aging male body: andropause and baldness. In: Rosenfeld D and Faircloth CA (eds.) Medicalized Masculinities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 89-111.

Urban Hussar Style. (2019a, March 6). The Urban Hussar Style Transformation Changed my Life | THIS IS HOW. [Video]. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJeylY97ACI

Urban Hussar Style. (2019c, June 28). What Growing a Beard CAN'T do for you | Self-Improvement and Beards. [Video]. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFB_-HvEfrw&t=3s

57. Title: Contesting Masculinities Play for Keeps Via “Meme” Stocks: An Analysis of Gendered Affects and Neoliberal Subjectivities within Contemporary Casino Capitalism

Rory Barron

Bio

Rory Barron is a doctoral student in the department of Gender Studies at Indiana University. In 2019 he earned his BA in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky. His undergraduate research was on the neoliberalization of contemporary Universities and its effect on contemporary student activism, using the University of Kentucky as a case study and comparing archived accounts of student activism from the mid-20^th century to archived accounts of student activism 2017-2019. In 2021, Rory completed his MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. His master’s research was on queer women’s fandom politics and the conceptualization of queer women’s identities through fan spaces. For his doctoral research, he is interested in analyzing the gendered and queer affects produced through the commodification of queer aesthetics within digital consumer markets. barrem@iu.edu

Abstract

In January 2021, the international video game company (or whatever you want to say) GameStop made national news as a site of tense competition between social media users, particularly those on the reddit thread /wallstreetbets, and Wallstreet hedgefund companies such as Citadel and Marvin Capital, bringing the term “meme stocks” into the pop culture sphere. Meme stocks are stocks that are shorted by hedgefund companies but invested in by social media users, causing short volatile dips within the stock market. These stocks are popular amongst millennials and are usually indicative of investors’ evaluation of a company’s market potential or sentimental attachment rather than the company’s financial reality. “The sentiment around the stock is positioned around the future problem it solves…FOMO [fear of missing out] is a big motivator to buy” (O’Mahony, 2021). Drawing upon V. Spike Peterson’s (2002) framework of the virtual economy’s semiotic effects that produce consumer subjectivities to sustain market cultures, this presentation analyzes how the gamified aspects of meme stocks shape /wallstreetbets users’ masculine rhetoric, a discourse often utilized to position themselves against what they perceive as traditional Wall Street elites. Through this analysis, I argue that meme stocks, and the GameStop phenomenon in particular, can be perceived as a consequence of those neoliberal subjectivities born out of cultivating market cultures on social media, the cultural crisis occurring around the reinvention of masculinity in contemporary mainstream consciousness, and the financial crisis born out of the pandemic.

References:

Michael O’Mahoney, “What is a Meme Stock?” (My Wall St. Own It, blogpost. 2 Feb. 2021). https://blog.mywallst.com/what-is-a-meme-stock/

V. Spike Peterson, “Rewriting (Global) Political Economy as Reproductive, Productive, and Virtual (Foucauldian) Economies” (International Journal of Feminist Politics. Vol. 4, No. 1. 2002). 1-30.

58. Investigating representations of the body within the context of collaborative virtual environment for higher education

Maria Sounti

Penny Papageorgopoulou

Dimitris Charitos

Bios

Maria Sounti is a Licensed Psychologist, MSc. She is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication and Mass Media at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Meanwhile she is training in Psychoanalytic Group Psychotherapy and she works in private practice with adults, adolescents and children.

Penny Papageorgopoulou is a computer scientist, visual artist and new media scholar currently engaged in doctoral research on posthumanism and the impact of wearable and insertable devices on the users’ emotional state. Her scientific interests include embodied computing, the broader field of human-computer interaction, as well as the design, development, and evaluation of immersive systems. She is a PhD candidate at the Department of Communication and Media Studies of National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. In 2015, she received her M.Sc. in Digital Communication Media and Interactive Environments from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. In 2008, she received her BSc. in Telecommunications Science and Technology from the University of Peloponnese. She is a member of Spatial Media Research Group.

Dimitris Charitos is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where he teaches human-machine communication, interactive design, digital art and visual communication. He studied Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens, and C.A.A.D. in the Department of Architecture, University of Strathclyde (Glasgow). He holds a PhD in interactive and virtual environments design. His artistic practice includes electronic music, audiovisual and interactive installations and virtual environments. He has participated in exhibitions in Greece, the UK and Cyprus. As a researcher or coordinator, he has participated in research projects (funded by Greek and European programs) on the subjects of virtual reality, locative media, digital art and multimedia.

Abstract

As digitally mediated experiences become significantly richer and more popular, novel practices of self-representation emerge among different groups of users, often including the highly detailed customization of avatars within virtual worlds. Digital Self becomes an integral part of the overall identity of the individual, simultaneously coexisting with the public and personal aspects of the individual’s personality. More specifically, the Digital Self is considered a form of projective identity, since it constitutes a projection of the user’s various psychological characteristics, values ​​and desires onto a virtually embodied character. Similarly to the construction and display of the individual’s identity within his/her immediate physical social setting, Digital Self is influenced by the content, purpose, limitations and characteristics of the virtual environment within which the avatar is met.

The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, led higher education institutes to quickly turn to the use of online tools, including collaborative virtual environments, radically transforming the modes of teaching and communication between the educators and the students. This educational shift significantly affected the conduct of laboratory courses, where physical presence is traditionally required for students and teaching staff respectively, offering new insights to the norms and boundaries of self-representation within the educational context. In this paper, we investigate the concept of self-representation with the adoption of highly customizable avatars within the OpenSim environment, as experienced by graduate students and their educators during the summer semester of the academic year 2020-21 at the Department of Digital Arts and Cinema, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. More specifically, the laboratory course “Artistic Creation II” was conducted within the OpenSim environment, allowing students and educators to interact through the creation and use of avatars as their virtual selves.

This qualitative research, based on data collected through observation and interviews, presents findings pertaining to reflections and interpretations on the concepts of self, body and otherness within collaborative virtual environments used for higher education purposes. The study focuses on the spontaneous creation of virtual selves, as well as the relation between the elements of physical and virtual self-representation associated with the formation of avatars of the students and educators.

59. "Well, spit it out!": Double discrimination in a televised case study of a woman who stutters

Sigal Barak-Brandes

Debora Freud

Bios

Sigal Barak-Brandes, PhD, is a lecturer. She received her Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University, Israel (2008) where she teaches. Her research interests include: gender representations, media images and ideologies of motherhood, women and girls' audiences, girls' images, girls and new media, media and crime victims. She is a co-editor of Feminist Interrogations of Women's Head Hair (Routledge) and published in international journals such as Communication, Culture & Critique, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, The Communication Review.

Email: brandes1@zahav.net.il; barakbr@post.tau.ac.il

Debora Freud, PhD, is a Speech-Language Pathologist (PhD) and a visiting teacher at the Department of Communication Disorders at Tel Aviv University (The Stanley Steyer School of Health Professions, Sackler Faculty of Medicine), and at Ariel University, Israel. Her research fields of interest include fluency disorders and dysphagia.

She has published in international journals such as Parkinsonism & related disorders, Journal of Fluency Disorders, Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities.‏

Email: deborafreud@gmail.com

Abstract

Depictions of disabled people are common in popular media outlets and cultural content. Stereotypes which medicalize, criminalize, patronize, and dehumanize disabled people abound in films, television, books and in the press (Barnes, 1992). Since different disabilities have different sociocultural meanings (Wendell, 1996), it is interesting to focus on one impediment that is still represented in troubling ways: stuttering (Johnson, 2008; Vandaele, 2002).

Despite the extensive literature dealing with disabled people (Disability Studies), including analysis of depictions of disabled people in the media (e.g., Safran, 1998), much less attention has been paid to images of disabled women (e.g., Kolbenschlag, 1978; Stibbe, 2004) and stuttering people in the media (e.g., Johnson, 2008; Logan, Mullins, & Jones, 2008). To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies that have looked at media images of stuttering women.

The intersection of stuttering and womanhood is an interesting case. As opposed to other disabilities, which can have clear external physical signs, stuttering typically only reveals itself when the person talks, creating the impression that it can't affect a woman's gender identity (which, according to social expectations is focused on physique and beauty).

This study thus uses Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (Lazar, 2007) in order to examine a televisual case study: Amazon’s legal web drama Goliath (2017), which includes the character of Lucy Kittridge, a young lawyer who stutters.Considering that media and popular culture portrayals of People Who Stutter (PWS) almost always feature men and exclude women (Mertz, 2013), the character of Lucy is an important and unusual case for the analysis of media images of stuttering women.

The findings illustrate how a patriarchal society built on ableism and sexism can harm and hurt stuttering women. In a society which conforms to the cultural myth that the body can be controlled, there is victim blaming against those who cannot control their bodies - they are seen as failures. Because of the media's socializing ability, such images can have an enormous effect on people's attitudes, values, beliefs and behavior regarding stuttering women.