Carol A. Stabile

Unveiling imperialism: media, gender and the war on Afghanistan:

The oppression of Afghan women by fundamentalist groups was barely addressed by the corporate media until it proved rhetorically useful for US elites to argue for military intervention as a means to liberate the women of that country. This article critically interrogates this claim, and analyzes media coverage of Afghan women before and after the US invasion on 7 October 2001. First, we present an overview of conflicts in Afghanistan, focusing on the US’s economic and strategic interests in the region, and its role in supporting and funding Islamic fundamentalism. Attention to this context, absent from media accounts, is essential to understanding the plight of Afghan women in all its complexity. Second, we examine news frameworks and the ways in which Afghan women figure in imperialist agendas in a thoroughly Orientalist manner. Finally, we turn to the outcome of the war and the situation for Afghan women today.

Nike, social responsibility, and the hidden abode of production

Nike Corporation irrefutably has created wealth for its owners and shareholders, but its rhetoric of social responsibility—its self‐presentation of the corporation as a now global citizen—constitutes a more dubious claim. Nike is not alone in engaging in such marketing practices, but the corporation has long been in the vanguard of innovations in both production and marketing and therefore offers an instructive case study of how multinational corporations produce and manage their public images. This essay looks at the conditions that have made this particular self‐presentation possible for U.S. consumers.

Resistance, recuperation, and reflexivity: The limits of a paradigm

Since the early 1980s, the paradigm of resistance (which emerges from a particular reading of Gramscis theory of hegemony) has enjoyed widespread popularity in the field of media studies. Arguing for understanding media studies as a field in Pierre Bourdieus sense of the term, this article explores the analytical and political limits of this paradigm, and, by extension, the intellectual vision that proceeds from it.

“Sweetheart, This Ain't Gender Studies”: Sexism and Superheroes

In the season three premiere of the television series Heroes, petite, blonde Claire Bennett, the cheerleader who needed to be saved to save the world, encounters arch villain Sylar for a second time. Paralyzed by his newly resurgent powers, she lays on her back as Sylar peels her skull open like a hard-boiled egg. ‘‘Are you gonna eat it?’’ she half-whispers as his lips hover above her forehead and the camera moves in for a close-up in which the lines between sexualized intimacy and graphic interpersonal violence are inextricably linked. I begin with this scene and the figure of Claire Bennett because in so many ways she embodies the continued legacies of sexism in a culture that understands itself as post*feminist, if not post*gender. This essay grapples with the ways in which the gendered representations of superheroes we have seen in the years following the attacks of September 11, 2001, with their narratives of protection and secular salvation, richly illustrate the power of sexism in a militarized culture. As we will see, these representations of superheroes are a crucial part of a wider ideological field of gendered understandings of power that sharply illustrate a collective poverty of the imagination when it comes to thinking about how and why gender should matter in the years to come. It is, of course, not surprising that the past seven years have seen a number of blockbuster superhero action-adventure films. Batman, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spiderman, Hellboy 1 and 2, Hulk, Ironman, and a host of other ‘‘men’’ have flown, stomped, fallen, and swung across screens in these Hollywood blockbusters. On television, NBC’s Heroes was the megahit of 2006 and the CW’s Supernatural, now in its fourth season, continues to garner respectable ratings. Comic books and graphic novels alike also have undergone a renaissance in the remasculinized atmosphere of the Bush era. From the perspective of film and television industries, there are plenty of reasons for the popularity of superheroes. Big-budget adventure films bring in big bucks

States of Insecurity and the Gendered Politics of Fear

“Terrorism” has become a catchall term for the enemy who challenges U.S. imperialism. Viewed by the likes of George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, terrorism is the activity of terrorists; and terrorists are not us, nor are they like us—terrorists are those who hate “our” freedom/democracy, modernity/secularism, and hard-won success. “Terrorism” has now fully replaced communism as the globe’s scourge. “Our” enemies, the enemies of democracy and freedom, exist everywhere and anywhere. Yet much of the rest of the world thinks that President Bush is more of a threat to the world than Saddam Hussein. (Eisenstein 2004, 8)

“I Will Own You”: Accountability in Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Although most massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) remain entrenched in a binary system of gendered avatars, the limited representational framework of avatar creation is only one among many different strategies for what sociologists refer to as “doing gender.” This essay explores how a doing gender approach might be useful for analyzing the interactive dimensions of gender play in the rich communicative environments of MMOs. Specifically, this essay explores how players do (or do not) hold one another accountable to sex category membership through their interactions, in so doing either reproducing or resisting normative forms of gender. A doing gender approach, I argue, holds out the promise of being held accountable to a different set of rules for doing gender—of doing gender differently or, in a more utopian sense, perhaps doing away with it altogether.

‘Between Two Evils, I Refuse To Choose The Lesser’

For French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the issue of the agency of intellectuals was paramount. Bourdieu maintained that intellectuals have a fearsome form of social responsibility. Having witnessed the ‘institutional misuse of authority’ common among academics, the ‘canonized stupidity’ that was part and parcel of the educational system, the faddishness of intellectual trends and the ‘cult of “transgression”‘ that underwrote this faddishness, Bourdieu crafted an alternative position and practice that were to bear fruit in the context of the fight against neo-liberalism during the last two decades of the twentieth century. This essay provides an examination of Bourdieus theory of the gap between theory and practice, how intellectuals shape and are influenced by this gap and what can and should be done to challenge it.

‘A garden inclosed is my sister’: Ecofeminism and eco-valences

Dead creek, for example, a creekbed that received discharges from the chemical and metal plants in previous years, is now a place where kids from East St. Louis ride their bikes. The creek, which smokes by day and glows on moonless nights, has gained some notoriety in recent years for instances of spontaneous combustion. The Illinois EPA believes that the combustion starts when children ride their bikes across the creekbed, ‘creating friction which begins the smoldering process’. (Kozol, 1991: 17) In 1986 a ruptured pipeline at the Purex Corporations bleach plant in South Gate sent a green cloud of deadly chlorine over nearby Tweedy Elementary School. Seventy-one students and faculty were hospitalized and the school site was eventually abandoned. The next year, teachers in Bell Gardens discovered a possible ‘miscarriage cluster’ associated with toxic chromium emissions from adjacent plating plants, and eighteen months later Park Elementary in Cudahy was closed after analysis revealed that the ‘gook’ oozi...

Turning the century : essays in media and cultural studies

* List of Figures * Acknowledgments * Introduction, Carol A. Stabile * Sound out of Time: Modernitys Echo, Jonathan Sterne * Maintaining the Order of Things: Class, the Gospel of Scientific Efficiency, and the Invention of Policy Expertise in America, 18651921, Amos Tevelow * Sensationalism, Objectivity, and Reform in Turn-of-the-Century America, Mark Harrison * All Love Making Scenes Must Be Normal: Pennsylvania Movie Censorship in the Progressive Era, Michael G. Aronson * Only Flossy, High-Society Dudes Would Smoke Em: Gender and Cigarette Advertising in the Nineteenth Century, Dawn Schmitz * Trotting Horses and Moving Pictures: A Sporting View of Early Cinema, Andrew C. Miller * Girls Who Come to Pieces: Women, Cosmetics, and Advertising in the Ladies Home Journal, 191920, Lisa Belicka Kernen * Race Betterment and Class Consciousness at the Turn of the Century, or Why Its Okay to Marry Your Cousin, Kelly Happe * Conspicuous Whiteness: The New Woman, the Old Negro, and the Vanishing Past of Early Brand Advertising, Carla Willard * Constructions of Violence: Labor, Capital, and Hegemonic Struggle in the Pullman Strike of 1894, Kevin Ayotte * Afterword, Richard Ohmann * About the Editor and Contributors * Index

The Typhoid Marys of the Left: Gender, Race, and the Broadcast Blacklist

Scholarly accounts of gender, race, and television in the 1950s have mainly focused on the ideological content of programming that ultimately made it onto the air. This research has played an important role in reckoning with the political and cultural legacies of 1950s television. But the focus on ideology and content has prevented us from fully understanding the repressive nature of anti-communist thought and action, both in terms of the powerful ways in which the broadcast blacklist made the production of progressive themes and images impossible, and in terms of how the fear that followed from the blacklist repressed the memory that such alternatives had ever existed. Counter to the images of white suburban women we have inherited from the 1950s, the first two casualties of the broadcast blacklist were professional women who were politically active—white actor Jean Muir and African American musician Hazel Scott—whose involvement in civil rights was deemed evidence of their communist sympathies. This essay builds on earlier research on gender and 1950s television not by analyzing the absence of strong women, people of color, immigrants, and working-class families from the televisual landscape, but by looking at the elimination of the very cultural workers writing, agitating, and fighting to broadcast these representations.