Debbie Ging

Cyberbullying, conflict management or just messing? Teenage girls’ understandings and experiences of gender, friendship, and conflict on Facebook in an Irish second-level school

Abstract In recent years, there have been growing concerns worldwide about young people’s safety online, much of which focuses on social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Moral panics about sexting and cyberbullying have constructed public discourses about social media as dangerous to adolescents’ safety and relationships. In the academic literature, there are conflicting perspectives on the nature of online relationships, behaviour, and risks, and on the causes and nature of cyberbullying. Less attention is paid—in both public and academic debates—to the role played by gender in online aggression, in spite of the fact that existing scholarship demonstrates that it is an important factor in the dynamics of young people’s online friendships and conflicts. This article presents the findings of an empirical, qualitative and quantitative study of teenage girls’ experiences and understandings of online friendship, conflict, and bullying in an Irish, single-sex secondary school. Questionnaires (n=116), individual in-depth interviews with students (n=26), and a focus group with teachers were used. Our study indicates that significant communicative phenomena within girls’ everyday lives remain unreported and frequently misunderstood.

‘Written in these scars are the stories I can’t explain’: A content analysis of pro-ana and thinspiration image sharing on Instagram

Since pro-anorexia websites began to appear in the 1990s, there has been a growing body of academic work on pro-ana and thinspiration communities online. Underpinned by a range of (inter)disciplinary perspectives, most of this work focuses on websites and blogs. There is a dearth of research and, in particular, gender-aware research on pro-ana practices and discourses in the context of newer mobile social platforms such as Instagram. Using a dataset of 7560 images, this study employs content analysis to ask whether, to what extent and how pro-ana identities and discourses manifest themselves on a more open, image-based platform such as Instagram. We demonstrate that, by mainstreaming pro-ana, Instagram has rendered visible pro-ana sensibilities such as abstinence and self-discipline in the broader context of distressed girls’ lives and Western culture more generally. We conclude that this increased visibility may in fact be a positive development.

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 feature, report or present the news (now at 24 per cent), but that increase is a mere 7 per cent over 20 years. Not only is there a problem with visibility but our data also suggest that when women are present, their contributions are often confined to the realm of the private as they speak as citizens rather than experts and in stories about health but not politics. Just over a third of the media professionals we coded were women and older women are almost entirely missing from the media scene. Citizens and democracy more generally are poorly served by a news media which privileges men’s voices, actions and views over the other 51 per cent of the population: we surely deserve better.

It’s Good to Talk? Language, Loquaciousness and Silence Among Irish Cinema’s Men in Crisis

Given the apparently traumatic nature of Irish boyhood and fatherhood, as they have been articulated in the Irish films discussed so far, it might be reasonable to assume that, by and large, the makers of these films agree that Irish masculinity has long been undergoing some form of crisis. However, even though these films are essentially about men in crisis, there is no indication of a masculinity-in-crisis discourse at work within them. On the contrary, they have tended to direct a largely feminist-inflected attack on patriarchy and its ‘frontline troops’ (Connell, 1995), inviting sympathy for the young boys who have suffered at its hands. In a later slew of films, however, there was a shift away from a preoccupation with men as perpetrators of violence and oppression, toward a concern with men, including adult men, as victims. These films, which include Disco Pigs, Kings, Swansong: the Story of Occi Byrne, Ailsa, On the Edge, Eden, Garage, Small Engine Repair, Parked, The Looking Glass and Eamon feature male characters who are excluded from male hegemony. Powerless, misunderstood and emotionally adrift, the protagonists of these films are either depressed or deeply frustrated, manifested in an inability or reluctance to talk about their feelings, the creation of alternative linguistic universes (Disco Pigs, Kings) or, in the case of The Guard, In Bruges and Intermission, in the use of words to draw protective discursive boundaries around a fragile or threatened sense of masculinity.

Special issue on online misogyny

Abstract This special issue seeks to identify and theorise the complex relationships between online culture, technology and misogyny. It asks how the internet’s anti-woman spaces and discourses have been transformed by the technological affordances of new digital platforms, and whether they are borne of the same types of discontents articulated in older forms of anti-feminism, or to what extent they might articulate a different constellation of social, cultural and gender-political factors. This collection of work is intended to lend focus and cohesion to a growing body of research in this area; to map, contextualise and take stock of current frameworks, making scholars aware of one another’s work and methodologies, and hopefully forging new interdisciplinary collaborations and directions for future work. Crucially, we move beyond the Anglophone world, to include perspectives from countries which have different gender-political and technological landscapes. In addition to mapping the new misogyny, several contributions also address digital feminist responses, evaluating their successes, limitations and impact on the shape of digital gender politics in future.

#Slane Girl, beauty pageants and padded bras: flashpoints in the sexualisation of children debate in Irish media and political discourse

Abstract Public and academic concern about the sexualisation of children first emerged in the early 1980s in the US, and has been traced back to the early 1990s in the UK. By contrast, public concern about child sexualisation is relatively new in Irish public discourse. In 2013 in particular, a number of “flashpoint” events occurred in Ireland, prompting both political and media reactions, which set the dominant tone of Irish discourse on this issue. This article examines how the sexualisation of children has come to be specifically framed in Irish media coverage and political debate. It derives from the first ever government funded study on the sexualisation and commercialisation of children in Ireland, which was also conducted by the authors of this article. The section of the study that is addressed here involved a broad qualitative analysis of print media coverage of child sexualisation in the period 2011–2013 and Parliamentary discussions from the first mention of child sexualisation (1998) to the time of analysis (2013). This article thus revisits data collected for the report, and subjects it to further analysis We conclude that the current status of Irish public debate on this issue lacks clarity and complexity, and indicates an urgent need to respond to Duschinsky and Barker’s call for a more sophisticated and nuanced discussion that eschews moral panic responses in favour of listening to the opinions and experiences of young people.

Women, Men and News

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 feature, report or present the news (now at 24 per cent), but that increase is a mere 7 per cent over 20 years. Not only is there a problem with visibility but our data also suggest that when women are present, their contributions are often confined to the realm of the private as they speak as citizens rather than experts and in stories about health but not politics. Just over a third of the media professionals we coded were women and older women are almost entirely missing from the media scene. Citizens and democracy more generally are poorly served by a news media which privileges men’s voices, actions and views over the other 51 per cent of the population: we surely deserve better.

Women, men and news: It's life, Jim, but not as we know it (Forthcoming/Available Online)

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 feature, report or present the news (now at 24 per cent), but that increase is a mere 7 per cent over 20 years. Not only is there a problem with visibility but our data also suggest that when women are present, their contributions are often confined to the realm of the private as they speak as citizens rather than experts and in stories about health but not politics. Just over a third of the media professionals we coded were women and older women are almost entirely missing from the media scene. Citizens and democracy more generally are poorly served by a news media which privileges men’s voices, actions and views over the other 51 per cent of the population: we surely deserve better.

Conclusion: a Masculinity of ‘Transcendent’ Defeat?

To the extent that a cohesive narrative arc is discernable in the story of masculinities in Irish film, it is one of short-lived cohesion, in which what David Gerstner (2006: 30–1) refers to as a sense of ‘nonself-conscious selfhood’ was briefly achieved, followed by a period of intense deconstruction (the First Wave), and subsequent waves of re-construction (the second wave, the ‘Lad Wave’ and a new, more contemplative, wave evident in the work of Darragh Byrne, John Carney and Lenny Abrahamson). In the course of the ‘doldrum decades’ of filmmaking, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the non-self-conscious Gaelic Manhood that informed the early films discussed in Chapter Three effectively came to stand for an oppressive brand of state nationalism that the First Wave set about exposing and critiquing. Although they were strongly influenced by European and American film and social movements, their focus was firmly on the local, on illuminating the darker or hitherto invisible aspects of Irish history and nationalist myth-making. Speaking of his own work during this period, Bob Quinn comments: Instead of aiming for the broad canvas I have been making notes, sketches, miniatures, documenting small places and small people; instead of dealing with eternal human verities as understood by a homogenous audience of popcorn eaters, I seem purposely to have been making my oeuvres as obscure as possible, in a language little known outside Ireland, in a community equally rather despised by progressive Irish people (Quinn, 2000: 27).

Institutional Boys: Adolescent Masculinity and Coming of Age in Ireland’s ‘Architecture of Containment’

The screen life of the wholesome, self-disciplined, Catholic family man of early propagandist filmmaking was a remarkably short one, and in the ‘doldrum’ decades from the 1940s to the late 1970s, filmmaking in Ireland was dominated by foreign productions. In 1980, however, a major breakthrough occurred with the establishment of the first Irish Film Board (1980–7), which fostered the beginnings of an indigenous film culture. Rather than endeavouring to construct ‘positive’ or entertaining visions of Irish life, however, much of the work that emerged out of this initiative served to expose the dark underbelly of the religious institutions which had shaped Irish national identity and, crucially, Irish manhood, as well as those which had been established to conceal aspects of life which did not conform to the nationalist ideal (Smith, 2007). By and large, Ireland’s new filmmakers eschewed heroic, patriotic and successful male figures in favour of male subjects who were socially marginalised, criminal, depressed, suicidal, abusive, abused, forced into exile, gay, queer or transsexual, violent and variously conflicted or in crisis.