Current Perspectives in Feminist Media Studies

Lisa McLaughlin, Cynthia Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781135716998
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Current Perspectives in Feminist Media Studies features contributions written by a diverse group of stellar feminist scholars from around the world. Each contributor has authored a brief, thought-provoking commentary on the current status and future directions of feminist media studies. Although contributors write about numerous, discrete subjects within the field of feminist media studies, their various ideas and concerns can be merged into six broad, overlapping subject areas that allow us to gain a strong sense of the expansive contours of current feminist communication scholarship and activism which the authors have identified as generally illustrative of the field. Specifically, authors encourage feminist media scholars to engage with issues of political economy, new ICTs and cybercultures as well as digital media policy, media and identity, sexuality and sexualisation, and postfeminism. They stress that feminist media scholars must broaden and deepen our theoretical frameworks and methodologies so as to provide a better sense of the conceptual complexities of feminist media studies and empirical realities of contemporary media forms, practices and audiences.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Feminist Media Studies.

Introduction

Lisa McLaughlin and Cynthia Carter

Feminist media scholarship has gone from a marginal endeavour several decades ago to become immensely influential across the field of communications. Not surprisingly, given the dearth of venues devoted to feminist media studies ten years ago, the arrival of the journal Feminist Media Studies was widely regarded by many feminists as “long overdue.” While there had been a rapid growth in feminist communication scholarship, the rate of that growth was not matched by a concomitant range of major, international forums in which an increasingly diverse array of such work could be published. As editors of Feminist Media Studies, we are proud to have had the opportunity to offer a venue for much of the most important, current scholarship in the field for over a decade. We celebrated in 2011 with a tenth year anniversary issue of the journal. The chapters in this collection originally were published in the special issue marking the tenth year anniversary of Feminist Media Studies.

In conceptualizing Feminist Media Studies, we understood that it was essential to address questions related to what was missing and what was needed in relation to spaces in which to publish feminist media research. The arrival of the journal, we suggested, signalled “the growth of feminist media studies as an area of intellectual inquiry, achieved through the efforts of a large number of scholars who have dedicated themselves to the affirmation of the importance of gender, along with race, nation, ethnicity, age and sexual preference, as key considerations in the analysis of mediated representational forms” (Lisa McLaughlin & Cynthia Carter 2001, p. 5).

From the beginning, our view was that the transdisciplinary and transnational nature of feminist media studies meant that its intellectual boundaries are permeable and mobile and, as such, we made no attempt to define what does or does not count as feminist media scholarship. Instead, we encouraged feminist scholars and activists to contribute to shaping its definition through open dialogue.

We also wanted to make it clear, from the outset, that with Feminist Media Studies we would seek to encourage scholars and activists to engage in dialogue. Such exchanges, we proposed, would enrich both scholarship and feminist professional practice and activism through cross-fertilisation of ideas and sharing of experiences.

A final point that we wish to draw out from our first editorial is that we underlined our commitment to fostering international, transnational exchange of ideas among feminists. This, we believed, would help to break down the dominance of “mostly white, First World dialogues and debates that have tended to define feminist media studies” (McLaughlin & Carter 2001, p. 6). It was important, in our view, and it very much continues to be so, to establish representational spaces for scholarship from those areas of the world that rarely had the opportunity to be heard, since most opportunities for publishing scholarship were dominated by “the more privileged institutions of First World countries [with] English prevailing as the language of most journals, conferences, listservs, and so on” (2001, p. 6).

Over time, Feminist Media Studies has become an important platform upon which to realise many of our initial ambitions in support of feminist communication scholarship; however, there is still much to be done (much as with the feminist movement itself). While there has been a growing recognition of the importance of feminist research in communication and media studies and in media activism in many parts of the world, at the same time there has also been an entrenching of gender-based cultural and economic inequalities: a growing global digital divide; an explosion of media sexism; a failure to establish feminist media scholarship in some parts of the world; the assessment of feminist publication as having less “impact” on the field of communication in relation to the venues in which it is published, to name only a few of the current issues driving feminist media research and activism worldwide.

With these and many other concerns and challenges in mind, we invited a diverse and multi-generational group of seventeen prominent and promising feminist scholars from around the world to each contribute a brief, thought-provoking piece that would remark on a set of questions similar to those that we asked contributors to address in the first issue of Feminist Media Studies. The questions directed them to comment on the current status and future directions of feminist media studies, as follows:

• 1. What constitutes “feminist media studies” one decade into the twenty-first century?
• 2. What in your view have been some of the most exciting and productive recent intellectual developments within feminist media studies?
• 3. What directions within feminist media studies should be re-thought and/or further developed?
• 4. What new directions would you propose for theory and research within feminist media studies (the field and the journal)?

Reading across the chapters, we can distinguish well over twenty discrete subject areas, which we have merged into six broad, largely overlapping themes that take up some or all of the questions we put to the authors. By merging the subject areas into themes we believe that this allows us to gain a better sense of the expansive contours of current feminist communication scholarship and activism which the authors have identified as generally illustrative of the field.

The first theme, and one that more than half of the chapters address either centrally or in relation to one of the other themes, is that of “political economy” where authors raise a range of concerns around the ways in which neo-liberalism, consumer culture, and the markets are fundamentally shaping gender relations in an often oppressive manner. A related focus in many of the chapters centres on exploring the relationship between Western and non-Western media and their respective contributions to the reproduction of gender inequalities (in representation, employment, policy, etc.). Still others link political economic changes occurring around the world to a dearth of critical and feminist scholarship in their country, region or continent, even in those places where feminist media activism appears to be flourishing. (See, for example, contributions by Salam Al-Mahadin, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Tanja Bosch, Monika Djerf-Pierre, Rosalind Gill, Melissa Gregg, Micky Lee, Angela McRobbie, Robin Means Coleman, Katharine Sarikakis, Leslie Regan Shade, and Audrey Yue.)

A markedly related second theme identified is that of “new ICTS, cybercultures and digital media policies.” An extensive array of topics is covered under its umbrella, including the need to investigate how new ICTs are linked to women’s overall social and economic development; the unequal digital divide (including an emphasis on understanding such things as “home work”); the need to investigate the gendered character of contemporary communication/digital polities and their impacts on women; the ways in which ICTs open up new possibilities for the development of new social movements as well as transnational/global feminisms and virtual identities. (See, for example, contributions by Tanja Bosch, Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Melissa Gregg, Micky Lee, Lisa Leung, Catharine Lumby, Katharine Sarikakis, and Leslie Regan Shade.)

A third theme, “media and identity” variously focuses on the importance of cultivating a greater appreciation of the relationships between gendered media identities and their material embodiment in an age of virtual (seemingly disembodied) identities; the notion of “affect” in feminist media scholarship that stresses the embodied self, memory, desire, and sexuality; the presence/absence of Black women’s embodied voices in media; moving beyond identity and cultural hybridity through the mobilisation of queer as an affective site from which to question re-nationalism and neo-liberalism; and the need for dialogue and activism across identities and differences while at the same time recognising and seeking to better understand differences. (See, for example, contributions by Salam Al-Mahadin, Mary Beltrán, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Tanja Bosch, Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Rosalind Gill, Melissa Gregg, Lisa Leung, Catharine Lumby, Angela McRobbie, and Robin Means Coleman.)

“Sexuality and sexualisation” forms a fourth theme, where is it noted that despite decades of feminism around the world, feminist research has concluded that there has been very little improvement in gendered representations in the media. Here, attention is given to the issue of sexism. Several authors argue that there is a need to return to the notion of sexism to describe and speak to the hypersexualised cultures in which many of us now live—to more fully appreciate how and why this has occurred and strategies feminists might employ to confront sexism today. An interconnected theme is that of women’s complicity in sexism. Why do many women appear to go along with sexist media culture, failing to critique the ways in which women are increasingly sexualised and objectified and, in some cases, participating in their own sexualisation in a manner that reinforces hegemonic notions of gender? (See, for example, contributions by Salam Al-Mahadin, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Tanja Bosch, Rosalind Gill, Lisa Leung, Angela McRobbie, and Audrey Yue.)

Related to these matters is an engagement with a fifth theme, “post-feminism,” which also is addressed by more than half of the contributors. Authors explore its definition, its connection to second-wave feminism, and whether or not it represents a backlash against feminism. Some also call for feminist communication scholarship to go beyond binarisms between second-wave and post-feminism to instead engage in research that will produce more complex understandings of the relationships between diverse feminist frameworks and the objects of our research in ways that are more productive and progressive. Also addressed is the affiliation of post-feminism to generation, linked to the notion that the lack of dialogue between generations of feminists in part is due to the identification of younger feminists with post-feminist concerns and “second-wave” feminists’ need to “update” their theoretical conceptualisations and research methods. Other contributors associate post-feminism with a global neo-liberal economic environment where the “ideal consumer” (generally represented as a sexualised, individualised, liberated subject/agent) reigns supreme over a feminist politics that seems to be receding. (See, for example, contributions by Mary Beltrán, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Tanja Bosch, Rosalind Gill, Catharine Lumby, Angela McRobbie, Robin Means Coleman, Andrea Press, Katharine Sarikakis, and Audrey Yue.)

And finally, we have identified a sixth theme that very much intersects with the aforementioned five thematic areas: “the need for more theoretical and methodological nuance and rigor,” indicating a need to broaden and deepen both the theoretical frameworks and methodologies that feminist scholarship now employ so as to provide a better sense of the conceptual complexities and empirical realities of contemporary media forms, practices, and audiences. Variously, authors call for enhancing our knowledge of gender and media through more action research; added emphasis on empirically based studies; greater attention paid to the production of media texts and less emphasis on the analysis of texts distanced or isolated from the conditions of their production; as well as increased consideration of audiences and how they make sense of media. Aside from particular theoretical and methodological issues identified, some express the need for more transnational research; more complex, conjunctural thinking; and enhanced dialogue amongst feminist media academics, activists, and media professionals. (See, for example, contributions by Mary Beltrán, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Tanja Bosch, Monika Djerf-Pierre, Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Rosalind Gill, Melissa Gregg, Micky Lee, Lisa Leung, Catharine Lumby, Andrea Press, Leslie Regan Shade, Katharine Sarikakis, and Audrey Yue.)

In the conclusion of this collection, we draw from the Commentary and Criticism section of Feminist Media Studies in order to present two interviews with feminists in the “global South”—one featuring Ana Carolina Escosteguy, a media scholar in Brazil, and the other featuring Anita Gurumurthy, a media activist/researcher located in India. The main aim of the interviews was to elicit their views on what sorts of social, cultural, and economic impacts feminist media studies might be having in their respective countries and regions and the extent to which feminist ideas and activism are shaping everyday life. The interviews demonstrate, as Commentary and Criticism Editors Kumarini Silva and Kaitlynn Mendes argue in their introductory remarks, “the importance of investigating the local, while simultaneously acknowledging global shifts in knowledge production and distribution.”

Over a decade ago we set out to ensure that Feminist Media Studies would be successful in supporting the broad diversity of excellent feminist media and communication scholarship being done. The first of those aims was to provide a transnational forum for feminist discussion that would be open and inclusive to scholars and activists around the world, to furnish a space in which a range of perspectives from an array of theoretical and methodological standpoints could be heard and debated, and to welcome contributions from authors in all fields and disciplines. The contributors to this collection offer vital, provocative ideas which help to advance this aim. They have opened up a space for further dialogue on feminist media studies—one that we expect will continue with vigorous and insightful engagement into the future.

Reference

MCLAUGHLIN, LISA & CARTER, CYNTHIA (2001) ‘Editors’ introduction’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 5-10.

Arab Feminist Media Studies

Towards a poetics of diversity

Salam AI-Mahadin

Arab women are often portrayed on Arab television satellite channels as wearing skimpy clothes and dancing in sexually provocative ways. At the same time, it is interesting to note that the Western media continue to depict Arab women in stereotypical ways as evidenced by the plethora of images of them wearing the burqa (Salam AI-Mahadin 2007; Faegheh Shirazi 2001). Who, I would ask, is this Arab/Muslim¹ woman made to appear to seamlessly flow between two such extreme representations? While the Western media appear to be desperate to catch her covered up so that they can jump on the bandwagon of human rights and call for divesting her of her oppressive clothing, the entertainment industries in many Arab countries have now apparently accepted and embraced the eroticisation and sexual objectification of the female body. How is it possible that both Western and Arab media can capture images of Arab women that bear very little resemblance to the everyday reality of most Arab women’s lives today?

This selective form of “strategic moulding” is not exactly a misrepresentation of Arab women, for women wearing the burqa do really exist alongside women who have adopted a personal style and fashion sense drawing from “soft pornography” that often shows up on Arab television and movie screens (Moataz Abdul Aziz 2004; Mona Bakir 2004; Charles P. Freund 2003). But what merits our attention as feminist media researchers is, in my view, the political, social and economic agenda which shapes both Arab and Western media choice in ways that delimit a certain type of Arab woman and attempt to “discursively condition” the reader/viewer to accept her as a certain norm.² Western audiences, to borrow a term from Kierkegaard, have been “levelled” (Hubert L. Dreyfus & Jane Rubin 1987) by an incessant flow of images to conjure up the proverbial motif of the woman in the black tent whenever the term “Muslim/Arab woman” is used; one need only to search for the term “Muslim woman” or “Muslim women” in the images section of Google to be inundated with women in burqas. Conversely, much of the current debate around the Arab world about women in the media has centred on the increased eroticisation of female bodies in the entertainment industry, particularly on game shows and in music videos.

The schism that exists in these contradictory, and indeed unrealistic, portrayals ought to be the springboard from which to launch a feminist Arab media studies project to explore how the Arab/Muslim woman still persists as one of the most distinguishable signifiers of post-9/11 media discourse in both the Arab and Western worlds. By this, I mean that she is the field of struggle par excellence for contested ideologies, be they intra-Arab or Arab and Western (AI-Mahadin 2004; Meyda Yegenoglu 1998).

But developing feminist Arab media studies is a rather difficult task considering there is no systematic tradition for Arab feminist studies on which a critical media tradition could be based. Unlike feminist studies in the West, Arab feminism is predominantly defined by individual researchers who largely are organised not by theoretical approach, nor by systematic waves of feminist thought similar to their Western counterparts. The importance of organised work is that it allows one to methodically tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Arab Feminist Media Studies: Towards a poetics of diversity
• 3. Sex, Shopping and Security: Thinking about feminist media studies again
• 4. Bridging The Gaps: Feminist generation gaps and feminist media studies in the US context
• 5. African Feminist Media Studies: A view from the global South
• 6. “Roll Up Your Sleeves!”: Black women, black feminism in Feminist Media Studies
• 7. The Difference Engine: Gender equality, journalism and the good society
• 8. Body Matters: Resuscitating the corporeal in a new media environment
• 9. Sexism Reloaded, or, It’s Time to get Angry Again!
• 10. Do Your Homework: New media, old problems
• 11. A Feminist Political Economy of Communication
• 12.”Pro-Suming” Swearing (Verbal Violence): “Affect” as feminist (Internet) criticism
• 13. Past the Post in Feminist Media Studies
• 14. Unveiling France’s Border Strategies: Gender and the politics of the headscarf ban
• 15. Feminism and Media in the Post-Feminist Era: What to make of the “feminist” in feminist media studies
• 16. Arriving at a Crossroads: Political priorities for a socially relevant feminist media scholarship
• 17. Wanted, Alive and Kicking: Curious feminist digital policy geeks
• 18. Critical Regionalities in Inter-Asia and the Queer Diaspora
• 19. Negotiating the Local/Global in Feminist Media Studies: Conversations with Ana Carolina Escosteguy and Anita Gurumurthy
• Index