Manosphere creep: Emotional and hermeneutic labour in Netflix’s Adolescence

This chapter focuses on Colleen, one of 22 youths who took part in a two year qualitative study designed to explore young adolescents’ use of information communication technology (ICT) and popular media texts to make sense of themselves and their world. The rationale for the study stemmed from limited research concerning the overlaps and schisms between adolescents’ use of ICT and popular media texts in their everyday lives (home, community, peer group) and how adolescents’ engagement with ICT and popular media texts affects established social institutions. The New London Group’s (1996) conception of multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000) and an activity theory-influenced framework (Beach, 2000; Cole, 1996; Engestrom & Miettinen, 1999) were used to guide the study. Colleen’s use of ICT and popular media texts, both in and outside of school, illustrates the non-linear, non-hierarchical complexity of the pedagogy of multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000).

This article explores five concerns among media literacy educators related to using potentially transgressive popular culture texts as tools in the classroom, detailing the formative teaching experiences of several instructors in a media literacy summer enrichment program. These five concerns include such issues as inappropriate material in a media text and fear of offending parents or administrators. Using inquiry-based learning as a classroom foundation, instructors and administration in the program developed strategies for dealing with problematic and transgressive popular culture material in classroom use. Strategies explored include teaching and practicing critical thinking skills and encouraging open-ended student dialogue. Instructors modeled and supported positive and respectful conversations about popular media texts, facilitated collaborative media production and analysis activities in their classrooms, and fostered personal reflection about media use among students.

In classrooms, museums, health clinics and beyond, the educational uses of visual media have proliferated over the past fifty years. Film, video, television, and digital media have been integral to the development of new pedagogical theories and practices, globalization processes, and identity and community formation. Yet, Brian Goldfarb argues, the educational roles of visual technologies have not been fully understood or appreciated. He contends that in order to understand the intersections of new media and learning, we need to recognize the sweeping scope of the technologically infused visual pedagogy—both in and outside the classroom. From Samoa to the United States mainland to Africa and Brazil, from museums to city streets, Visual Pedagogy explores the educational applications of visual media in different institutional settings during the past half century. Looking beyond the popular media texts and mainstream classroom technologies that are the objects of most analyses of media and education, Goldfarb encourages readers to see a range of media subcultures as pedagogical tools. The projects he analyzes include media produced by AIDS/HIV advocacy groups and social services agencies for classroom use in the 1990s; documentary and fictional cinemas of West Africa used by the French government and then by those resisting it; museum exhibitions; and TV Anhembi, a municipally sponsored collaboration between the television industry and community-based videographers in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Combining media studies, pedagogical theory, and art history, and including an appendix of visual media resources and ideas about the most productive ways to utilize visual technologies for educational purposes, Visual Pedagogy will be useful to educators, administrators, and activists.

Is she looking as royal as can be? Dressing the part of a princess? Popular media texts, such as magazines completely devoted to celebrity matters, dealing with reports on who is wearing what at which occasion, provide the empirical outset for this textual study on the representations of the Scandinavian princesses of today: Mary (Denmark), Mette-Marit (Norway), Victoria (Sweden) and Madeleine (Sweden). In this article the princesses are, on a theoretical level, considered stars with their own images, images constructed in a similar way as film stars, with fashion and appearance as the focal point. In popular media texts, such as the Swedish woman's magazine Svensk Damtidning, the styles of the princesses are scrutinised, compared and evaluated. These mappings are in this way further examined, and the topics surrounding the representations are surveyed. The themes selected for supplementary examination are personal style and Cinderella narrative, as they emerge as intimately interrelated with fashion. The epithet princess, in the sense “what a princess ought to look like”, is given in terms of aestheticised appearance: body, fashion and personal style, is thus discussed and theorised throughout the article. Hence, the purpose of this article is to examine the roll of dress and the matter of appearance concerning the representations of the Scandinavian princesses, relating to the themes of style and consumption, as well as the transformation narratives. How are these royal styles constructed, on a designer level as well on a thematic level?Therése Andersson, Ph.D., Cinema Studies, currently employed at the Department of History, Stockholm University. Her doctoral thesis is entitled Beauty Box: Film Stars and Beauty Culture in Early 20th Century Sweden. She has recently finished her post doctoral research project Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, granted by Anna Ahlström and Ellen Terserus Foundation, and is currently working on the research project Velcro, Button, and Zip: Power and Materiality during Styling and Dressing, funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. She has published several articles on popular- and visual culture.

The study of popular culture addresses both media texts and cultural practices. This ever-expanding area of scholarship includes film, science fiction, television, romance novels, popular music, magazines: all the seeming ephemera in the public domain that through its popularity remains in production and circulation or has attained a place in cultural memory. As a field that encompasses and interrogates the production, distribution, and interpretation of all popular media forms, this much-maligned discipline demands particularly stringent intellectual and methodological rigor. Feminist interventions in the field have been both inspiring and infuriating. For example, Germaine Greer's three and sixpence purchase of the two romance novels analyzed in The Female Eunuch does not actually misrepresent the genre, but her anecdotal discussion of their impact falls short of the systematic methodology expected in scholarly research in popular culture. Difficulties in studying popular culture arise from the scale of the mass media, its ephemeral nature, and the paradox of its apparent inconsequence. Feminist analysis of popular culture intensifies the debate over whether popular texts merely reflect society or act as part of the process of mediation in social life. The understanding that popular and mass media texts act as sites of cultural practice, which Greer acknowledges in her discussion, links popular culture directly to ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in the world. The status of these texts as shared cultural reference points that make visible ideologies, discourses, and values is a major topic of feminist analysis. Popular culture constitutes a space of exchange between dominant and subordinate cultures and provides a valuable area of study for those who hope to understand social change.

Gossip Girl: A Critical Understanding provides a critical analysis of The CW’s hit teen television drama Gossip Girl. Lori Bindig analyzes episodes as a set of media texts that blur the boundaries between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic content. Using political economy, textual and audience analyses, Bindig dissects how the show presents ideological content in regard to gender, race, class, sexuality, and consumerism, ultimately unearthing potential ramifications of Gossip Girl and other popular media texts. In addition, Bindig examines the expansive fan community and its engagement with the show through online forums and YouTube. Gossip Girl: A Critical Understanding will appeal to scholars of media, audience studies, and popular culture.

This article discusses the need to regulate the vast amount of empirical material that makes it possible to digitally process texts in dialogical communication. To systematize popular science communication, a set of speech markers has been identified that constitute the speech systematicity of popular science texts related to various trajectories of popularization of scientific knowledge: news, training, education, promotion, and entertainment. As a methodological basis, we use an integrated approach to analyzing textual materials, which involves: 1) manual marking of texts to determine their belonging to one of the trajectories of scientific popularization; 2) identification of the features of speech representation of scientific knowledge in each trajectory, through a description of denotation, mode, and communicative situation; 3) identification of markers that form the speech systematicity in texts of each trajectory of scientific popularization. We identify speech markers by their frequency of usage in media texts published in various sources. The analysis of the materials shows that the trajectories of scientific popularization differ in specific denotations, mode settings, and features of the communicative situation, leading to the frequency of certain objections. Manually selected speech markers for each popularization trajectory form metadata that is intended to be used to train text classification algorithms. These parameters allow for distinguishing between a wide range of empirical data, facilitating navigation, configuring information searches, filtering out spam, and identifying the advantages and disadvantages of interpreting scientific knowledge for the needs of the audience. This research helps to address shortcomings in the systematization of popular science texts in general and objections in particular.

Conceptual Overview (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

This article aims to shed light on the gender dynamics in the context of performing emotional labor in Turkish call centers. Based on qualitative interviews, this study aimed to illuminate how gender is done and undone, providing a perspective on the relationship between gender and emotional labor in call centers, a highly gendered and interactional line of work. Gender relations are complex and gender performativity in call center work allows us to observe different ways in which employees do and undo gender. This study reveals that female employees are more inclined to undo gender and display competence as a work strategy to elevate their position, whereas male employees struggle between job demands and adhering to masculine norms.

Many of the existing debates about Reality TV overlook some of the obvious ways in which questions of intimacy are implicated in gender relations. In this article we want to open up a debate about how Reality TV’s creation of mediated intimacy induces a type of emotional labour through the performance of femininity. The realm of intimacy is one that has traditionally been associated with the feminine private sphere, but various commentators have marked out how public worlds, institutions and market forces have marshalled the intimate terrain into public spaces, using it to reinforce arguments of ‘normalcy’. We want to assess whether the blurring of the public/private distinction can offer a straightforward route to viewing pleasure through locating some of our findings from the 40 women that we interviewed about their own lives and the place of Reality TV within their broader life experiences. What we see on Reality TV is a visualisation of different performatives and demands. The distance between the practice of the viewer and the performer is minimised because both are subject to the requirements of feminine performances, particularly at the level of caring. The emotional labour of empathy is also bound up within moral judgements of value, especially visible in the use of the word ‘sad’. The ambiguity over ‘sad’ draws the female viewers of our study into an immanent emotional labour relationship at the same time as offering a space to critique.

Reviewed by: The Cost of Belonging: An Ethnography of Solidarity and Mobility in Beijing's Koreatown by Sharon J. Yoon Minjeong Kim The Cost of Belonging: An Ethnography of Solidarity and Mobility in Beijing's Koreatown, by Sharon J. Yoon. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 208 pages. ISBN: 9780197517901. $19.94 paperback. Questioning an optimistic picture of co-ethnic solidarity or suggesting immigrants' mixed relationships with co-ethnic communities are by no [End Page 356] means new in the immigration literature, but these topics have never been interrogated more directly than in Sharon Yoon's The Cost of Belonging: An Ethnography of Solidarity and Mobility in Beijing's Koreatown. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork comprising an original survey, in-depth interviews, and participant observations in different spaces in the Wangjing district in Beijing, Yoon presents a compelling portrayal of a transnational ethnic enclave that is both spatially segregated and socioeconomically stratified. Wangjing is a district in Beijing that grew with foreign investment from Korean multinational corporations, or chaebol, to use Yoon's choice of terminology. The district is home to the fastest-growing and largest overseas Korean community in the world, with over 200,000 Koreans living there as of 2015. Since China opened its market and relaxed its own domestic migration policy, three large streams of Korean migrants have come to Wangjing: Korean companies' "expat" managers, who often moved with their families for overseas assignments; South Korean grassroots migrants, who moved with their retirement savings to bet on the burgeoning Chinese market; and the Korean Chinese (joseonjok), who followed the economic opportunities of the transnational Korean economy. Yoon carefully illustrates how Koreans in Wangjing are unable to bond over their co-ethnic diasporic identity, instead grappling with immovable hierarchies, deep-seated suspicion, and quotidian tensions among these groups. One of Yoon's main arguments is that "diasporic identity politics are increasingly enmeshed in class conflict and market competition, and notions of nationhood and feelings of belonging are utilized to legitimate and perpetuate processes of stratification" (p. 16). Here, Yoon finds a connection between the economic privilege of the global middle class and the emotional privilege of having an uninterrupted sense of belonging to the ethnic space. In turn, Yoon critically exposes the financial precarity of middle-class immigrant entrepreneurs and the widening economic gaps and social divisions among Koreans. These are, Yoon contends, "a darker side" of transnationalism in Wangjing. In this highly mobile enclave, Korean chaebol and their subsidiaries work with their headquarters in Korea, ethnic churches receive financial and human resources from their Korean counterparts, and people frequently travel to and from Korea for business and pleasure. Imbricated with these transnational movements are stereotypes about the Korean Chinese among South Koreans and stereotypes about South Koreans among the Korean Chinese, both of which perpetuate suspicion and tension among these groups, preventing [End Page 357] them from cultivating deeper relationships. To a certain extent, the stunting of these relationships contributes to engendering divergent outcomes—Korean Chinese migrants finding upwardly mobile paths and South Korean grassroots migrants finding their dreams ruptured in Beijing's Koreatown. Among the unique aspects of Yoon's volume is that she delves into Koreans' lives in Wangjing through spaces. Yoon first lays out the physical space of the enclave, where groups are geographically segregated and socially stratified, by describing Wangjing New City, the hub of Koreatown; Nanhu, the Korean Chinese side of the enclave; and the luxurious Huading Complex, where South Korean expats are concentrated. Then, with commendable ethnographic work balanced with theoretical engagement, Yoon takes readers through three spaces, where the three Korean diasporic groups (Korean expat managers, South Korean grassroots migrants, and the Korean Chinese) clash with one another. First, in a chaebol company, a very rigid hierarchy is unabashedly displayed, with South Korean expat managers in the highest positions, South Korean locals below them, and Korean Chinese at the lowest levels. Yoon explains that Korean Chinese employees who use their knowledge of Chinese social norms to work as cultural intermediaries have been instrumental to the success of Korean chaebol in Chinese markets, but that such "soft skills" and emotional labor are rarely recognized as professional specialties and are...

This entry describes adolescents' uses of digital literacy and popular media texts (broadly defined) in a world that takes for granted much of what heightened technological advances have heaped upon a society largely ambivalent on how to translate these advances into sound instruction. Among the topics addressed in defining what counts as adolescent literacy in a digital world are these: dual and competing models of literacy, youth identities, digital literacy practices, popular media/pop culture, and new directions for research.

ABSTRACTFor this contribution to the special issue on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” the author employs an array of public health and popular media texts (especially Jonathan Demme’s film Philadelphia) to challenge the construction and reconstruction of HIV-positive bodies as sites of bioethical concern. In outlining notions of “digital restoration,” the author argues that there has been of late a remapping of the first decade of the HIV/AIDS pandemic through media projects assembled from archived materials. Accordingly, the author suggests that in the first decades of the 2000s, we have witnessed a media-archaeological turn, whereby old materials have been reassembled for commemorative purposes that oftentimes perform a reshaping of the topography of the first decade of the AIDS pandemic.

This article analyzes discursive linkages between acts of listening and eating within a combined multisensory regime that the authors label the gustasonic. Including both marketing discourses mobilized by the commercial music industry and representations of record consumption in popular media texts, gustasonic discourses have shaped forms and experiences of recorded sound culture from the gramophone era to the present. The authors examine three prominent modalities of gustasonic discourse: (1) discourses that position records as edible objects for physical ingestion; (2) discourses that preserve linkages between listening and eating but incorporate musical recordings into the packaging of other foodstuffs; and (3) discourses of gustasonic distinction that position the listener as someone with discriminating taste. While the gustasonic on one hand serves as an aid to consumerism, it can also cultivate a countervailing collecting impulse that resists music’s commodity status and inscribes sound recording within alternative systems of culture value.

Photography has become a key ingredient in Kenya’s political communication. This is based on the fact that photography, its use, appreciation and interpretation in postcolonial Africa, has allowed people to identify with specific modes of agency, subjectivity, intentionality, necessity, determination and impact in political and democratic processes. Photography, like other popular media texts, offers evocative evidence that supports political messaging and discourses in the national or global public sphere where the production of meaning takes place, and public opinion is negotiated, aggregated and legitimised. Even though this chapter is based on the work of popular photographer and social justice activist, Boniface Mwangi, it contends that the use of photography in postcolonial Africa is important in political communication, mobilisation and action, and ultimately in the development and consolidation of “democracy” and associated principles like accountability and the rule of law. What’s more, Mwangi has used public spaces to exhibit pictures and thus invited Kenyans to internalise and evoke memory, remember their experiences, express anger and mobilise feelings and actions. The chapter locates arguments within the ambit of “photography of resistance” whose meaning is drawn from photography’s capacity to incite action and change in postcolonial Africa.