Mary Douglas Vavrus

What Is This “Post-” in Postracial, Postfeminist… (Fill in the Blank)?

The events of the 2008 election continue to spark prognostications that we live in a world that is postracial/feminist, and so on. At the 2009 NCA (National Communication Association) convention, a panel of communication scholars discussed how to approach questions of identity and communication over the next 5 years. Participants suggested ways to be critical of assertions of “post” and elaborated ways to encounter new dimensions of identification in an era of immense sociopolitical challenges. This forum revisits the exchanged dialogues among the participants at the roundtable and further explores the meaning of post- in post-America.

Opting Out Moms in the News: Selling New Traditionalism in the new millennium

Since October 2003, US news media have circulated a story about professional and executive women leaving their well-paying, high-status occupations to raise their children at home. This essay argues that these print and television narratives about the “opt out revolution” both re-invoke and perpetuate pre-feminist notions about mothering and family care. The stories mask a dangerous and socially conservative bent using the language of postfeminism and neoliberalism to encourage capitulation to neoliberal postfeminism—a fusion of ideologies that, in these cases, functions to quell a brewing national crisis around family care.

The Politics of NASCAR Dads: Branded Media Paternity

The figure of the NASCAR dad emerged in the 2002 and 2004 campaign seasons to signal the importance of white, male Southern voters to politicians and their political parties. Analysis of television news coverage of NASCAR dads shows that it privileges patriarchal masculinity, the Republican Party, and corporate consumerism—all of which were propelled to high visibility by the NASCAR Corporations place in these stories. Television news produces NASCAR dads as an “emotional brand,” a population of citizen-consumers representing the appropriation of patriotism, Christianity, and fatherhood, deployed in a politically conservative fashion.

Putting Ally on Trial: Contesting Postfeminism in Popular Culture

Feminist scholars long have evinced an interest not only in explaining the world, but also in changing it for the better. In feminist scholarship these goals are not always separable, but sometimes advocacy needs its own place. This section of the journal is devoted to essays that do not take the form of traditional academic research articles. Short advocacy pieces or conversations about womens scholarship and advocacy will be published here.

Working the senate from the outside in: The mediated construction of a feminist political campaign

The 1992 campaign year was known as the political Year of the Woman. This phrase was used to denote both the high‐profile Senate campaigns of five women, as well as a generalized sense of enthusiasm for female political candidates and, to some extent, for certain feminist beliefs. This is an examination of one aspect of this campaign: the mass‐mediated discursive formation used to position these Senate candidates outside of perceived mainstream, cultural beliefs and the ways in which the resulting discourse functioned as a commentary on U.S. feminism writ large.

Lifetime's Army Wives, or I Married the Media-Military-Industrial Complex

Lifetimes Army Wives is its most successful serial drama to date, depicting Army families with loved ones deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. I argue that Army Wives uses marriage to produce gendered propaganda and advance banal militarism. The program achieves verisimilitude and profitability through Lifetimes alliances with the military-industrial complex and thus frames militarism to appeal to viewers historically the most resistant to the military: women.

Critical Voices in the Future of News Debates

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