Jessalynn Keller

VIRTUAL FEMINISMS: Girls’ blogging communities, feminist activism, and participatory politics

While feminist media scholars have recognized the growing importance of feminist blogs, such as Jezebel, Racialicious, and Feministe, to contemporary feminism, the contribution of girls to this feminist blogosphere remains understudied. In this paper, the author addresses this research gap by investigating the complex and diverse ways that girls are using blogging communities to participate in a feminist political activism that reflects their needs as contemporary young feminists within a neoliberal cultural context. This analysis draws upon two case studies of popular blogs by teenage feminists, and interviews that were conducted with four girl bloggers who participated in these two communities. The author argues that through the practice of blogging, teenage girls are actively reframing what it means to participate in feminist politics, drawing on opportunities that the Internet provides to embrace new understandings of community, activism, and even feminism itself.

' But then feminism goes out the window!' : exploring teenage girls' critical response to celebrity feminism

The release of ELLE UK’s December 2014 ‘Feminism Issue’ capped off a year in which feminism was increasingly visible within popular media cultures, including celebrity culture. Considering Beyoncé’s MTV Music Video Awards performance before an illuminated backdrop of the word ‘Feminist’ (discussed elsewhere in this Forum by Nathalie Weidhase) and celebrities like Taylor Swift and Jennifer Lawrence claiming allegiance to the f-word, Jessica Valenti’s (2014) recent acknowledgement of the increasing cool factor of feminism among celebrities seems particularly apt. There has been a substantial amount of feminist critique of what we may call ‘celebrity feminism’ – a form of popular feminism made visible recently by young celebrity women eager to publicly claim a feminist identity. We may contextualise celebrity feminism as part of the increasing prominence of what Catherine Rottenberg (2013) calls ‘neoliberal feminism’. This version of feminism recognises current inequalities between men and women yet disavows the social, cultural, and economic roots of these inequalities in favour of the neoliberal ethos of individual action, personal responsibility, and unencumbered choice as the best strategy to produce gender equality. Actor Emma Watson’s insistence in her ELLE December 2014 feature interview that feminism is foremost about choice for women and girls, for example, is indicative of this neoliberal imperative. Yet we do not aim to reproduce the excellent critiques made of celebrity feminism (Gay 2014, Valenti 2014) here. Instead, we examine teenage girls’ responses to this version of popular feminism, perspectives which have been unexplored in both mainstream and academic discussions of celebrity feminism. This lack of attention to girls is troubling, considering that many of the celebrities performing feminist identities are marketed towards teen girls. Therefore, we ask how girls understand celebrity feminism, analysing the tensions that it often raises for girls doing feminism in their everyday lives. To do so we foreground the voices of girls interviewed as part of their involvement with a feminist club at a London high school or their participation in feminist politics as bloggers. Girls’ responses to celebrities like Beyoncé and Emma Watson point to the nuanced and complex ways in which young people are problematising celebrity feminism.

Speaking ‘unspeakable things’: documenting digital feminist responses to rape culture

Abstract This paper examines the ways in which girls and women are using digital media platforms to challenge the rape culture they experience in their everyday lives; including street harassment, sexual assault, and the policing of the body and clothing in school settings. Focusing on three international cases, including the anti-street harassment site Hollaback!, the hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported, and interviews with teenage Twitter activists, the paper asks: What experiences of harassment, misogyny and rape culture are girls and women responding to? How are girls and women using digital media technologies to document experiences of sexual violence, harassment, and sexism? And, why are girls and women choosing to mobilize digital media technologies in such a way? Employing an approach that includes ethnographic methods such as semi-structured interviews, content analysis, discursive textual analysis, and affect theories, we detail a range of ways that women and girls are using social media platforms to speak about, and thus make visible, experiences of rape culture. We argue that this digital mediation enables new connections previously unavailable to girls and women, allowing them to redraw the boundaries between themselves and others.

Girl Power's Last Chance?:Tavi Gevinson, Feminism, and Popular Media Culture

This paper focuses on Tavi Gevinson, the teenage fashion blogger-turned-editor in chief of the online magazine Rookie, as a case study with which to interrogate the production and circulation of feminist politics within a ‘post-girl power’ era. Drawing on theories of performativity, I employ a discursive and ideological textual analysis of Gevinsons self-produced media and media coverage to map how she uses the opportunities afforded by digital media to rearticulate narratives of ‘girl power’ and perform a feminist girlhood subjectivity that makes feminism accessible to her many readers. While I argue that Gevinsons ability to do so is positive and demonstrates the porous nature of postfeminist media culture, I also suggest that we must be critical of the ways in which her feminism functions as part of her self brand that reproduces feminism as white, middle-class, and ‘hip’. Thus, I conclude by questioning a larger cultural trend towards the branding of feminism and advocating the need for an intersectional approach to understanding the resurgence of feminism within contemporary popular media culture.

Girls' Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age

Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age explores the practices of U.S.-based teenage girls who actively maintain feminist blogs and participate in the feminist blogosphere as readers, writers, and commenters on platforms including Blogspot, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Drawing on interviews with bloggers between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, as well as discursive textual analyses of feminist blogs and social networking postings authored by teenage girls, Keller addresses how these girls use blogging as a practice to articulate contemporary feminisms and craft their own identities as feminists and activists. In this sense, feminist girl bloggers defy hegemonic postfeminist and neoliberal girlhood subjectivities, a finding that Keller uses to complicate both academic and popular assertions that suggest teenage girls are uninterested in feminism.Instead, Keller maintains that these young bloggers employ digital media production to educate their peers about feminism, connect with like-minded activists, write feminist history, and make feminism visible within popular culture, practices that build upon and continue a lengthy tradition of American feminism into the twenty-first century. Girls’ Feminist Bloggers in a Postfeminist Age challenges readers to not only reconsider teenage girls’ online practices as politically and culturally significant, but to better understand their crucial role in a thriving contemporary feminism.

Why 'intergenerational feminist media studies'?

Abstract Feminism and generation are live and ideologically freighted issues that are subject to a substantial amount of media engagement. The figure of the millennial and the baby boomer, for example, regularly circulate in mainstream media, often accompanied by hyperbolic and vitriolic discourses and affects of intergenerational feminist conflict. In addition, theories of feminist generation and waves have been and continue to be extensively critiqued within feminist theory. Given the compelling criticisms directed at these categories, we ask: why bother examining and foregrounding issues of generation, intergeneration, and transgeneration in feminist media studies? Whilst remaining sceptical of linearity and familial metaphors and of repeating reductive, heteronormative, and racist versions of feminist movements, we believe that the concept of generation does have critical purchase for feminist media scholars. Indeed, precisely because of the problematic ways that is it used, and the prevalence of it as a volatile, yet only too palpable, organizing category, generation is both in need of continual critical analysis, and is an important tool to be used—with care and nuance—when examining the multiple routes through which power functions in order to marginalize, reward, and oppress. Exploring both diachronic and synchronic understandings of generation, this article emphasizes the use of conjunctural analysis to excavate the specific historical conditions that impact upon and create generation. This special issue of Feminist Media Studies covers a range of media forms—film, games, digital media, television, print media, as well as practices of media production, intervention, and representation. The articles also explore how figures at particular lifestages—particularly the girl and the aging woman—are constructed relationally, and circulate, within media, with particular attention to sexuality. Throughout the issue there is an emphasis on exploring the ways in which the category of generation is mobilized in order to gloss sexism, racism, ageism, class oppression, and the effects of neoliberalism.

Mapping New Methodological Approaches to Girls’ Media Studies: Reflections from the Field

Over the past two decades, girls’ media studies have developed from a marginalized research interest into an innovative subfield exploring the relationship between girls and media cultures. As girls become increasingly visible within the production, reception, and distribution of cinema, television, and new media, girls’ media studies scholars have responded by employing a diverse range of methodological approaches, including discursive and esthetic analysis, ethnographic interviews, industrial analysis, historiography, and community engagement. While this subfield is quite interdisciplinary and international, there have been few explorations of its various methodological approaches. Recognizing the growing significance of media within girls’ cultures—and vice versa—we need to create spaces for open dialogue about how researching girlhood can contribute to the development of media studies at large. At the 2015 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Annual Conference, we participated in a workshop that aimed to produce this intellectual space by bringing together a diverse group of girls’ media studies scholars to reflect on the various methodologies currently being employed in the subfield and to consider what new methodological approaches might be needed as our field grows. At the workshop, we grappled with several questions that provide context for our discussion below: How have girls’ studies researchers reconfigured approaches to media studies? How might traditional methods, such as narrative analysis, be refreshed through an application to new media texts and girls’ media practices circulating globally? How do we study representations of girlhood and girls’ uses of media across platforms? In what ways can we analyze girls’ roles as celebrities, media producers, and audiences within converged media industries? How might historical research help us understand contemporary girls’ media cultures? And what methodological approaches remain underutilized but potentially useful in girls’ media studies research? With the inaugural International Girls’ Studies Association Conference being held at the University of East Anglia in April 2016, we believe that a more rigorous analysis

Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture

applied to a variety of other cases. Nishime also points to the many ways in which multiracial Asian Americans have capitalized upon this potential for queer readings and re-readings. The career of model/ reality star/entrepreneur Kimora Lee Simmons reveals the ways in which multiracial individuals can potentially foreground (and benefit from) a more playful approach to identity. Through Simmons’ over-the-top performances of her Black and Asian heritage, combined with her “drag queen” performance of femininity, she exposes the artificiality of both. While Simmons’ celebrations of excess and cultural transgression have been criticized as trashy, low-class, or tasteless, such labels merely reinforce their counterhegemonic potential. Nishime makes a compelling argument for productive possibilities in the way that we understand multiracial bodies and narratives, but it is clear that such work is not easy—multiracial individuals must constantly battle against erasure of their multiplicities, and the overlapping oppressions of their class or sexual identities often threaten to overwhelm. This fascinating, elegant book provides a model for doing this kind of analysis and creating new narratives so that these possibilities may one day be realized.