Feminist Media

While feminists have long recognised the importance of self-managed, alternative media to transport their messages, to challenge the status quo, and to spin novel social processes, this topic has been an under-researched area. Hence, this book explores the processes of women's and feminist media production in the context of participatory spaces, technology, and cultural citizenship. The collection is composed of theoretical analyses and critical case studies. It highlights contemporary alternative feminist media in general as well as blogs, zines, culture jamming, and street art.

Feminist Media Studies is a cutting-edge introduction to the core and emerging theories, methods, and approaches in a field that has blossomed over the past twenty-five years. Adopting an intersectional approach – a framework concerning the interconnected character of oppression based on gender, race, class, and other constructed identities – Alison Harvey takes a global view of gendered practices in and around the media. She provides an accessible overview of classical and contemporary issues in media culture by exploring the past, present, and future of feminist media studies, accounting for changes in the media landscape, from digital technologies and globalized media systems to emergent inequalities, discourses, and practices. By engaging with research from a diverse body of scholarship, this book situates feminist media studies as vital to researching and analysing a range of significant issues. The go-to textbook for a new generation of students, as well as an important resource for scholars, Feminist Media Studies is both an exciting invitation to the field and a passionate call to arms.

Making Feminist Media provides new ways of thinking about the vibrant media and craft cultures generated by Riot Grrrl and feminism’s third wave. It focuses on a cluster of feminist publications—including BUST, Bitch, HUES, Venus Zine, and Rockrgrl—that began as zines in the 1990s. By tracking their successes and failures, this book provides insight into the politics of feminism’s recent past. Making Feminist Media brings together interviews with magazine editors, research from zine archives, and analysis of the advertising, articles, editorials, and letters to the editor found in third-wave feminist magazines. It situates these publications within the long history of feminist publishing in the United States and Canada and argues that third-wave feminist magazines share important continuities and breaks with their historical forerunners. These publishing lineages challenge the still-dominant—and hotly contested— wave metaphor categorization of feminist culture. The stories, struggles, and strategies of these magazines not only represent contemporary feminism, they create and shape feminist cultures. The publications provide a feminist counter-public sphere in which the competing interests of editors, writers, readers, and advertisers can interact. Making Feminist Media argues that reading feminist magazines is far more than the consumption of information or entertainment: it is a profoundly intimate and political activity that shapes how readers understand themselves and each other as feminist thinkers.

"Questions of gender are scarce in the mass communication literature and feminist media studies remain marginalized. Here is a strong effort to remedy the situation, an overview that initiates the newcomer and offers topics and methods for the previously initiated. . . . All levels." --Choice Feminists have long recognized the significance of the media as a forum for the expression of--or challenges to--the existing constructions of gender. In this broad-ranging analysis, Liesbet van Zoonen explores how feminist theory and research contribute to a fuller understanding of the media's multiple roles in the construction of gender in contemporary societies.

Highlighting the contributions of feminist media history to media studies and related disciplines, this book focuses on feminist periodicals emerging from or reacting to the Edwardian suffrage campaign and situates them in the context of current debates about the public sphere, social movements, and media history.

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.

Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research tackles the breadth and depth of feminist perspectives in the field of media studies through essays and research that reflect on the present and future of feminist research and theory at the intersections of women, gender, media, activism, and academia. The volume includes original chapters on diverse topics illustrating where theorization and research currently stand with regard to the politics of gender and media, what work is being done in feminist theory, and how feminist scholarship can contribute to our understanding of gender as a mediated experience with implications for our contemporary global society. It opens for discussion how the research, theory, and interventions challenge concepts of gender in mediated discourses and practices and how these fit into the evolving state of contemporary feminisms. Contributors engage with discussions about contemporary feminisms as they are understood in media theory and research, particularly in a field that has changed rapidly in the last decades with digital communication tools and through cross-disciplinary work. Overall, the book illustrates how the politics of gender operate within the current media landscapes and how feminist theorizing shapes academic inquiry of these landscapes.

"Questions of gender are scarce in the mass communication literature and feminist media studies remain marginalized. Here is a strong effort to remedy the situation, an overview that initiates the newcomer and offers topics and methods for the previously initiated. . . . All levels." --Choice Feminists have long recognized the significance of the media as a forum for the expression of--or challenges to--the existing constructions of gender. In this broad-ranging analysis, Liesbet van Zoonen explores how feminist theory and research contribute to a fuller understanding of the media's multiple roles in the construction of gender in contemporary societies.