Gender and Sexuality in the European Media

Exploring Different Contexts Through Conceptualisations of Age

Cosimo Marco Scarcelli, Despina Chronaki, Sara De Vuyst, Sergio Villanueva Baselga, Cosimo Marco Scarcelli, Despina Chronaki, Sara De Vuyst, Sergio Villanueva Baselga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000383195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

This edited collection brings together original empirical and theoretical insights into the complex set of relations which exist between age, gender, sexualities and the media in Europe.

This book investigates how engagements with media reflect people's constructions and understandings of gender in society, as well as articulations of age in relation to gender and sexuality; the ways in which negotiations of gender and sexuality inform people's practices with media, and not least how mediated representations may reinforce or challenge social hierarchies based in differences of gender, sexual orientation and age. In doing so, it showcases new and innovative research at the forefront of media and communication practice and theory. Including contributions from both established and early career scholars across Europe, it engages with a wide range of hotly debated topics within the context of gender, sexuality and the media, informing academic, public and policy agendas.

This collection will be of interest to students and researchers in gender studies, media studies, film and television, cultural studies, sexuality, ageing, sociology and education.

PART I

Young people, sexuality and gender performance: Texts and audiences

1

Feminist YouTubers in Spain

A public space for building resistance

Núria Araüna, Iolanda Tortajada and Cilia Willem

Feminism in Spain

The Spanish feminist movement has recently gained significant relevance both in Spain and outside (Campillo 2019). Through massive demonstrations, the women’s strikes on International Women’s Day (8 March) from 2018 to 2020 in Spain, and a strong capillarity within diverse local settings and with social movements beyond those focused on gender, feminist collectives have managed to raise awareness and legitimise their claims. As a consequence, the ‘feminist’ label is now connoted with positive meanings in mainstream culture, after decades of stigmatisation. Journalists have put particular emphasis on the young age of feminist activists during the 8 March marches in Spain highlighting a renewal going on in the Spanish feminist movement without losing previous age groups’ claims, thus bridging the generation gap around old demands such as legislation on gender violence, abolishing the pay gap or fighting against the feminisation of precarity. As Galarza Fernández, Castro-Martínez and Sosa Valcárcel (2019) have pointed out, Spanish feminism has benefited from social media and online communication, which has allowed activists to increase their social capital and mobilise young and old. In fact, according to Hunt (2017) the incorporation of young women in the movement and the creation of new networks have allowed for a sense of unity among women, regardless of age, and despite acknowledging their different positions on the axes of inequality. This, in turn, has led to a transnational expansion of the movement, as well as a more sophisticated use of technology contesting discursive strategies online and a more inclusive definition of the term ‘women’ understood as a political category. We consider this transnationality, intersectionality and technological empowerment to be part of what some authors have called the ‘Feminist Fourth Wave’ (Cochrane 2013), despite the controversial use of the ‘wave’ metaphor for referring to the feminist movement and the obvious geographical differences regarding discourses of feminism in different territories (McLean 2020).

The aim of our research is to examine how feminist YouTubers in Spain are forging a digital public space for resistance, by delving into YouTube and analysing videos that share and help spread feminist ideas or actions in Spain. In this chapter, we are focusing on the channels of activists like Andy Asadaf, Towanda Rebels and Irantzu Varela. As a produsage platform (Bruns 2008) based on video, YouTube provides many young and digitally savvy people with a chance to participate in the construction of a public debate about gender inequalities, the historical role of feminism, and social transformation strategies (Jouët 2017; Lawrence & Ringrose, 2018). On this platform, new communication formats are being tested that establish relationships both with the feminist tradition and with celebrity culture (Araüna, Tortajada & Willem 2019). At the same time, the online violence, threats and attacks on feminist YouTubers (Döring & Mohseni 2019), and the attempts to silence them are forcing the latter into articulating responses fast and developing sophisticated strategies of resistance and solidarity. We intend to highlight some of these strategies in this chapter.

Capitalising on the achievements of feminism

The recent expansion of feminism into the mainstream as a broad conceptual framework – ranging from a commercial and neoliberal appropriation of feminism to grassroots activism – has come to replace the hegemony of postfeminism as defined by Rosalind Gill, one of the most prominent researchers in postfeminist culture (Gill 2007). We will argue that postfeminism now shares a much more contended understanding of gender roles with this renewed and ‘mainstreamed’ feminism.

In communication and gender studies, postfeminist representation patterns have been one of the main concerns of Anglo-Saxon and North European academics during the last decade (Gill 2016b; Tortajada & Van Bauwel 2012). Postfeminism is a cultural representation regime, suggesting that feminism has achieved formal ‘equality’ between men and women while omitting structural and embedded inequalities in cultural systems (McRobbie 2004). Its assumptions somehow arose from the conjunction between neoliberalism and a popularised third-wave feminism. Since the early 2000s it has occupied the substrate of most audiovisual and graphic productions addressing women, establishing narratives that emphasise individual empowerment through competition on the labour market (neoliberal feminism) and encouraging the recovery of some of the traditional values associated with femininity. In this postfeminist spectrum, the concept of beauty and the ability to generate sexual attraction – especially in its cosmetic-commercial realisation – had a central role in the satisfaction of women (McRobbie 2004; Gill 2007), along with their capacity as consumers (Gill 2008). While the meritocratic and liberal notions underlying postfeminism supposedly allowed for a diversification of gender identities and sexualities, in turn, they subsumed this diversity to standards of ‘heterosexiness’ (Dobson 2011). The postfeminist framework and its liberal optimism have thus participated in rendering the structures of inequality invisible and holding individuals accountable for their own failure and success while promoting mechanisms of self-surveillance and self-demand in performing standard and marketable identities in terms of ‘appropriate femininity’ (Araüna, Dhaenens & Van Bauwel 2017).

In more recent times, however, and partly as a response to this backlash, the labels and ideas associated with feminism have regained centrality and are now present everywhere, ranging from political discourses to commercial advertisements (Banet-Weiser 2018). Rosalind Gill defines the moment as ‘a new luminosity’ of feminism (2016a, 2016b). Guerra Palmero (2019), on the other hand, has pointed out that the institutionalisation of feminism goes hand in hand with a hostile, patriarchal and misogynistic reaction from neoliberalism and neoconservatism, against which feminism is now the most significant force of resistance. In summary, we are facing a scenario where feminist and postfeminist media discourses operate simultaneously, while misogyny and antifeminism are also strengthened (Banet-Weiser & Miltner 2016; Keller, Mendes & Ringrose 2016), and where both left and right-wing political parties – at least in Spain – try to capitalise on the achievements of feminism.

Feminism on YouTube

YouTuber videos, along with content on recent platforms such as TikTok or Twitch, are the privileged objects of young people’s audiovisual produsage practices, understood as actions carried out by people who adopt a double condition of producers and users (Bruns, 2008). Much of this produsage has to do with the presentation of the online Self in its various aspects, including the creation of the Self as a reflective (Genz 2015) and political subject (Tortajada, Cabellero-Gálvez, Willem 2019). At the outset, YouTubers who self-define as such mostly produce videos on their own (or in small teams), focusing on their own image and what they have to say, acting as the enunciator and branding the style of a set of videos uploaded regularly on their channel. In stylistic terms, the camera usually emulates the position of the selfie with a constant medium shot of the YouTuber, who most of the time is sitting in a private space at home. Bedrooms, offices and living rooms are the most common backdrops for this type of videos. The domestic atmosphere, together with the first-person tone of the video, creates an environment of apparent proximity and trust between the performer and the public.

Teenagers have been reported to perceive YouTubers as personalities who are accessible, close and similar to themselves, and with whom they can identify (Pérez-Torres, Pastor-Ruiz & Abarrou-Ben-Boubaker 2018). Adding to this illusion of a direct connection with the YouTuber is the relative possibility of followers to actually interact with them through likes, shares, and comments, or – in the case of other YouTubers – with videos of their own. In some cases, for example in the YouTube row involving the trans community in Spain (Tortajada, Caballero-Gálvez & Willem 2019), dialectic discussions between YouTubers indicate the positioning of their publics regarding the issues raised, tapping into broader debates regarding social and gender inequalities.

YouTubers can have one or several channels, and they sometimes specialise in a specific topic, but each YouTuber establishes a ‘marketable’ and intentionally styled personality. When successful, YouTubers become micro-celebrities: a kind of public personality who – unlike television or cinema celebrities – needs to constantly and successively upload new content herself (Jerslev 2016). Regardless of the complexity of the content, YouTube videos generally have a ‘didactic’ or ‘common good’ aspect, in the sense that they intend to raise issues perceived as useful for a particular social group. In fact, the success of social media platforms like YouTube greatly depends on the social response to its contents, and this often leads to mutual support groups or even learning communities (Araüna, Tortajada & Willem 2019).

According to authors such as Szostak, YouTube ‘operates as a support network for women dedicated to the general goal of acceptance and respect’ (2013: 56), and so we can assume its feminist potential within the discursive online space. In fact, the number of YouTube channels specifically dedicated to feminist issues has increased dramatically in the last five years. On other social media platforms movements such as #MeToo or #TimesUp have already sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Editors’ introduction
• PART I Young people, sexuality and gender performance: Texts and audiences
• PART II Adults, sexuality, gender and the media in research perspective
• PART III Elderly have a voice(?): Sexuality, gender and the media across texts and audiences
• Index