Karen Boyle
Biographic Data
| ID | 3687984 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karen Boyle |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karen |
| FAMILY NAME | Boyle |
| SIGNATURE | BOYLE K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Strathclyde |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0162-2656 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 84 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
To warn or not to warn? Trigger warnings in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in UK HE
Although gender-based violence (GBV) in HE has received considerable attention recently, this has not, typically, extended to a concern with how experiences of GBV impact on student engagement with content about GBV. On the other hand, the emerging research evidence around trigger warnings in HE has not addressed GBV in a consistent way. This article thus aims to bring feminist work on GBV into the trigger warning debate.
Gender-based violence and safety work in Higher Education
Safety work describes the strategies that women implement to avoid men's violence, particularly in public spaces. These strategies involve resource, time and energy but paradoxically cannot actually produce safety. In this research, we extend the concept of safety work to Higher Education to make visible the work that goes into engaging with the learning environment for survivors of gender-based violence. We move beyond the application and/or pro…
CannesYouNot? Oppositional and asymmetrical versions of believability in the Depp/Heard case
Johnny Depp’s contentious return to the red carpet at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival sparked fervent debate online about domestic abuse, believability, #MeToo and the rehabilitation of men accused of abuse. In this article, we analyse two oppositional hashtags that became central to this discussion on Twitter: #CannesYouNot, created by supporters of Depp’s ex-wife Amber Heard; and #YesYouCannes, the response offered by Depp’s supporters. Drawing o…
Gender in/and the news in the UK and Republic of Ireland: Slow but (un)steady progress
For the half-century or so in which the relationship between women and news has been researched, two of the key themes have been the underrepresentation and marginalisation of women as both subjects/sources and journalists. The latest Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) iteration – the largest international collaborative study of women and news, running since 1995 – found the pace of change regarding women’s visibility across the news landscap…
The Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence
Discussion of the status of pornography as a form of media which blurs the boundary between fiction and reality is common in the academic debates on porn. Arguments are made from all sides which complicate the idea that pornography is simply a form of fiction or representation, from critical interpretations which focus on the production of porn to more celebratory understandings which explore how pornography consumers use porn in ways that expand…
Time to Pass the Mic: Gender and race in Scotland’s news
Pass the Mic is a project focusing on women of colour in Scottish news, established by Talat Yaqoob. In 2020, funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust enabled us to undertake original research to investigate the representation of women of colour in Scottish news, providing baseline evidence for Pass the Mic’s ongoing work with media partners and women-of-colour writers. Focusing on media produced in Scotland with a national audience, we …
MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism
HimToo and the networking of misogyny in the age of #MeToo
This article brings together a quantitative approach which seeks to map and understand actor centrality and connectivity in relation to Twitter using social network analysis, with a qualitative set of interdisciplinary concerns around media representations of men’s sexual violence against women. Our focus is #HimToo, a short-lived Twitter-backlash to #MeToo concentrated around the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and confirmation. We explore how #HimToo …
What's in a name? Theorising the Inter-relationships of gender and violence
This article explores the representational practices of feminist theorising around gender and violence. Adapting Liz Kelly's notion of the continuum of women's experiences of sexual violence, I argue that 'continuum thinking' can offer important interventions which unsettle binaries, recognise grey areas in women's experiences and avoid 'othering' specific communities. Continuum thinking allows us to understand connections whilst nevertheless mai…
Television and/as testimony in the Jimmy Savile case
In October 2012, TV presenter Jimmy Savile was identified as a sexual predator in an ITV documentary, Exposure. Focusing on documentaries dealing with the case, this article explores the interrogation and recalibration of the television archive. Paying attention both to the use of archival footage of Savile, and televisual testimony of victim/survivors, I argue that the Savile documentaries present an unusual space where victim/survivor testimony…
Hiding in Plain Sight: Gender, sexism and press coverage of the Jimmy Savile case
In 2012—less than 12 months after his death—television personality Jimmy Savile was revealed to have been a prolific sexual abuser of children and young adults, mainly girls and women. This study advances research on the gendering of violence in news discourse by examining press coverage in the period leading up to Savile’s unmasking. It investigates the conditions in which Savile’s predatory behaviour—widely acknowledged in his lifetime—finally …
Women, Men and News: It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it
In the twenty-teens, there are increasing numbers of women occupying executive positions in politics, business and the law but their words and actions rarely make the front page. In this article, we draw on data collected as part of the 2015 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) and focus on England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. Since the first GMMP in 1995, there has been a slow but steady rise in the proportion of women who fea…
Not Waving … Agitating: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” The Second Wave, and Me
Laura Mulvey's “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) was published at the crest of feminism's second wave and, as essays by Laura Mulvey (2015a) and Mandy Merck (2007) have argued, this pol
Introduction: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema at Forty
Introduction: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema at Forty." Feminist Media Studies, 15(5), pp. 880–881
Portrait of A Serial Killer: Intertextuality and gender in the portrait film
This article presents a feminist analysis of the serial killer portrait film—a cycle of contemporary low-budget films featuring serial killer protagonists. Although unusual within serial killer cinema for their frustration of identification and suspense, portrait films remain locked into wider popular discourses around serial murder, particularly in their intertextual aspects. In the portrait film, this results in a tautological construction of t…
I Love You, Man: Gendered narratives of friendship in contemporary Hollywood comedies
This article begins with a simple observation: there are very few contemporary Hollywood films in which women are shown becoming friends. This is in contrast to the “bromance,” in which new connections between men are privileged, yet this pattern has gone largely unremarked in the literature. This article has two aims: to sketch this pattern and explore reasons for it through comparing the “girlfriend flick” and “bromance.” To do this, we first d…
The Myth of Objectivity: A Reply to Weitzer
In this article, the editor of Everyday Pornography offers a response to Ronald Weitzer's 2011 review of that book, addressing questions about objectivity, the framing of pornography as violence against women, the role of women's testimony in debates about pornography, and research on porn's consumers
Producing abuse: Selling the harms of pornography
Commentary and Criticism: Representations of Sex Workers
Watch with baby: Cinema, parenting and community
This article examines the experiences of women attending dedicated screenings in one Glasgow cinema with their babies. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with 25 women, the article explores the possibilities of pleasure that exist in this context, arguing that watching with baby is most consistently experienced as pleasurable when women are able to reconcile their expectations as adult cinema-goers with their new roles as mothers. …
Courting Consumers And Legitimating Exploitation: The representation of commercial sex in television documentaries
The explosion of sexually explicit imagery in popular culture in recent years has been widely noted. On television, this has led to the birth of a new genre, a pornography-documentary hybrid. This article examines the kind of stories about sex that have emerged in this new generic space at the beginning of the twenty-first century and makes the case for retaining a central focus on gender as a relational matrix in feminist responses to both telev…
Revisiting the Papin Case: "Gender, Sexuality and Violence in "Sister My Sister
Karen Boyle, Revisiting the Papin Case: Gender, Sexuality and Violence in "Sister My Sister", South Central Review, Vol. 19/20, Vol. 19, no. 4 - Vol. 20, no. 1, Murdering Marianne?: Violence, Gender and Representation in French Literature and Film (Winter, 2002 - Spring, 2003), pp. 103-118
What's Natural About Killing? Gender, copycat violence and Natural Born Killers
With a lawsuit implicating Natural Born Killers in real-world violence still pending, the representation of violence in Oliver Stone's 1994 film remains a controversial issue. This article examines the gendering of violence - both in the film itself and in three of the most infamous 'copycat' cases - and demonstrates that the apparently gender-neutral term 'natural born killers' is used to disguise the normalisation of male violence on- and off-s…
The pornography debates
The pornography debates
Women, Men and News: It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it
In the twenty-teens, there are increasing numbers of women occupying executive positions in politics, business and the law but their words and actions rarely make the front page. In this article, we draw on data collected as part of the 2015 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) and focus on England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. Since the first GMMP in 1995, there has been a slow but steady rise in the proportion of women who fea…
What's in a name? Theorising the Inter-relationships of gender and violence
This article explores the representational practices of feminist theorising around gender and violence. Adapting Liz Kelly's notion of the continuum of women's experiences of sexual violence, I argue that 'continuum thinking' can offer important interventions which unsettle binaries, recognise grey areas in women's experiences and avoid 'othering' specific communities. Continuum thinking allows us to understand connections whilst nevertheless mai…
Hiding in Plain Sight: Gender, sexism and press coverage of the Jimmy Savile case
In 2012—less than 12 months after his death—television personality Jimmy Savile was revealed to have been a prolific sexual abuser of children and young adults, mainly girls and women. This study advances research on the gendering of violence in news discourse by examining press coverage in the period leading up to Savile’s unmasking. It investigates the conditions in which Savile’s predatory behaviour—widely acknowledged in his lifetime—finally …
HimToo and the networking of misogyny in the age of #MeToo
This article brings together a quantitative approach which seeks to map and understand actor centrality and connectivity in relation to Twitter using social network analysis, with a qualitative set of interdisciplinary concerns around media representations of men’s sexual violence against women. Our focus is #HimToo, a short-lived Twitter-backlash to #MeToo concentrated around the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and confirmation. We explore how #HimToo …
I Love You, Man: Gendered narratives of friendship in contemporary Hollywood comedies
This article begins with a simple observation: there are very few contemporary Hollywood films in which women are shown becoming friends. This is in contrast to the “bromance,” in which new connections between men are privileged, yet this pattern has gone largely unremarked in the literature. This article has two aims: to sketch this pattern and explore reasons for it through comparing the “girlfriend flick” and “bromance.” To do this, we first d…
Producing abuse: Selling the harms of pornography
Television and/as testimony in the Jimmy Savile case
In October 2012, TV presenter Jimmy Savile was identified as a sexual predator in an ITV documentary, Exposure. Focusing on documentaries dealing with the case, this article explores the interrogation and recalibration of the television archive. Paying attention both to the use of archival footage of Savile, and televisual testimony of victim/survivors, I argue that the Savile documentaries present an unusual space where victim/survivor testimony…
Gender in/and the news in the UK and Republic of Ireland: Slow but (un)steady progress
For the half-century or so in which the relationship between women and news has been researched, two of the key themes have been the underrepresentation and marginalisation of women as both subjects/sources and journalists. The latest Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) iteration – the largest international collaborative study of women and news, running since 1995 – found the pace of change regarding women’s visibility across the news landscap…
Commentary and Criticism: Representations of Sex Workers
Time to Pass the Mic: Gender and race in Scotland’s news
Pass the Mic is a project focusing on women of colour in Scottish news, established by Talat Yaqoob. In 2020, funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust enabled us to undertake original research to investigate the representation of women of colour in Scottish news, providing baseline evidence for Pass the Mic’s ongoing work with media partners and women-of-colour writers. Focusing on media produced in Scotland with a national audience, we …
Portrait of A Serial Killer: Intertextuality and gender in the portrait film
This article presents a feminist analysis of the serial killer portrait film—a cycle of contemporary low-budget films featuring serial killer protagonists. Although unusual within serial killer cinema for their frustration of identification and suspense, portrait films remain locked into wider popular discourses around serial murder, particularly in their intertextual aspects. In the portrait film, this results in a tautological construction of t…
The Myth of Objectivity: A Reply to Weitzer
In this article, the editor of Everyday Pornography offers a response to Ronald Weitzer's 2011 review of that book, addressing questions about objectivity, the framing of pornography as violence against women, the role of women's testimony in debates about pornography, and research on porn's consumers
The pornography debates
What's Natural About Killing? Gender, copycat violence and Natural Born Killers
With a lawsuit implicating Natural Born Killers in real-world violence still pending, the representation of violence in Oliver Stone's 1994 film remains a controversial issue. This article examines the gendering of violence - both in the film itself and in three of the most infamous 'copycat' cases - and demonstrates that the apparently gender-neutral term 'natural born killers' is used to disguise the normalisation of male violence on- and off-s…
Revisiting the Papin Case: "Gender, Sexuality and Violence in "Sister My Sister
Karen Boyle, Revisiting the Papin Case: Gender, Sexuality and Violence in "Sister My Sister", South Central Review, Vol. 19/20, Vol. 19, no. 4 - Vol. 20, no. 1, Murdering Marianne?: Violence, Gender and Representation in French Literature and Film (Winter, 2002 - Spring, 2003), pp. 103-118
Courting Consumers And Legitimating Exploitation: The representation of commercial sex in television documentaries
The explosion of sexually explicit imagery in popular culture in recent years has been widely noted. On television, this has led to the birth of a new genre, a pornography-documentary hybrid. This article examines the kind of stories about sex that have emerged in this new generic space at the beginning of the twenty-first century and makes the case for retaining a central focus on gender as a relational matrix in feminist responses to both telev…
Commentary and Criticism: Representations of Sex Workers
Watch with baby: Cinema, parenting and community
This article examines the experiences of women attending dedicated screenings in one Glasgow cinema with their babies. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with 25 women, the article explores the possibilities of pleasure that exist in this context, arguing that watching with baby is most consistently experienced as pleasurable when women are able to reconcile their expectations as adult cinema-goers with their new roles as mothers. …
Producing abuse: Selling the harms of pornography
I Love You, Man: Gendered narratives of friendship in contemporary Hollywood comedies
This article begins with a simple observation: there are very few contemporary Hollywood films in which women are shown becoming friends. This is in contrast to the “bromance,” in which new connections between men are privileged, yet this pattern has gone largely unremarked in the literature. This article has two aims: to sketch this pattern and explore reasons for it through comparing the “girlfriend flick” and “bromance.” To do this, we first d…
The Myth of Objectivity: A Reply to Weitzer
In this article, the editor of Everyday Pornography offers a response to Ronald Weitzer's 2011 review of that book, addressing questions about objectivity, the framing of pornography as violence against women, the role of women's testimony in debates about pornography, and research on porn's consumers
Portrait of A Serial Killer: Intertextuality and gender in the portrait film
This article presents a feminist analysis of the serial killer portrait film—a cycle of contemporary low-budget films featuring serial killer protagonists. Although unusual within serial killer cinema for their frustration of identification and suspense, portrait films remain locked into wider popular discourses around serial murder, particularly in their intertextual aspects. In the portrait film, this results in a tautological construction of t…
Not Waving … Agitating: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” The Second Wave, and Me
Laura Mulvey's “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) was published at the crest of feminism's second wave and, as essays by Laura Mulvey (2015a) and Mandy Merck (2007) have argued, this pol
Introduction: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema at Forty
Introduction: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema at Forty." Feminist Media Studies, 15(5), pp. 880–881
Women, Men and News: It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it
In the twenty-teens, there are increasing numbers of women occupying executive positions in politics, business and the law but their words and actions rarely make the front page. In this article, we draw on data collected as part of the 2015 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) and focus on England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. Since the first GMMP in 1995, there has been a slow but steady rise in the proportion of women who fea…
Hiding in Plain Sight: Gender, sexism and press coverage of the Jimmy Savile case
In 2012—less than 12 months after his death—television personality Jimmy Savile was revealed to have been a prolific sexual abuser of children and young adults, mainly girls and women. This study advances research on the gendering of violence in news discourse by examining press coverage in the period leading up to Savile’s unmasking. It investigates the conditions in which Savile’s predatory behaviour—widely acknowledged in his lifetime—finally …
Television and/as testimony in the Jimmy Savile case
In October 2012, TV presenter Jimmy Savile was identified as a sexual predator in an ITV documentary, Exposure. Focusing on documentaries dealing with the case, this article explores the interrogation and recalibration of the television archive. Paying attention both to the use of archival footage of Savile, and televisual testimony of victim/survivors, I argue that the Savile documentaries present an unusual space where victim/survivor testimony…
MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism
HimToo and the networking of misogyny in the age of #MeToo
This article brings together a quantitative approach which seeks to map and understand actor centrality and connectivity in relation to Twitter using social network analysis, with a qualitative set of interdisciplinary concerns around media representations of men’s sexual violence against women. Our focus is #HimToo, a short-lived Twitter-backlash to #MeToo concentrated around the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and confirmation. We explore how #HimToo …
What's in a name? Theorising the Inter-relationships of gender and violence
This article explores the representational practices of feminist theorising around gender and violence. Adapting Liz Kelly's notion of the continuum of women's experiences of sexual violence, I argue that 'continuum thinking' can offer important interventions which unsettle binaries, recognise grey areas in women's experiences and avoid 'othering' specific communities. Continuum thinking allows us to understand connections whilst nevertheless mai…
Time to Pass the Mic: Gender and race in Scotland’s news
Pass the Mic is a project focusing on women of colour in Scottish news, established by Talat Yaqoob. In 2020, funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust enabled us to undertake original research to investigate the representation of women of colour in Scottish news, providing baseline evidence for Pass the Mic’s ongoing work with media partners and women-of-colour writers. Focusing on media produced in Scotland with a national audience, we …
The Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence
Discussion of the status of pornography as a form of media which blurs the boundary between fiction and reality is common in the academic debates on porn. Arguments are made from all sides which complicate the idea that pornography is simply a form of fiction or representation, from critical interpretations which focus on the production of porn to more celebratory understandings which explore how pornography consumers use porn in ways that expand…
CannesYouNot? Oppositional and asymmetrical versions of believability in the Depp/Heard case
Johnny Depp’s contentious return to the red carpet at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival sparked fervent debate online about domestic abuse, believability, #MeToo and the rehabilitation of men accused of abuse. In this article, we analyse two oppositional hashtags that became central to this discussion on Twitter: #CannesYouNot, created by supporters of Depp’s ex-wife Amber Heard; and #YesYouCannes, the response offered by Depp’s supporters. Drawing o…
Gender in/and the news in the UK and Republic of Ireland: Slow but (un)steady progress
For the half-century or so in which the relationship between women and news has been researched, two of the key themes have been the underrepresentation and marginalisation of women as both subjects/sources and journalists. The latest Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) iteration – the largest international collaborative study of women and news, running since 1995 – found the pace of change regarding women’s visibility across the news landscap…
To warn or not to warn? Trigger warnings in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in UK HE
Although gender-based violence (GBV) in HE has received considerable attention recently, this has not, typically, extended to a concern with how experiences of GBV impact on student engagement with content about GBV. On the other hand, the emerging research evidence around trigger warnings in HE has not addressed GBV in a consistent way. This article thus aims to bring feminist work on GBV into the trigger warning debate.
Gender-based violence and safety work in Higher Education
Safety work describes the strategies that women implement to avoid men's violence, particularly in public spaces. These strategies involve resource, time and energy but paradoxically cannot actually produce safety. In this research, we extend the concept of safety work to Higher Education to make visible the work that goes into engaging with the learning environment for survivors of gender-based violence. We move beyond the application and/or pro…
Sociology (22 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (15 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Media studies (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Art (9 works) · Criminology (9 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Law (9 works)