Shani Orgad
Biographic Data
| ID | 160770 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shani Orgad |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shani |
| FAMILY NAME | Orgad |
| SIGNATURE | ORGAD S |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5129-4203 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 410 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Sociological imagination, feminist politics and their limits in accounts of UK menopause experts
This article presents an ‘ambivalent critique’ of how experts in the UK ‘menopause movement’ imagine menopause. It shows how, on the one hand, in employing a sociological imagination and drawing on the legacy of feminist movements, menopause experts seek to challenge structural inequalities and social injustices, including the shame, silence and stigma surrounding menopause. On the other hand, it critiques the way these experts’ visions of menopa…
Towards a sociological imagination of menopause
This article presents the monograph Reimagining Menopause as a sociological response to the heightened public visibility of menopause in the West and the increasing attention it is receiving in the Global South in recent years. Employing C. W. Mills’ concept of the sociological imagination as a lens, the monograph examines how individuals’ and groups’ diverse lived experiences of menopause relate to and interact with contemporary cultural narrati…
“Me.No.Pause.”: Anxieties and fantasies of aging and femininity in contemporary menopause advertising
Amidst heightened cultural visibility of menopause and a burgeoning market of menopause-related products in the United Kingdom and the United States, this article examines how menopause is constructed in contemporary advertising. Informed by a psychosocial understanding of advertisements as fantasy texts which operate through mobilizing psychic desires, identifications, and anxieties, we ask: How are women exhorted to relate to menopause? What fa…
Listening in times of crisis: The value and limits of radio phone-in shows
The article explores the democratic value of listening by examining what listening to radio phone-in programmes and listening more broadly mean to people in times of crisis. Drawing on focus groups with London residents severely affected by the cost-of-living, health and social care crises, the article discusses how participants engaged in listening and discussed its significance. Against what we call a ‘crisis of listening’, namely, a rapid shri…
How to tame your hormones: Menopause rage in media discourse
While feminist scholarship has challenged earlier misogynist discourses around menopause, menopause continues to be associated with women’s rage. Focusing on UK news and advice websites (2018–2024), we ask if and how this association is figured in contemporary cultural representations and what cultural and political work it performs. We situate our examination within three converging contexts: 1) the unleashing of public displays of women’s rage …
Posting vulnerability on LinkedIn
Digital spaces such as LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional digital network, constitute central sites for self-promotion, where job seekers and the employed present their polished “best” professional selves. However, in recent years, LinkedIn members are increasingly publishing accounts that highlight their vulnerabilities and struggles. This article examines the emergence of vulnerability on LinkedIn by analyzing how vulnerability is artic…
Mediating menopause: Feminism, neoliberalism, and biomedicalisation
Menopause is currently a 'hot' topic in the UK. This article examines the Channel 4 television documentary Davina McCall: Sex, Myths and the Menopause as a key cultural text in the current UK 'menopause moment', demonstrating how the programme both reflects and contributes to the broader trend of menopause's growing visibility and the emerging menopause market. We begin by situating Davina within broader social, cultural and economic processes wh…
The menopause moment: The rising visibility of ‘the change’ in UK news coverage
Drawing on feminist scholarship that interrogates cultural representations of ageing women, this article examines UK news coverage of menopause from 2001 to 2021. We show that not only has there been a dramatic rise in menopause’s visibility since 2015, and especially since 2021, but that the coverage is concentrated in the conservative right-wing press. We also document six peaks in coverage, which are driven by celebrity stories, news about men…
Confidence Culture
In Confidence Culture, Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill argue that imperatives directed at women to “love your body” and “believe in yourself” imply that psychological blocks rather than entrenched social injustices hold women back. Interrogating the prominence of confidence in contemporary discourse about body image, workplace, relationships, motherhood, and international development, Orgad and Gill draw on Foucault’s notion of technologies of self…
Crisis-ready responsible selves: National productions of the pandemic
National governments have played a key role in constructing the Covid-19 pandemic through their communications. Drawing on thematic, discursive and visual analyses of Covid-19 campaigns from 12 national contexts, we show how the pandemic has presented governments with unique conditions for articulating and reinforcing nationalism and neoliberalism. The campaigns frame the pandemic as a force that brings the nation together and conjure up notions …
Get Unstuck
Examining women's magazines and lifestyle coaching, the article explores how positivity imperatives in contemporary culture call forth a happy, confident, hopeful, and vibrant subject during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis shows how these positivity imperatives acknowledge stress and difficulty, and at times highlight their gendered impacts, yet nevertheless systematically figure responses and solutions in individual, psychological, and often…
Representations of migration in U.K. and U.S. children’s picture books in the Trump and Brexit era
In the wake of an intensifying hostile environment towards migrants and refugees in the U.S. and Europe, children’s picture books play an important role in shaping children’s understanding of migration and attitudes towards migrants. How do contemporary children’s books depict migration? This article discusses the findings of a thematic analysis of 40 picture books about migration, published between 2015 and 2019 in the U.K. and the U.S. We found…
Sensing the (in)visible: Domestic cleaning and cleaners on Mumsnet Talk
Based on a thematic analysis of 7,569 posts on the online parenting forum Mumsnet Talk, in this article we examine how domestic cleaning—one of the most invisible aspects of reproductive labour—and the people who perform it are made visible. We conceptualize Mumsnet discussions as a “visibility sensor:” a technological and affective space that captures, analyses and relays information and feelings in ways that contribute to visibilizing cleaning …
How Any Woman Does What They Do Is Beyond Comprehension”: Media Representations of Meghan Markle’s Maternity
In 2019–2020, Meghan Markle was one of the most intensely mediated mothers in the anglophone media. This article examines how U.K. and U.S. media representations of Markle negotiate, trouble, challenge, regulate, and reassert the boundaries and meanings of contemporary motherhood. Situating Markle’s mediated representations in the context of the increasing visibility and shifting meanings of motherhood in contemporary culture, and particularly in…
The Sociological Imagination and Media Studies in Neoliberal Times
To date, media and communication studies have mostly examined narratives either as stories that circulate in public discourse or as people’s personal narratives. In the context of deepening inequalities, the cementing of neoliberal rationality and the intensifying centrality of media and communication technologies in public and everyday life, connecting the two realms is a vital task. Drawing on The Sociological Imagination, I argue for and demon…
Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality
Women in today's advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to "lean in." The media and government champion women's empowerment. In a cultural climate where women can seemingly have it all, why do so many successful professional women-lawyers, financial managers, teachers, engineers, and others-give up their careers after having children and become stay-at-home mothers? How do they feel about their decision and what do their stories tell us abo…
Safety valves for mediated female rage in the #MeToo era
In political discourse, popular and media culture, female rage is "having a moment." More and more women are getting publicly and unapologetically angry, particularly in relation to sexual violence, but also in reaction to other forms of sexism, racism and injustice. Yet, it is also clear that the release of female anger in public culture is uneven —— in terms of class, race, age, sexuality, disability —- and that powerful mechanisms continue lon…
MeToo, popular feminism and the news: A content analysis of UK newspaper coverage
This article examines the first 6 months of #MeToo’s coverage in the UK press, revealing how newspapers played an important role in heightening the campaign’s visibility. Using content analysis, our study demonstrates that the press contributed to expanding and reinforcing #MeToo’s visibility in important ways. In terms of reach, the UK press has expanded the movement’s visibility beyond social media, addressing potentially new and different read…
Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim. Mothering through precarity: Women's work and digital media
The shifting terrain of sex and power: From the ‘sexualization of culture’ to # MeToo
In this short article we will aim to do three things. First, we want to use this opportunity to reflect on some of the changes we have seen in the scholarly field of gender, sexuality, and intimacy over this period, and on new emerging directions. Second, we want to discuss the move away from discussions of ‘sexualization’ to a more critical and political register interested in a variety of ways in which sex and power intersect. Thirdly, we will …
The Amazing Bounce-Backable Woman: Resilience and the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism
This article examines the growing prominence accorded to the idea of 'resilience' as a regulatory ideal, locating it in the context of a 'turn to character' in contemporary culture which we see as part of a wider psychological turn within neoliberalism. Building from discussions of 'resilience' as a quality demanded and promoted by public policy in the context of austerity and worsening inequality, we argue that resilience has also emerged as a c…
Caring in Crisis? Humanitarianism, the Public and NGOs
The Cruel Optimism of The Good Wife: The Fantastic Working Mother on the Fantastical Treadmill
This article juxtaposes The Good Wife’s ( TGW) representation of Alicia Florrick’s experience as a professional woman and a mother, against interview accounts of middle-class women who left successful careers after having children. I show that TGW furnishes a compelling fantasy based on (1) the valorization of combining motherhood with competitive, long-hours high-powered waged work as the basis for a woman’s value and liberation, and (2) an emph…
Incongruous encounters: Media representations and lived experiences of stay-at-home mothers
This article juxtaposes mediated representations of stay-at-home mothers (SAHMs) with accounts of twenty-two UK -educated middle-class SAHMs. It exposes a fundamental chasm between media constructions of women’s “opting out” of the workplace as a personal choice, and the factors shaping women’s decisions to leave a career, and their complex, often painful consequences. The juxtaposition highlights three aspects largely rendered invisible in curre…
The Humanitarian Makeover
We examine how the makeover paradigm is mobilized in contemporary humanitarian communications—a practice we call “humanitarian makeover.” We demonstrate its operation in the Finnish television programme Arman and the Children of Cameroon and Plan's 2013 International Day of the Girl event. The analysis shows how helping distant others is configured within a makeover and self-transformation narrative, providing a stage for performance of an “ethic…
The Confidence Cult(ure)
In this paper we explore how confidence has become a technology of self that invites girls and women to work on themselves. The discussion demonstrates the extensiveness of what we call the ‘cult(ure) of confidence’ across different areas of social life, and examines the continuities in the way that exponents of the confidence cult(ure) name, diagnose and propose solutions to archetypal feminist questions about labour, value and the body. Our ana…
The Amazing Bounce-Backable Woman: Resilience and the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism
This article examines the growing prominence accorded to the idea of 'resilience' as a regulatory ideal, locating it in the context of a 'turn to character' in contemporary culture which we see as part of a wider psychological turn within neoliberalism. Building from discussions of 'resilience' as a quality demanded and promoted by public policy in the context of austerity and worsening inequality, we argue that resilience has also emerged as a c…
MeToo, popular feminism and the news: A content analysis of UK newspaper coverage
This article examines the first 6 months of #MeToo’s coverage in the UK press, revealing how newspapers played an important role in heightening the campaign’s visibility. Using content analysis, our study demonstrates that the press contributed to expanding and reinforcing #MeToo’s visibility in important ways. In terms of reach, the UK press has expanded the movement’s visibility beyond social media, addressing potentially new and different read…
Girl power and ‘selfie humanitarianism’
The aim of this article is to examine the ‘turn to the girl’ and the mobilization of ‘girl power’ in contemporary global humanitarian and development campaigns. The paper argues that the ‘girl powering’ of humanitarianism is connected to the simultaneous depoliticization, corporatization, and neo-liberalization of both humanitarianism and girl power. Located in broad discussions of campaigns around Malala, Chime for Change and the Girl Effect, th…
Visualizers of solidarity: Organizational politics in humanitarian and international development NGOs
Discussion of the visual politics of solidarity, in relation specifically to the representation of suffering and development, has been grounded in analysis of images. This article seeks to expand this debate by exploring the organizational politics that shape and are shaped by these images. The article is inspired by production studies in the cultural industries and draws on interviews with 17 professionals from 10 UK-based international developm…
The Transformative Potential of Online Communication: The case of breast cancer patients' Internet spaces
Get Unstuck
Examining women's magazines and lifestyle coaching, the article explores how positivity imperatives in contemporary culture call forth a happy, confident, hopeful, and vibrant subject during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis shows how these positivity imperatives acknowledge stress and difficulty, and at times highlight their gendered impacts, yet nevertheless systematically figure responses and solutions in individual, psychological, and often…
Proper distance from ourselves: The potential for estrangement in the mediapolis
This article discusses how, and with what consequences, the news in today’s increasingly global and porous environment tells us about ourselves, showing us images that are often uncomfortable, strange and disturbing. In particular, it examines how, in times of conflict, in narrating and imaging ‘us’ as a nation, the news media can contribute to an ethical project of estrangement — achieving distance from ourselves, seeing ourselves as others, as …
The ‘stay-at-home’ mother, postfeminism and neoliberalism: Content analysis of UK news coverage
This article analyzes the construction in the UK media of the ‘stay-at-home mother’, a maternal figure who received increasing visibility during the recession and its aftermath. Based on a content analysis of UK national newspaper coverage of stay-at-home mothers (2008–2013), this article argues that the stay-at-home mother emerges from its press coverage as a neoliberal postfeminist subject. On the one hand, the coverage complicates claims about…
Proper distance: Mediation, ethics, otherness
The Cruel Optimism of The Good Wife: The Fantastic Working Mother on the Fantastical Treadmill
This article juxtaposes The Good Wife’s ( TGW) representation of Alicia Florrick’s experience as a professional woman and a mother, against interview accounts of middle-class women who left successful careers after having children. I show that TGW furnishes a compelling fantasy based on (1) the valorization of combining motherhood with competitive, long-hours high-powered waged work as the basis for a woman’s value and liberation, and (2) an emph…
The cultural dimensions of online communication: A study of breast cancer patients’ internet spaces
Many have studied the interrelations between online spaces and offline contexts, highlighting that internet spaces are fundamentally embedded within specific social, cultural and material contexts. Drawing upon a study of breast cancer patients’ computer-mediated communication (CMC), this article aims to contribute to our understanding of the role of cultural elements in shaping the participation in and design of, CMC environments. It uses an ana…
The menopause moment: The rising visibility of ‘the change’ in UK news coverage
Drawing on feminist scholarship that interrogates cultural representations of ageing women, this article examines UK news coverage of menopause from 2001 to 2021. We show that not only has there been a dramatic rise in menopause’s visibility since 2015, and especially since 2021, but that the coverage is concentrated in the conservative right-wing press. We also document six peaks in coverage, which are driven by celebrity stories, news about men…
Safety valves for mediated female rage in the #MeToo era
In political discourse, popular and media culture, female rage is "having a moment." More and more women are getting publicly and unapologetically angry, particularly in relation to sexual violence, but also in reaction to other forms of sexism, racism and injustice. Yet, it is also clear that the release of female anger in public culture is uneven —— in terms of class, race, age, sexuality, disability —- and that powerful mechanisms continue lon…
Sensing the (in)visible: Domestic cleaning and cleaners on Mumsnet Talk
Based on a thematic analysis of 7,569 posts on the online parenting forum Mumsnet Talk, in this article we examine how domestic cleaning—one of the most invisible aspects of reproductive labour—and the people who perform it are made visible. We conceptualize Mumsnet discussions as a “visibility sensor:” a technological and affective space that captures, analyses and relays information and feelings in ways that contribute to visibilizing cleaning …
Incongruous encounters: Media representations and lived experiences of stay-at-home mothers
This article juxtaposes mediated representations of stay-at-home mothers (SAHMs) with accounts of twenty-two UK -educated middle-class SAHMs. It exposes a fundamental chasm between media constructions of women’s “opting out” of the workplace as a personal choice, and the factors shaping women’s decisions to leave a career, and their complex, often painful consequences. The juxtaposition highlights three aspects largely rendered invisible in curre…
How Any Woman Does What They Do Is Beyond Comprehension”: Media Representations of Meghan Markle’s Maternity
In 2019–2020, Meghan Markle was one of the most intensely mediated mothers in the anglophone media. This article examines how U.K. and U.S. media representations of Markle negotiate, trouble, challenge, regulate, and reassert the boundaries and meanings of contemporary motherhood. Situating Markle’s mediated representations in the context of the increasing visibility and shifting meanings of motherhood in contemporary culture, and particularly in…
Mediating menopause: Feminism, neoliberalism, and biomedicalisation
Menopause is currently a 'hot' topic in the UK. This article examines the Channel 4 television documentary Davina McCall: Sex, Myths and the Menopause as a key cultural text in the current UK 'menopause moment', demonstrating how the programme both reflects and contributes to the broader trend of menopause's growing visibility and the emerging menopause market. We begin by situating Davina within broader social, cultural and economic processes wh…
Have you seen Bloomberg: Satellite news channels as agents of the new visibility
With the proliferation of transnational television flows, viewers can see their national affairs, traditionally covered predominantly by national news, portrayed by cross-border news channels. This article examines how transnational satellite news coverage of national events enhances nations' global visibility, and influences national public debate over national narratives. An analysis of the public debates in Spain and France over transnational …
Posting vulnerability on LinkedIn
Digital spaces such as LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional digital network, constitute central sites for self-promotion, where job seekers and the employed present their polished “best” professional selves. However, in recent years, LinkedIn members are increasingly publishing accounts that highlight their vulnerabilities and struggles. This article examines the emergence of vulnerability on LinkedIn by analyzing how vulnerability is artic…
Listening in times of crisis: The value and limits of radio phone-in shows
The article explores the democratic value of listening by examining what listening to radio phone-in programmes and listening more broadly mean to people in times of crisis. Drawing on focus groups with London residents severely affected by the cost-of-living, health and social care crises, the article discusses how participants engaged in listening and discussed its significance. Against what we call a ‘crisis of listening’, namely, a rapid shri…
The Sociological Imagination and Media Studies in Neoliberal Times
To date, media and communication studies have mostly examined narratives either as stories that circulate in public discourse or as people’s personal narratives. In the context of deepening inequalities, the cementing of neoliberal rationality and the intensifying centrality of media and communication technologies in public and everyday life, connecting the two realms is a vital task. Drawing on The Sociological Imagination, I argue for and demon…
The Humanitarian Makeover
We examine how the makeover paradigm is mobilized in contemporary humanitarian communications—a practice we call “humanitarian makeover.” We demonstrate its operation in the Finnish television programme Arman and the Children of Cameroon and Plan's 2013 International Day of the Girl event. The analysis shows how helping distant others is configured within a makeover and self-transformation narrative, providing a stage for performance of an “ethic…
Intimacy at a distance’ in humanitarian communication
While humanitarian communication has been scrutinized by practitioners and academics, the role and meanings of intimacy at a distance in this communication have been largely overlooked. Based on analysis of 17 in-depth interviews with professionals in 10 UK-based international NGOs engaged in planning, designing and producing humanitarian communications, this article explores how intimacy figures in NGOs’ thinking about and practice of humanitari…
Crisis-ready responsible selves: National productions of the pandemic
National governments have played a key role in constructing the Covid-19 pandemic through their communications. Drawing on thematic, discursive and visual analyses of Covid-19 campaigns from 12 national contexts, we show how the pandemic has presented governments with unique conditions for articulating and reinforcing nationalism and neoliberalism. The campaigns frame the pandemic as a force that brings the nation together and conjure up notions …
The Transformative Potential of Online Communication: The case of breast cancer patients' Internet spaces
The cultural dimensions of online communication: A study of breast cancer patients’ internet spaces
Many have studied the interrelations between online spaces and offline contexts, highlighting that internet spaces are fundamentally embedded within specific social, cultural and material contexts. Drawing upon a study of breast cancer patients’ computer-mediated communication (CMC), this article aims to contribute to our understanding of the role of cultural elements in shaping the participation in and design of, CMC environments. It uses an ana…
The internet as a moral space: The legacy of Roger Silverstone
exactly a month before Roger Silverstone's shocking death, we had our annual Media@LSE "Away Day": an occasion in which members of the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE talk to one another about current and future research interests, sharing their passions, concerns, anxieties and hopes.We went to the historic and beautiful Cumberland Lodge, set in the heart of Windsor Great Park -a stark contrast to the setting of our London offi…
Have you seen Bloomberg: Satellite news channels as agents of the new visibility
With the proliferation of transnational television flows, viewers can see their national affairs, traditionally covered predominantly by national news, portrayed by cross-border news channels. This article examines how transnational satellite news coverage of national events enhances nations' global visibility, and influences national public debate over national narratives. An analysis of the public debates in Spain and France over transnational …
Proper distance: Mediation, ethics, otherness
Proper distance from ourselves: The potential for estrangement in the mediapolis
This article discusses how, and with what consequences, the news in today’s increasingly global and porous environment tells us about ourselves, showing us images that are often uncomfortable, strange and disturbing. In particular, it examines how, in times of conflict, in narrating and imaging ‘us’ as a nation, the news media can contribute to an ethical project of estrangement — achieving distance from ourselves, seeing ourselves as others, as …
Media Representation and the Global Imagination
This book is a clear, systematic, original and lively account of how media representations shape the way we see our and others' lives in a global age. It provides in-depth analysis of a range of international media representations of disaster, war, conflict, migration and celebration. The book explores how images, stories and voices, on television, the Internet, and in advertisements and newspapers, invite us to relocate to distant contexts, and …
Visualizers of solidarity: Organizational politics in humanitarian and international development NGOs
Discussion of the visual politics of solidarity, in relation specifically to the representation of suffering and development, has been grounded in analysis of images. This article seeks to expand this debate by exploring the organizational politics that shape and are shaped by these images. The article is inspired by production studies in the cultural industries and draws on interviews with 17 professionals from 10 UK-based international developm…
The Mediation of Humanitarianism: Toward a Research Framework: The Mediation of Humanitarianism
This article examines existing research on the role of mediated narratives and images of distant suffering in cultivating moral response, identifying two central strands: Philosophically oriented accounts and empirical studies of text, audience, and production. On the basis of this critical review, we suggest a research framework that simultaneously builds on and departs from existing work, helping to expand and strengthen a program of research o…
Intimacy at a distance’ in humanitarian communication
While humanitarian communication has been scrutinized by practitioners and academics, the role and meanings of intimacy at a distance in this communication have been largely overlooked. Based on analysis of 17 in-depth interviews with professionals in 10 UK-based international NGOs engaged in planning, designing and producing humanitarian communications, this article explores how intimacy figures in NGOs’ thinking about and practice of humanitari…
The Humanitarian Makeover
We examine how the makeover paradigm is mobilized in contemporary humanitarian communications—a practice we call “humanitarian makeover.” We demonstrate its operation in the Finnish television programme Arman and the Children of Cameroon and Plan's 2013 International Day of the Girl event. The analysis shows how helping distant others is configured within a makeover and self-transformation narrative, providing a stage for performance of an “ethic…
Girl power and ‘selfie humanitarianism’
The aim of this article is to examine the ‘turn to the girl’ and the mobilization of ‘girl power’ in contemporary global humanitarian and development campaigns. The paper argues that the ‘girl powering’ of humanitarianism is connected to the simultaneous depoliticization, corporatization, and neo-liberalization of both humanitarianism and girl power. Located in broad discussions of campaigns around Malala, Chime for Change and the Girl Effect, th…
The ‘stay-at-home’ mother, postfeminism and neoliberalism: Content analysis of UK news coverage
This article analyzes the construction in the UK media of the ‘stay-at-home mother’, a maternal figure who received increasing visibility during the recession and its aftermath. Based on a content analysis of UK national newspaper coverage of stay-at-home mothers (2008–2013), this article argues that the stay-at-home mother emerges from its press coverage as a neoliberal postfeminist subject. On the one hand, the coverage complicates claims about…
The Confidence Cult(ure)
In this paper we explore how confidence has become a technology of self that invites girls and women to work on themselves. The discussion demonstrates the extensiveness of what we call the ‘cult(ure) of confidence’ across different areas of social life, and examines the continuities in the way that exponents of the confidence cult(ure) name, diagnose and propose solutions to archetypal feminist questions about labour, value and the body. Our ana…
Beyond consumer capitalism: Media and the Limits to Imagination
Justin Lewis's Beyond Consumer Capitalism: Media and the Limits to Imagination addresses a paradox that the author observes is deeply puzzling: Consumer capitalism is a system that potentially can cause environmental catastrophe. It is a system that no longer is delivering its original promise, namely quality of life. And yet ‘we remain so deeply committed’ to this system 'whose benefits are increasingly limited, whose promises are exhausted and …
The Cruel Optimism of The Good Wife: The Fantastic Working Mother on the Fantastical Treadmill
This article juxtaposes The Good Wife’s ( TGW) representation of Alicia Florrick’s experience as a professional woman and a mother, against interview accounts of middle-class women who left successful careers after having children. I show that TGW furnishes a compelling fantasy based on (1) the valorization of combining motherhood with competitive, long-hours high-powered waged work as the basis for a woman’s value and liberation, and (2) an emph…
Incongruous encounters: Media representations and lived experiences of stay-at-home mothers
This article juxtaposes mediated representations of stay-at-home mothers (SAHMs) with accounts of twenty-two UK -educated middle-class SAHMs. It exposes a fundamental chasm between media constructions of women’s “opting out” of the workplace as a personal choice, and the factors shaping women’s decisions to leave a career, and their complex, often painful consequences. The juxtaposition highlights three aspects largely rendered invisible in curre…
Caring in Crisis? Humanitarianism, the Public and NGOs
The shifting terrain of sex and power: From the ‘sexualization of culture’ to # MeToo
In this short article we will aim to do three things. First, we want to use this opportunity to reflect on some of the changes we have seen in the scholarly field of gender, sexuality, and intimacy over this period, and on new emerging directions. Second, we want to discuss the move away from discussions of ‘sexualization’ to a more critical and political register interested in a variety of ways in which sex and power intersect. Thirdly, we will …
The Amazing Bounce-Backable Woman: Resilience and the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism
This article examines the growing prominence accorded to the idea of 'resilience' as a regulatory ideal, locating it in the context of a 'turn to character' in contemporary culture which we see as part of a wider psychological turn within neoliberalism. Building from discussions of 'resilience' as a quality demanded and promoted by public policy in the context of austerity and worsening inequality, we argue that resilience has also emerged as a c…
Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality
Women in today's advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to "lean in." The media and government champion women's empowerment. In a cultural climate where women can seemingly have it all, why do so many successful professional women-lawyers, financial managers, teachers, engineers, and others-give up their careers after having children and become stay-at-home mothers? How do they feel about their decision and what do their stories tell us abo…
Safety valves for mediated female rage in the #MeToo era
In political discourse, popular and media culture, female rage is "having a moment." More and more women are getting publicly and unapologetically angry, particularly in relation to sexual violence, but also in reaction to other forms of sexism, racism and injustice. Yet, it is also clear that the release of female anger in public culture is uneven —— in terms of class, race, age, sexuality, disability —- and that powerful mechanisms continue lon…
MeToo, popular feminism and the news: A content analysis of UK newspaper coverage
This article examines the first 6 months of #MeToo’s coverage in the UK press, revealing how newspapers played an important role in heightening the campaign’s visibility. Using content analysis, our study demonstrates that the press contributed to expanding and reinforcing #MeToo’s visibility in important ways. In terms of reach, the UK press has expanded the movement’s visibility beyond social media, addressing potentially new and different read…
Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim. Mothering through precarity: Women's work and digital media
The Sociological Imagination and Media Studies in Neoliberal Times
To date, media and communication studies have mostly examined narratives either as stories that circulate in public discourse or as people’s personal narratives. In the context of deepening inequalities, the cementing of neoliberal rationality and the intensifying centrality of media and communication technologies in public and everyday life, connecting the two realms is a vital task. Drawing on The Sociological Imagination, I argue for and demon…
Sociology (33 works) · Political science (25 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (22 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · Law (16 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Media studies (13 works)