Sarah Banet-Weiser
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3629434 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Sarah Banet-Weiser |
| NOMBRES | Sarah |
| APELLIDO | Banet-Weiser |
| FIRMA | BANET-WEISER S |
| AFILIACIONES | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 35 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 1011 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 32 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1998 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Through the looking glass
In recent years, the ‘mirror’ has emerged as a key metaphor for theorizing contemporary digital culture, with its disorienting communicative architectures and bewildering social and political effects. This short piece considers what the dynamic of ‘mirroring’ in digital culture means for the relationship between gender politics and an increasingly authoritarian right. In the digital hall of mirrors, feminist ideas and practices are mimicked, co-o…
Getting it wrong
In her book Perfect, Ros Gill makes an important historical comparison between the contemporary digital context and earlier media forms, and deftly shows us a historical arc between these two momen
Croyabilité
Diversity as Distributive Justice
The rage of tradwives
In the contemporary media landscape, the 'tradwife', part of a burgeoning movement of women who document their activities on social media, sends a deceptively simple message: happiness for women is to be found in caring for and submitting to one's husband, having and raising children and keeping a tidy and comfortable home. Tradwives have captured the attention of a broad media audience, with popular articles speculating on the purpose of tradwiv…
Liars, scammers and cheats
In this paper, we analyze the conjuncture framing the recent rise of media representations of female con artists, looking at two recent examples of the trope on television: Inventing Anna (a fictionalized account of con artist Anna Delvey) and The Dropout (a fictionalized account of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes). We situate the new visibility of women who lie, scam and cheat on television within a set of distinct yet interlocking cultural an…
A roundtable discussion of Kathryn Claire Higgins and Sarah Banet-Weiser’s Believability
This article is the athor's contribution to: A roundtable discussion of Kathryn Claire Higgins and Sarah Banet-Weiser’s Believability: Sexual Violence, Media and the Politics of Doubt, published early online by SAGE Publications, 25 March 2024 at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14647001241228856
Misogyny, Survivorship, and Believability on Digital Platforms
On 18th May 2022, in an opinion piece for The New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg declared “the death of #MeToo” (Goldberg, 2022). The papers in this panel examine this claim and wrestle with its potential implications. Drawing on case studies and data from the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, we evaluate the current state of play in the online push-and-pull between feminist speech about gender-based violence and…
Introduction to special issue
This special issue aims to identify the social and affective dynamics that circulate and attach to the ‘master’ signifier of victimhood in liberal public spheres. Drawing on cutting-edge work by leading scholars across theoretical traditions, the issue illuminates the ways in which victimhood emerges as a dominant communicative logic in three distinct but interrelated domains of liberal publicity: its histories, politics and aesthetics
Ruined’ lives
When the hashtag #metoo began to circulate in digital and social media, it challenged a familiar interpretation of those who are raped or sexually harassed as victims, positioning women as embodied agents. Yet, almost exactly a year after the #metoo movement shot to visible prominence, a different, though eerily similar, story began to circulate on the same multi-media platforms as #metoo: a story about white male victimhood. Powerful men in posi…
Gender, Social Media, and the Labor of Authenticity
Gender, Social Media, and the Labor of Authenticity Sarah Banet-Weiser (bio) In 2012 I wrote AuthenticTM: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, where I thought through what it means to organize our lives—politically, culturally, socially—in an age of branding and commodity activism that centered on a concept of the “authentic.”1 I argued that in contemporary capitalism, corporate marketing efforts are about building an affective relatio…
A Good Life? Critical Feminist Approaches to Influencer Ecologies
Social media platforms are widely lauded as bastions for entrepreneurial self-actualisation and creative autonomy, offering an answer to historically exclusive and hierarchical creative industries as routes to employability and success. Social media influencers are envied by audiences as having achieved ‘the good life’, one in which they are able to ‘do what they love’ for a living (Duffy 2017). Despite this ostensive accessibility and relatabili…
Absence and Exclusion
In this short response to Kate Eichhorn’s article, ‘Girls in the Public Sphere: Dissent, Consent, and Media Making’, I extend her analysis by offering three points of provocation which challenge the idea of the digital sphere as a public sphere. As Eichhorn points out, the digital sphere offers more access and visibility to girls, so that this contemporary version of the public is not characterised by an absence of girls—even if this participatio…
Future tense
This brief essay considers the impact of the current conjunctural crisis on ideas about, and access to the ‘future’. It explores ways in which cultural critics and scholars might learn to think ‘scandalously’ in order to imagine and build a more equitable and humane world
Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in conversation
In this unconventional article, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg conduct a three-way 'conversation' in which they all take turns outlining how they understand the relationship among postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism. It begins with a short introduction, and then Ros, Sarah and Catherine each define the term they have become associated with. This is followed by another round in which they discuss the …
The Beguiling
Arguing that questions of power expressed through aesthetic form are too often left out of current approaches to digital culture, this article revives the modernist aesthetic category of glamour in order to analyze contemporary forms of platformed cultural production. Through a case study of popular feminism, the article traces the ways in which glamour, defined as a beguiling affective force linked to promotional capitalist logics, suffuses digi…
Racism Postrace
Feminist anger and feminist respair
How bad things have become. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say: how bad things have always been, but it is only now that some people with particular kinds of class and race privilege are beginni
Postfeminism and Popular Feminism
In the 1990s, as a feminist media studies scholar, I was reflecting on gender and popular culture and found myself intrigued by the various ways in which the rhetoric of “girl power” had found currency in so much of North America and Europe, from the Spice Girls to the Women's Soccer World Cup to television programs about self-confident, assertive, intelligent girls, for instance Nickelodeon's 1991 hit Clarissa Explains It All and the Cartoon Net…
Special Issue
When we were graduate students in the early 1990s, critical media and communication scholars were still coming to terms with the Reagan years. The rise of the Religious Right, the promotion of “family values,” a war on drugs that targeted low-income people of color, the deregulation of industry (including the media industries) and a roll-back of welfare policies in the name of trickle-down economics that widened the gap between the wealthy and th…
Empowered
In 2018, we are living in a moment in North Amer i ca and Eu rope in which feminism has become, somewhat incredibly, popu lar.It feels as if everywhere you turn, there is an expression of feminism-on a T-shirt, in a movie, in the lyr ics of a pop song, in an inspirational Instagram post, in an awards ceremony speech.Feminism is "popu lar" in at least three senses: One, feminism manifests in discourses and practices that are circulated in popu lar…
The traffic in feminism
In many ways, this is a remarkable moment. The surge in what we might call “popular feminism” has allowed us to imagine a culture in which feminism, in every form, does not have to be defended, is
Keynote Address
This is the keynote address I gave at the Console-ing Passions Conference in April 2014, in Columbia, Missouri. In this talk, I attempted to offer a broad picture of the contemporary gendered economy of visibility and what I am calling the marketing of “empowerment feminism.” It is reproduced here as a talk, without the typical conventions of a scholarly article. A part of it has been published in a special issue of Continuum, Issue 29, Vol. 2, 2…
MasculinitySoFragile
In September 2015, the hashtag #MasculinitySoFragile was trending on Twitter. The ostensible purpose of the hashtag was to illustrate the precariousness of “toxic masculinity,” a (heterosexual) mas
Confidence you can carry!’
Girl empowerment organizations (GEOs) emerged in the USA around the same time that empowering girls became a central theme in international development discourse. I argue that these organizations are part of a ‘market of empowerment’ that aims to empower girls within a context of commodified girl power and neoliberal entrepreneurialism
Empowered
In 2018, we are living in a moment in North Amer i ca and Eu rope in which feminism has become, somewhat incredibly, popu lar.It feels as if everywhere you turn, there is an expression of feminism-on a T-shirt, in a movie, in the lyr ics of a pop song, in an inspirational Instagram post, in an awards ceremony speech.Feminism is "popu lar" in at least three senses: One, feminism manifests in discourses and practices that are circulated in popu lar…
MasculinitySoFragile
In September 2015, the hashtag #MasculinitySoFragile was trending on Twitter. The ostensible purpose of the hashtag was to illustrate the precariousness of “toxic masculinity,” a (heterosexual) mas
Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in conversation
In this unconventional article, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg conduct a three-way 'conversation' in which they all take turns outlining how they understand the relationship among postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism. It begins with a short introduction, and then Ros, Sarah and Catherine each define the term they have become associated with. This is followed by another round in which they discuss the …
Gender, Social Media, and the Labor of Authenticity
Gender, Social Media, and the Labor of Authenticity Sarah Banet-Weiser (bio) In 2012 I wrote AuthenticTM: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, where I thought through what it means to organize our lives—politically, culturally, socially—in an age of branding and commodity activism that centered on a concept of the “authentic.”1 I argued that in contemporary capitalism, corporate marketing efforts are about building an affective relatio…
The traffic in feminism
In many ways, this is a remarkable moment. The surge in what we might call “popular feminism” has allowed us to imagine a culture in which feminism, in every form, does not have to be defended, is
Confidence you can carry!’
Girl empowerment organizations (GEOs) emerged in the USA around the same time that empowering girls became a central theme in international development discourse. I argue that these organizations are part of a ‘market of empowerment’ that aims to empower girls within a context of commodified girl power and neoliberal entrepreneurialism
Feminist anger and feminist respair
How bad things have become. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say: how bad things have always been, but it is only now that some people with particular kinds of class and race privilege are beginni
Hoop Dreams
This article focuses on development of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), exploring the gendered and racialized meanings that surround both male and female professional basketball players. It examines the social, cultural, and political consequences of the challenge the WNBA poses in terms of shifting these meanings. Professional male basketball players, especially Black men, have been marketed as fetish objects, so much so that …
I just want to be me again
This essay examines the connections between the Miss America pageant and reality makeover television shows. We argue that televised performances of gender have shifted focus from the intensely scripted, out-of-touch Miss America to reality makeover shows that normalize cosmetic surgery as a means to become the 'ideal' woman. While both spectacles offer their viewers performances of femininity, these performances need to be understood as emerging …
Ruined’ lives
When the hashtag #metoo began to circulate in digital and social media, it challenged a familiar interpretation of those who are raped or sexually harassed as victims, positioning women as embodied agents. Yet, almost exactly a year after the #metoo movement shot to visible prominence, a different, though eerily similar, story began to circulate on the same multi-media platforms as #metoo: a story about white male victimhood. Powerful men in posi…
The Beguiling
Arguing that questions of power expressed through aesthetic form are too often left out of current approaches to digital culture, this article revives the modernist aesthetic category of glamour in order to analyze contemporary forms of platformed cultural production. Through a case study of popular feminism, the article traces the ways in which glamour, defined as a beguiling affective force linked to promotional capitalist logics, suffuses digi…
Introduction to special issue
This special issue aims to identify the social and affective dynamics that circulate and attach to the ‘master’ signifier of victimhood in liberal public spheres. Drawing on cutting-edge work by leading scholars across theoretical traditions, the issue illuminates the ways in which victimhood emerges as a dominant communicative logic in three distinct but interrelated domains of liberal publicity: its histories, politics and aesthetics
Special Issue
When we were graduate students in the early 1990s, critical media and communication scholars were still coming to terms with the Reagan years. The rise of the Religious Right, the promotion of “family values,” a war on drugs that targeted low-income people of color, the deregulation of industry (including the media industries) and a roll-back of welfare policies in the name of trickle-down economics that widened the gap between the wealthy and th…
"Elian Gonzalez and "The Purpose of America
The preoccupation of the North American media with the story of Elian Gonzalez in late 1999 and early 2000 was unprecedented, even given a historical obsession with sensationalism and scandal. The plight of this "innocent" child, perfectly represented in the telegenic Elian Gonzalez, was a continual theme in the media coverage that relentlessly covered every move that was made in the negotiations between US and Cuba. This essay explores the cultu…
Through the looking glass
In recent years, the ‘mirror’ has emerged as a key metaphor for theorizing contemporary digital culture, with its disorienting communicative architectures and bewildering social and political effects. This short piece considers what the dynamic of ‘mirroring’ in digital culture means for the relationship between gender politics and an increasingly authoritarian right. In the digital hall of mirrors, feminist ideas and practices are mimicked, co-o…
Remembering Clyde Woods
Remembering Clyde Woods Sarah Banet-Weiser, Editor In the 2009 special issue he guest edited, In the Wake of Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions, the extraordinary scholar Clyde Woods wrote about New Orleans: "Brilliance often flashes brightly, just as suddenly disappears, and then reappears decades later. To understand the region, the reader will have to explore the subterranean caverns that shelter the wellsprings of dreams during the sea…
Figures of beauty, figures of nation
Figures of Beauty, Figures of Nation: Global Contests of Femininity Sarah Banet-Weiser (bio) Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power. Edited by Colleen Ballerino Cohen, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje. New York: Routledge, 1996. 256 pages. $62.95 (cloth). $17.95 (paper). The feminist protest against the 1968 Miss America pageant is often recognized as a key event in heralding the second wave feminist movement in the Unit…
Figures of beauty, figures of nation
Figures of Beauty, Figures of Nation: Global Contests of Femininity Sarah Banet-Weiser (bio) Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power. Edited by Colleen Ballerino Cohen, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje. New York: Routledge, 1996. 256 pages. $62.95 (cloth). $17.95 (paper). The feminist protest against the 1968 Miss America pageant is often recognized as a key event in heralding the second wave feminist movement in the Unit…
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
Hoop Dreams
This article focuses on development of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), exploring the gendered and racialized meanings that surround both male and female professional basketball players. It examines the social, cultural, and political consequences of the challenge the WNBA poses in terms of shifting these meanings. Professional male basketball players, especially Black men, have been marketed as fetish objects, so much so that …
"Elian Gonzalez and "The Purpose of America
The preoccupation of the North American media with the story of Elian Gonzalez in late 1999 and early 2000 was unprecedented, even given a historical obsession with sensationalism and scandal. The plight of this "innocent" child, perfectly represented in the telegenic Elian Gonzalez, was a continual theme in the media coverage that relentlessly covered every move that was made in the negotiations between US and Cuba. This essay explores the cultu…
The Business of Representing
Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market. By Katherine Sender. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 311 pages. $35.00 (cloth). The Ellis Island Snow Globe. By Erica Rand. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. 360 pages. $22.95 (paper). In late 2005, film director Ang Lee's heavily hyped film Brokeback Mountain first screened in U.S. theaters. The film was an immediate success, garnering $32 million during the first month, w…
I just want to be me again
This essay examines the connections between the Miss America pageant and reality makeover television shows. We argue that televised performances of gender have shifted focus from the intensely scripted, out-of-touch Miss America to reality makeover shows that normalize cosmetic surgery as a means to become the 'ideal' woman. While both spectacles offer their viewers performances of femininity, these performances need to be understood as emerging …
What’s Your Flava? Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture
Duke University Press is a not-for-profit scholarly publisher specializing in books, journals, open access, and other digital publishing initiatives in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics. Our mission is to advance the frontiers of knowledge and contribute to the international community of scholarship.
Cable Visions
Convergence on the Street
This article examines shifting definitions of creativity in urban spaces in the contemporary USA, and analyzes how different definitions of creativity inform an understanding of convergence in the context of contemporary street art. This essay examines the logic that mobilizes these dynamics, and, through the cultural lens of contemporary street art, asks how and in what ways does 'creativity' matter differently – indeed, have a different value –…
Remembering Clyde Woods
Remembering Clyde Woods Sarah Banet-Weiser, Editor In the 2009 special issue he guest edited, In the Wake of Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions, the extraordinary scholar Clyde Woods wrote about New Orleans: "Brilliance often flashes brightly, just as suddenly disappears, and then reappears decades later. To understand the region, the reader will have to explore the subterranean caverns that shelter the wellsprings of dreams during the sea…
Keynote Address
This is the keynote address I gave at the Console-ing Passions Conference in April 2014, in Columbia, Missouri. In this talk, I attempted to offer a broad picture of the contemporary gendered economy of visibility and what I am calling the marketing of “empowerment feminism.” It is reproduced here as a talk, without the typical conventions of a scholarly article. A part of it has been published in a special issue of Continuum, Issue 29, Vol. 2, 2…
MasculinitySoFragile
In September 2015, the hashtag #MasculinitySoFragile was trending on Twitter. The ostensible purpose of the hashtag was to illustrate the precariousness of “toxic masculinity,” a (heterosexual) mas
Confidence you can carry!’
Girl empowerment organizations (GEOs) emerged in the USA around the same time that empowering girls became a central theme in international development discourse. I argue that these organizations are part of a ‘market of empowerment’ that aims to empower girls within a context of commodified girl power and neoliberal entrepreneurialism
The traffic in feminism
In many ways, this is a remarkable moment. The surge in what we might call “popular feminism” has allowed us to imagine a culture in which feminism, in every form, does not have to be defended, is
Postfeminism and Popular Feminism
In the 1990s, as a feminist media studies scholar, I was reflecting on gender and popular culture and found myself intrigued by the various ways in which the rhetoric of “girl power” had found currency in so much of North America and Europe, from the Spice Girls to the Women's Soccer World Cup to television programs about self-confident, assertive, intelligent girls, for instance Nickelodeon's 1991 hit Clarissa Explains It All and the Cartoon Net…
Special Issue
When we were graduate students in the early 1990s, critical media and communication scholars were still coming to terms with the Reagan years. The rise of the Religious Right, the promotion of “family values,” a war on drugs that targeted low-income people of color, the deregulation of industry (including the media industries) and a roll-back of welfare policies in the name of trickle-down economics that widened the gap between the wealthy and th…
Empowered
In 2018, we are living in a moment in North Amer i ca and Eu rope in which feminism has become, somewhat incredibly, popu lar.It feels as if everywhere you turn, there is an expression of feminism-on a T-shirt, in a movie, in the lyr ics of a pop song, in an inspirational Instagram post, in an awards ceremony speech.Feminism is "popu lar" in at least three senses: One, feminism manifests in discourses and practices that are circulated in popu lar…
Racism Postrace
Feminist anger and feminist respair
How bad things have become. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say: how bad things have always been, but it is only now that some people with particular kinds of class and race privilege are beginni
A Good Life? Critical Feminist Approaches to Influencer Ecologies
Social media platforms are widely lauded as bastions for entrepreneurial self-actualisation and creative autonomy, offering an answer to historically exclusive and hierarchical creative industries as routes to employability and success. Social media influencers are envied by audiences as having achieved ‘the good life’, one in which they are able to ‘do what they love’ for a living (Duffy 2017). Despite this ostensive accessibility and relatabili…
Absence and Exclusion
In this short response to Kate Eichhorn’s article, ‘Girls in the Public Sphere: Dissent, Consent, and Media Making’, I extend her analysis by offering three points of provocation which challenge the idea of the digital sphere as a public sphere. As Eichhorn points out, the digital sphere offers more access and visibility to girls, so that this contemporary version of the public is not characterised by an absence of girls—even if this participatio…
Future tense
This brief essay considers the impact of the current conjunctural crisis on ideas about, and access to the ‘future’. It explores ways in which cultural critics and scholars might learn to think ‘scandalously’ in order to imagine and build a more equitable and humane world
Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in conversation
In this unconventional article, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg conduct a three-way 'conversation' in which they all take turns outlining how they understand the relationship among postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism. It begins with a short introduction, and then Ros, Sarah and Catherine each define the term they have become associated with. This is followed by another round in which they discuss the …
The Beguiling
Arguing that questions of power expressed through aesthetic form are too often left out of current approaches to digital culture, this article revives the modernist aesthetic category of glamour in order to analyze contemporary forms of platformed cultural production. Through a case study of popular feminism, the article traces the ways in which glamour, defined as a beguiling affective force linked to promotional capitalist logics, suffuses digi…
Introduction to special issue
This special issue aims to identify the social and affective dynamics that circulate and attach to the ‘master’ signifier of victimhood in liberal public spheres. Drawing on cutting-edge work by leading scholars across theoretical traditions, the issue illuminates the ways in which victimhood emerges as a dominant communicative logic in three distinct but interrelated domains of liberal publicity: its histories, politics and aesthetics
Sociology (29 obras) · Political science (23 obras) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (22 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Gender Studies (16 obras) · Politics (14 obras) · Media studies (13 obras) · Law (10 obras) · Psychology (10 obras) · Aesthetics (9 obras)