A Kanai
Biographic Data
| ID | 37191 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Kanai |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Kanai |
| SIGNATURE | KANAI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5410-891X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 145 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Is My Child Normal? Sciency Discourses in Online Parenting Advice Cultures
For some decades, scholars have documented the expansion of discourses of ‘intensive’ parenting in Anglo-American culture and the increasing mediation of family life. In this context, this article argues that online culture is increasingly responsible for an ever-present instructional address, in which parents are continually targeted with advice from many voices, automated, known and unknown, all claiming various kinds of expertise about how to …
Selfie-Editing Practices, Visual Culture and Contemporary Formations of Embodied Subjectivity
Selfie-editing technologies, including in-phone editing tools, filters and apps like Facetune, provide the ability to digitally edit and ‘enhance’ facial and body features in photos shared on visual social media platforms. This study is unique in focusing on how young people understand and experience the practice of editing self-images through qualitative and visual methods. It is based on a study with 79 young people in Australia. Editing bodily…
Cinch, filter, erase: Virtual bodies and the editable self
Selfie-editing technologies (including in-phone editing tools, filters, and apps like Facetune) provide the ability digitally edit and “enhance” facial and body features in photos. This article extends a theorization of “the virtual” developing from earlier approaches in feminist sociology and digital media studies, to consider the implications of selfie-editing capacities for how young people navigate selfhood in contemporary visual cultures. We…
Roundtable discussion
For over three decades now Rosalind Gill has played a critical role in steering the direction of feminist media studies. Her scholarship provides a powerful overview of what it has been like for wo
What’s perfect, and what’s good
Hang on, why am I editing my photos?' Disrupting the virtual gaze through selfie-editing workshops
This article presents findings from a qualitative study that aimed to provide some of the first detailed accounts of how young people use selfie-editing apps, and the implications for young people's embodiment, body concerns and wellbeing. In particular, the article introduces the method of 'smartphone live capture' in selfie-editing workshops as a way of studying the actual practice and meanings associated with editing in 'real time' with small …
Dissonance and defensiveness: Orienting affects in online feminist cultures
Are there certain shared feelings that orient contemporary feminists? And what does it mean to feel like a feminist now, at a time when digital networks and media culture significantly shape the conditions for what feminism ‘is’ (Banet-Weiser Citation2018)? This paper considers how digital culture, as a crucial but potentially disorienting site of feminist encounter and contestation, may reshape norms of feminist feeling, and what feminist feelin…
Influence and expertise: Distancing and distinction in online youth feminist knowledge cultures
In recent years, feminism’s visibility in Western pop culture and social media has seemingly made it ever more accessible for young people (Banet-Weiser, S. 2019. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). This article uses the framework of youth ‘knowledge cultures’ to analyse how feminist knowledge is negotiated and remade in online culture, going beyond characterisations of online feminism primarily i…
I can live without you’: Self-branding as individuation in young Chinese women’s transnational mobilities
In recent years, significant numbers of young middle-class Chinese women have moved abroad to construct an individual ‘biography’ beyond the unequal gendered expectations of the post-reform context. This article reports on a 2019 qualitative study combining interviews and visual analysis of WeChat and Instagram posts to consider how young Chinese women temporarily living in Australia maintain relationships with upper middle class family who have …
The hypervisibility and discourses of ‘wokeness’ in digital culture
From its origins in Black grassroots activist and political consciousness raising spaces, the term ‘woke’ has shifted in its significance. Now broadly synonymous with statements on social media that are assumed to indicate an investment in tackling social injustices, specifically, antiblackness and racial injustice, it has also become the subject of heated critique. Using key case studies such as the ‘I take responsibility’ and Instagram ‘blackou…
Feminist filter bubbles: Ambivalence, vigilance and labour
In this paper, we complicate and bring a new perspective to debates on the democratic limitations of filter bubbles, by exploring the case study of feminist filter bubbles. We extend understandings of the filter bubble to examine the highly reflexive, everyday ways in which filtering is adopted as a practical response to the information saturation and the politicised vulnerability engendered by digital environments. In doing so, we make a case fo…
Feminist fire: Embodiment and affect in managing conflict in digital feminist spaces
Digital spaces are crucial in enabling participation in contemporary feminism and activism, as key sites through which feminist knowledges are dispersed, taken up, and debated. However, little is known about how feminist learning is practically enacted, and how the potential for conflict and debate in online feminist spaces are navigated and have implications for feminist pedagogies. Through a qualitative participatory study with self-described “…
Authenticity, uniqueness and talent: Gay male beauty influencers in post-queer, postfeminist Instagram beauty culture
The emblematic rise of the female Instagram influencer has been understood as exemplifying shifts in postfeminist and neoliberal frameworks of femininity. Yet, the central place of gay men in postfeminist beauty culture and its intersection with ‘post-queer’ culture have so far escaped considered attention. In this article, we examine the performance of femininity by four of the top gay male influencers in Instagram beauty culture, Jeffree Star, …
Intersectionality in digital feminist knowledge cultures: The Practices and Politics of a Travelling Theory
Intersectionality is a travelling theory; now enjoying significant contemporary visibility and popularity in the feminist blogosphere, it has moved across disciplines and borders in ways that are quite distinct from the scholarly critique developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw some time ago. In this article, I consider how intersectionality is translated, and retheorised, as an intertwined set of everyday knowledges and associated governmental practices …
Disclosing Racism, Awareness-Raising and Seeking Support: Korean Women Migrants' Use of Online Cafés
In recent years, Korean migrants to Australia have turned increasingly to digital culture as a space of information exchange, support, and belonging. The need for a space in which the ‘politics of listening’ [Dreher, T., 2009. Listening across Difference: Media and Multiculturalism Beyond the Politics of Voice. Continuum (Mount Lawley, W.A.), 23 (4), 445–458] is made possible becomes even more crucial in face of continued exclusions and everyday …
Media Comforts and International Student Mobility: Managing Hopes, Host and Home
This paper underlines the importance of emotional and physical anchoring within international student experiences of dislocation, migration and place, noting the complex role of various media in situating students as at ‘home’ and/or ‘here’. Growth in the transnational mobility of international students is transforming infrastructures across ‘host countries’ globally. Yet, in these significant transformations, we are yet to fully understand how i…
Making do on not much: High Energy Striving, Femininity and Friendship in Broad City
In the years following the 2008 global financial crisis (“GFC”), feminist media scholarship has drawn attention to the gendered calls in Western media culture to remake subjectivity in line with imperatives of thrift required in conditions of austerity. In the shared symbolic environments that “gender the recession” (Negra & Tasker, 2014), media ranging from news, reality television, and film have placed further, intensified demands on women’s do…
The work of emotion in a digital age: A trust betrayed', ten years on
This article explores the legacy of Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi’s germinal 2010 article, ‘A Trust Betrayed’, which provided a hugely generative framework for considering the politics of emotion exemplified in celebrity culture. Focusing on the relational politics of affective revelation, Nunn and Biressi identified the emotional labour of celebrity individuality underpinned by the continual work of self-narrativisation. I briefly highlight the…
Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture: Managing Affect, Intimacy and Value
Between the perfect and the problematic: Everyday femininities, popular feminism, and the negotiation of intersectionality
In recent years, celebrity and popular culture have figured as key sites in the mediated resurgence of feminism, producing competing and contested articulations of feminism as a ‘popular’ phenomenon [Banet-Weiser, S. and Portwood-Stacer, L., 2017. The traffic in feminism: an introduction to the commentary and criticism on popular feminism. Feminist media studies, 17, 884–888]. Drawing on interviews with self-identifying feminists who primarily le…
Mediating Neoliberal Capitalism: Affect, Subjectivity and Inequality
In this article we make an argument for why thinking critically about neoliberalism is important for media and communication studies. We advance a case for a critical media analysis that will take seriously the affective and psychic life of neoliberalism as an increasingly central means of governing and producing people’s desires, attachments, and modes of “getting by.” To illustrate our broader theoretical argument, we will discuss the contradic…
From “can-do” girls to insecure and angry: Affective dissonances in young women’s post-recessional media
Feminist scholars have begun to unpack the ways in which neoliberalism is underpinned by particular gendered affective investments: drives for perfection, confidence, and the careful observance of feeling rules mandating a pleasing balance of resilience and approachability. In this context, we are interested in mapping the cultural production of affective dissonances with neoliberal modes of thriving. We draw attention to post-recessional televis…
Girls' Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age by Jessalynn Keller
Reviewed by: Girls' Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age by Jessalynn Keller Akane Kanai (bio) Jessalynn Keller. Girls' Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age. Routledge, 2016, 198 pp. ISBN 978-1138800147, $172.00. What does it mean for the personal to be political? This question has been repeatedly raised by feminist scholars in relation to the potential of journal-writing, culture-making, and other forms of everyday production by girls and …
The Girl in the GIF
In this article, I explore the practice of reading as a form of social participation in girlhood in digital spaces. Positioning girlhood as the circulation of particular discourses and affects, I consider a set of six self-representative blogs authored by young women on the microblogging platform Tumblr, and the affective and discursive positions they invite through their address to readers. Adapted from a central blog named WhatShouldWeCallMe, t…
The best friend, the boyfriend, other girls, hot guys, and creeps: The relational production of self on Tumblr
This article interrogates how youthful feminine selves are relationally articulated by reference to post-feminist economies of value on the blogging platform Tumblr. I examine a public on Tumblr in which everyday experiences in young women’s lives are narrated through reaction-GIF blog posts. Combining GIFs and captions, the posts capture moments ranging from the rage “when I see some chick getting all flirty with my crush” to the self-satisfacti…
On not taking the self seriously: Resilience, relatability and humour in young women’s Tumblr blogs
In a contemporary neoliberal landscape, young women are subject to intensified requirements to demonstrate resilient individuality while also enacting a pleasing, approachable femininity, in domains of life including bodily appearance, education, employment and personal productivity in general. Following Arlie Hochschild’s work on emotional labour, I suggest normative youthful femininity is lived, not simply as a set of life regulations, but as a…
From “can-do” girls to insecure and angry: Affective dissonances in young women’s post-recessional media
Feminist scholars have begun to unpack the ways in which neoliberalism is underpinned by particular gendered affective investments: drives for perfection, confidence, and the careful observance of feeling rules mandating a pleasing balance of resilience and approachability. In this context, we are interested in mapping the cultural production of affective dissonances with neoliberal modes of thriving. We draw attention to post-recessional televis…
Sociality and Classification: Reading Gender, Race, and Class in a Humorous Meme
This article is concerned with how the gendered, raced, and classed practices of readership of a humorous meme on Tumblr organize forms of sociality and belonging along these lines. Based on the anonymous Tumblr blog, WhatShouldWeCallMe, the meme narrates feelings and reactions related to youthful, feminine, Western 'everyday' experience through the use of captions and Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images. Drawing on the feminist Cultural Stu…
The hypervisibility and discourses of ‘wokeness’ in digital culture
From its origins in Black grassroots activist and political consciousness raising spaces, the term ‘woke’ has shifted in its significance. Now broadly synonymous with statements on social media that are assumed to indicate an investment in tackling social injustices, specifically, antiblackness and racial injustice, it has also become the subject of heated critique. Using key case studies such as the ‘I take responsibility’ and Instagram ‘blackou…
Beyond Repudiation: The Affective Instrumentalisation of Feminism in Girlfriendly Spaces
As a mediated sensibility, Gill, McRobbie and Angela have argued that postfeminism is held together by an incorporation of feminist ideas, in order to position feminism as 'past', a positioning which contributes to the production of highly individualised subjectivities. This article highlights an emerging modality of feminine subjectivity in which feminism is affectively incorporated, but, rather than being repudiated, it is deconstructed and ins…
Girlfriendship and sameness: Affective Belonging in a Digital Intimate Public
This article draws on Lauren Berlant’s conceptualization of an intimate public to explain how the culture of postfeminist girlfriendship in a set of blogs on Tumblr invites particular pleasures based on desires for normativity and commonality. This digital intimate public is based on the circulation, adaptation and readership of a central popular blog named WhatShouldWeCallMe authored by two ‘best friends’ narrating humorous, everyday moments of …
Authenticity, uniqueness and talent: Gay male beauty influencers in post-queer, postfeminist Instagram beauty culture
The emblematic rise of the female Instagram influencer has been understood as exemplifying shifts in postfeminist and neoliberal frameworks of femininity. Yet, the central place of gay men in postfeminist beauty culture and its intersection with ‘post-queer’ culture have so far escaped considered attention. In this article, we examine the performance of femininity by four of the top gay male influencers in Instagram beauty culture, Jeffree Star, …
Feminist fire: Embodiment and affect in managing conflict in digital feminist spaces
Digital spaces are crucial in enabling participation in contemporary feminism and activism, as key sites through which feminist knowledges are dispersed, taken up, and debated. However, little is known about how feminist learning is practically enacted, and how the potential for conflict and debate in online feminist spaces are navigated and have implications for feminist pedagogies. Through a qualitative participatory study with self-described “…
Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture: Managing Affect, Intimacy and Value
Intersectionality in digital feminist knowledge cultures: The Practices and Politics of a Travelling Theory
Intersectionality is a travelling theory; now enjoying significant contemporary visibility and popularity in the feminist blogosphere, it has moved across disciplines and borders in ways that are quite distinct from the scholarly critique developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw some time ago. In this article, I consider how intersectionality is translated, and retheorised, as an intertwined set of everyday knowledges and associated governmental practices …
Jennifer Lawrence, remixed: Approaching celebrity through DIY digital culture
This article seeks to interrogate the relationship between two gendered aspects of celebrity: the way in which female celebrities are used to determine normative femininity in a postfeminist regulatory environment, and the way their audiences are primarily imagined as young and female. I aim to consider the intersections of this relationship by conducting an analysis of the discursive and affective practices of a feminine digital public where dis…
The best friend, the boyfriend, other girls, hot guys, and creeps: The relational production of self on Tumblr
This article interrogates how youthful feminine selves are relationally articulated by reference to post-feminist economies of value on the blogging platform Tumblr. I examine a public on Tumblr in which everyday experiences in young women’s lives are narrated through reaction-GIF blog posts. Combining GIFs and captions, the posts capture moments ranging from the rage “when I see some chick getting all flirty with my crush” to the self-satisfacti…
Cinch, filter, erase: Virtual bodies and the editable self
Selfie-editing technologies (including in-phone editing tools, filters, and apps like Facetune) provide the ability digitally edit and “enhance” facial and body features in photos. This article extends a theorization of “the virtual” developing from earlier approaches in feminist sociology and digital media studies, to consider the implications of selfie-editing capacities for how young people navigate selfhood in contemporary visual cultures. We…
Influence and expertise: Distancing and distinction in online youth feminist knowledge cultures
In recent years, feminism’s visibility in Western pop culture and social media has seemingly made it ever more accessible for young people (Banet-Weiser, S. 2019. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). This article uses the framework of youth ‘knowledge cultures’ to analyse how feminist knowledge is negotiated and remade in online culture, going beyond characterisations of online feminism primarily i…
Media Comforts and International Student Mobility: Managing Hopes, Host and Home
This paper underlines the importance of emotional and physical anchoring within international student experiences of dislocation, migration and place, noting the complex role of various media in situating students as at ‘home’ and/or ‘here’. Growth in the transnational mobility of international students is transforming infrastructures across ‘host countries’ globally. Yet, in these significant transformations, we are yet to fully understand how i…
I can live without you’: Self-branding as individuation in young Chinese women’s transnational mobilities
In recent years, significant numbers of young middle-class Chinese women have moved abroad to construct an individual ‘biography’ beyond the unequal gendered expectations of the post-reform context. This article reports on a 2019 qualitative study combining interviews and visual analysis of WeChat and Instagram posts to consider how young Chinese women temporarily living in Australia maintain relationships with upper middle class family who have …
The work of emotion in a digital age: A trust betrayed', ten years on
This article explores the legacy of Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi’s germinal 2010 article, ‘A Trust Betrayed’, which provided a hugely generative framework for considering the politics of emotion exemplified in celebrity culture. Focusing on the relational politics of affective revelation, Nunn and Biressi identified the emotional labour of celebrity individuality underpinned by the continual work of self-narrativisation. I briefly highlight the…
The Girl in the GIF
In this article, I explore the practice of reading as a form of social participation in girlhood in digital spaces. Positioning girlhood as the circulation of particular discourses and affects, I consider a set of six self-representative blogs authored by young women on the microblogging platform Tumblr, and the affective and discursive positions they invite through their address to readers. Adapted from a central blog named WhatShouldWeCallMe, t…
Jennifer Lawrence, remixed: Approaching celebrity through DIY digital culture
This article seeks to interrogate the relationship between two gendered aspects of celebrity: the way in which female celebrities are used to determine normative femininity in a postfeminist regulatory environment, and the way their audiences are primarily imagined as young and female. I aim to consider the intersections of this relationship by conducting an analysis of the discursive and affective practices of a feminine digital public where dis…
Sociality and Classification: Reading Gender, Race, and Class in a Humorous Meme
This article is concerned with how the gendered, raced, and classed practices of readership of a humorous meme on Tumblr organize forms of sociality and belonging along these lines. Based on the anonymous Tumblr blog, WhatShouldWeCallMe, the meme narrates feelings and reactions related to youthful, feminine, Western 'everyday' experience through the use of captions and Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images. Drawing on the feminist Cultural Stu…
The Girl in the GIF
In this article, I explore the practice of reading as a form of social participation in girlhood in digital spaces. Positioning girlhood as the circulation of particular discourses and affects, I consider a set of six self-representative blogs authored by young women on the microblogging platform Tumblr, and the affective and discursive positions they invite through their address to readers. Adapted from a central blog named WhatShouldWeCallMe, t…
The best friend, the boyfriend, other girls, hot guys, and creeps: The relational production of self on Tumblr
This article interrogates how youthful feminine selves are relationally articulated by reference to post-feminist economies of value on the blogging platform Tumblr. I examine a public on Tumblr in which everyday experiences in young women’s lives are narrated through reaction-GIF blog posts. Combining GIFs and captions, the posts capture moments ranging from the rage “when I see some chick getting all flirty with my crush” to the self-satisfacti…
On not taking the self seriously: Resilience, relatability and humour in young women’s Tumblr blogs
In a contemporary neoliberal landscape, young women are subject to intensified requirements to demonstrate resilient individuality while also enacting a pleasing, approachable femininity, in domains of life including bodily appearance, education, employment and personal productivity in general. Following Arlie Hochschild’s work on emotional labour, I suggest normative youthful femininity is lived, not simply as a set of life regulations, but as a…
Beyond Repudiation: The Affective Instrumentalisation of Feminism in Girlfriendly Spaces
As a mediated sensibility, Gill, McRobbie and Angela have argued that postfeminism is held together by an incorporation of feminist ideas, in order to position feminism as 'past', a positioning which contributes to the production of highly individualised subjectivities. This article highlights an emerging modality of feminine subjectivity in which feminism is affectively incorporated, but, rather than being repudiated, it is deconstructed and ins…
Girlfriendship and sameness: Affective Belonging in a Digital Intimate Public
This article draws on Lauren Berlant’s conceptualization of an intimate public to explain how the culture of postfeminist girlfriendship in a set of blogs on Tumblr invites particular pleasures based on desires for normativity and commonality. This digital intimate public is based on the circulation, adaptation and readership of a central popular blog named WhatShouldWeCallMe authored by two ‘best friends’ narrating humorous, everyday moments of …
Mediating Neoliberal Capitalism: Affect, Subjectivity and Inequality
In this article we make an argument for why thinking critically about neoliberalism is important for media and communication studies. We advance a case for a critical media analysis that will take seriously the affective and psychic life of neoliberalism as an increasingly central means of governing and producing people’s desires, attachments, and modes of “getting by.” To illustrate our broader theoretical argument, we will discuss the contradic…
From “can-do” girls to insecure and angry: Affective dissonances in young women’s post-recessional media
Feminist scholars have begun to unpack the ways in which neoliberalism is underpinned by particular gendered affective investments: drives for perfection, confidence, and the careful observance of feeling rules mandating a pleasing balance of resilience and approachability. In this context, we are interested in mapping the cultural production of affective dissonances with neoliberal modes of thriving. We draw attention to post-recessional televis…
Girls' Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age by Jessalynn Keller
Reviewed by: Girls' Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age by Jessalynn Keller Akane Kanai (bio) Jessalynn Keller. Girls' Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age. Routledge, 2016, 198 pp. ISBN 978-1138800147, $172.00. What does it mean for the personal to be political? This question has been repeatedly raised by feminist scholars in relation to the potential of journal-writing, culture-making, and other forms of everyday production by girls and …
Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture: Managing Affect, Intimacy and Value
Between the perfect and the problematic: Everyday femininities, popular feminism, and the negotiation of intersectionality
In recent years, celebrity and popular culture have figured as key sites in the mediated resurgence of feminism, producing competing and contested articulations of feminism as a ‘popular’ phenomenon [Banet-Weiser, S. and Portwood-Stacer, L., 2017. The traffic in feminism: an introduction to the commentary and criticism on popular feminism. Feminist media studies, 17, 884–888]. Drawing on interviews with self-identifying feminists who primarily le…
Making do on not much: High Energy Striving, Femininity and Friendship in Broad City
In the years following the 2008 global financial crisis (“GFC”), feminist media scholarship has drawn attention to the gendered calls in Western media culture to remake subjectivity in line with imperatives of thrift required in conditions of austerity. In the shared symbolic environments that “gender the recession” (Negra & Tasker, 2014), media ranging from news, reality television, and film have placed further, intensified demands on women’s do…
The work of emotion in a digital age: A trust betrayed', ten years on
This article explores the legacy of Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi’s germinal 2010 article, ‘A Trust Betrayed’, which provided a hugely generative framework for considering the politics of emotion exemplified in celebrity culture. Focusing on the relational politics of affective revelation, Nunn and Biressi identified the emotional labour of celebrity individuality underpinned by the continual work of self-narrativisation. I briefly highlight the…
Feminist filter bubbles: Ambivalence, vigilance and labour
In this paper, we complicate and bring a new perspective to debates on the democratic limitations of filter bubbles, by exploring the case study of feminist filter bubbles. We extend understandings of the filter bubble to examine the highly reflexive, everyday ways in which filtering is adopted as a practical response to the information saturation and the politicised vulnerability engendered by digital environments. In doing so, we make a case fo…
Feminist fire: Embodiment and affect in managing conflict in digital feminist spaces
Digital spaces are crucial in enabling participation in contemporary feminism and activism, as key sites through which feminist knowledges are dispersed, taken up, and debated. However, little is known about how feminist learning is practically enacted, and how the potential for conflict and debate in online feminist spaces are navigated and have implications for feminist pedagogies. Through a qualitative participatory study with self-described “…
Authenticity, uniqueness and talent: Gay male beauty influencers in post-queer, postfeminist Instagram beauty culture
The emblematic rise of the female Instagram influencer has been understood as exemplifying shifts in postfeminist and neoliberal frameworks of femininity. Yet, the central place of gay men in postfeminist beauty culture and its intersection with ‘post-queer’ culture have so far escaped considered attention. In this article, we examine the performance of femininity by four of the top gay male influencers in Instagram beauty culture, Jeffree Star, …
Intersectionality in digital feminist knowledge cultures: The Practices and Politics of a Travelling Theory
Intersectionality is a travelling theory; now enjoying significant contemporary visibility and popularity in the feminist blogosphere, it has moved across disciplines and borders in ways that are quite distinct from the scholarly critique developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw some time ago. In this article, I consider how intersectionality is translated, and retheorised, as an intertwined set of everyday knowledges and associated governmental practices …
Disclosing Racism, Awareness-Raising and Seeking Support: Korean Women Migrants' Use of Online Cafés
In recent years, Korean migrants to Australia have turned increasingly to digital culture as a space of information exchange, support, and belonging. The need for a space in which the ‘politics of listening’ [Dreher, T., 2009. Listening across Difference: Media and Multiculturalism Beyond the Politics of Voice. Continuum (Mount Lawley, W.A.), 23 (4), 445–458] is made possible becomes even more crucial in face of continued exclusions and everyday …
Media Comforts and International Student Mobility: Managing Hopes, Host and Home
This paper underlines the importance of emotional and physical anchoring within international student experiences of dislocation, migration and place, noting the complex role of various media in situating students as at ‘home’ and/or ‘here’. Growth in the transnational mobility of international students is transforming infrastructures across ‘host countries’ globally. Yet, in these significant transformations, we are yet to fully understand how i…
I can live without you’: Self-branding as individuation in young Chinese women’s transnational mobilities
In recent years, significant numbers of young middle-class Chinese women have moved abroad to construct an individual ‘biography’ beyond the unequal gendered expectations of the post-reform context. This article reports on a 2019 qualitative study combining interviews and visual analysis of WeChat and Instagram posts to consider how young Chinese women temporarily living in Australia maintain relationships with upper middle class family who have …
The hypervisibility and discourses of ‘wokeness’ in digital culture
From its origins in Black grassroots activist and political consciousness raising spaces, the term ‘woke’ has shifted in its significance. Now broadly synonymous with statements on social media that are assumed to indicate an investment in tackling social injustices, specifically, antiblackness and racial injustice, it has also become the subject of heated critique. Using key case studies such as the ‘I take responsibility’ and Instagram ‘blackou…
Influence and expertise: Distancing and distinction in online youth feminist knowledge cultures
In recent years, feminism’s visibility in Western pop culture and social media has seemingly made it ever more accessible for young people (Banet-Weiser, S. 2019. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). This article uses the framework of youth ‘knowledge cultures’ to analyse how feminist knowledge is negotiated and remade in online culture, going beyond characterisations of online feminism primarily i…
Dissonance and defensiveness: Orienting affects in online feminist cultures
Are there certain shared feelings that orient contemporary feminists? And what does it mean to feel like a feminist now, at a time when digital networks and media culture significantly shape the conditions for what feminism ‘is’ (Banet-Weiser Citation2018)? This paper considers how digital culture, as a crucial but potentially disorienting site of feminist encounter and contestation, may reshape norms of feminist feeling, and what feminist feelin…
Cinch, filter, erase: Virtual bodies and the editable self
Selfie-editing technologies (including in-phone editing tools, filters, and apps like Facetune) provide the ability digitally edit and “enhance” facial and body features in photos. This article extends a theorization of “the virtual” developing from earlier approaches in feminist sociology and digital media studies, to consider the implications of selfie-editing capacities for how young people navigate selfhood in contemporary visual cultures. We…
Gender, Feminism, and Media (27 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Gender Studies (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Media studies (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Social Media and Politics (9 works)