Dialogic voices in talk about drinking and pregnancy

Alcohol use during pregnancy poses a significant risk of fetal alcohol syndrome. This study presents the interpretive findings of the formative research phase of a funded grant to develop a community‐based public health media campaign on the topic of drinking during pregnancy. In the initial wave of data collection, 50 rural women were recruited from four Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) clinics in southeastern Iowa to participate in semi‐structured interviews. In the second wave, 10 additional WIC clients were interviewed for member‐checking purposes. Findings revealed two competing discourses that organized these women's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors surrounding drinking and pregnancy: the discourse of individualism and the discourse of responsible motherhood. These two discourses offer opposing normative guidelines for talk among their close female relatives and friends. The implications of these findings for designing a community‐based media campaign are discussed.     

Sports,physical practice,and the female body, 1980–1989: women’s emancipation in Romania under communism

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the promotion and practice of physical exercise and sport in relation to social class and the shifting roles of women in communist-governed Romania during the 1980s. Since sport played a central role in communist ideology, especially as a means of maintaining a healthy and growing workforce, the government encouraged physical activity through gymnastics at work (in the form of “production gymnastics”), in public wellness centers, and at home. In this study, the authors trace societal shifts related to changing policies and laws through corresponding shifts in the representation of female bodies engaged in sport and exercise by the media. Content analysis of Romanian magazine and newspaper articles published during the 1980s reveals how group physical exercises, such as maintenance gymnastics, were promoted to working-class women and how images of women became increasingly feminized and sexualized, thereby reinforcing new norms of feminine beauty.     

Dialogic voices in talk about drinking and pregnancy

Alcohol use during pregnancy poses a significant risk of fetal alcohol syndrome. This study presents the interpretive findings of the formative research phase of a funded grant to develop a community-based public health media campaign on the topic of drinking during pregnancy. In the initial wave of data collection, 50 rural women were recruited from four Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) clinics in southeastern Iowa to participate in semi-structured interviews. In the second wave, 10 additional WIC clients were interviewed for member-checking purposes. Findings revealed two competing discourses that organized these women's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors surrounding drinking and pregnancy: the discourse of individualism and the discourse of responsible motherhood. These two discourses offer opposing normative guidelines for talk among their close female relatives and friends. The implications of these findings for designing a community-based media campaign are discussed.     

The metamorphosis of medical discourse and embedded cultural rationality: a content analysis of health reporting for neurasthenia and depressive disorder in China

Neurasthenia (shenjing shuairuo) and depressive disorder are medical issues that have given rise to disputes in China for more than 20 years. Since the 1980s, the once ubiquitous diagnosis of neurasthenia in China was rapidly substituted by depressive disorder in the clinical context. Globally, the metamorphosis from neurasthenia to depressive disorder heralded the triumph of scientific rationality, which identifies neurasthenia as a categorical fallacy. In China, however, neurasthenia retained social and cultural significance; thus, it has become a contestable discourse in relation to depressive disorder. By examining the health reporting of both discourses over a decade, this study explicated how neurasthenia and depressive disorder were represented in a popular health newspaper in China. The content analysis showed that neurasthenia is a more culturally and everyday embedded discourse closely associated with Chinese medicine and laymen’s discourse, while depressive disorder is more associated with Western medicine and the professional discourse. The differentiation of two sets of medical discourse evinces that despite the ostensibly prevailing scientific rationality in media health reporting, cultural rationality is deeply embedded in communicating mental health issues with the lay public. It further suggests the significance of investigating the social and cultural expression of mental illnesses in China.     

LIS Leadership and Leadership Education: A Matter of Gender

To grapple with the difficulties of change, LIS literature often turns to a discourse of leadership as a way of gaining an understanding of how change can be effectively and appropriately managed. However, much of this work fails to account for the feminized nature of the profession and the gendered practices that shape the roles of men and women who choose this field. Furthermore, there is an absence of literature that interrogates the ways in which LIS master's programs address gendered practice. Beginning with an examination of how the field of LIS is feminized, I set out to reveal how, within the context of gender, the experience of women who advance in LIS leadership and administrative positions remains poorly understood. I suggest that the adoption of masculinized practices is a response to the devaluation of “women's work” that has historically defined the service ethic of librarianship. This article serves as an example of the ways in which it is possible to interrogate assumptions about leadership.     

Engaging with Korean dramas: discourses of gender,media, and class formation in Taiwan

This paper attempts to explore the politics of differential engagements with Korean drama, particularly with relation to the formation of gender and class identities. As social identities are mediated through the cultural, discourse becomes a significant site for understanding the relationships between structures and the formation of subjectivities. The imported Korean drama falls mostly into two genres – trendy drama and family drama. Both of them deal with family and love, and both of them aim at women audiences. As such, discourses of femininity provide a productive avenue for understanding: on the one hand, their place in social formation, that is, how women inhabit different discourses of femininity which in turn position them hierarchically in the social domain; on the other hand, how social processes, including globalization and nation formation, play a central role in constituting the different meanings and hierarchy of discourses of femininity. However, discourses of femininity also intersect with discourses of television in structuring women's engagements with Korean drama. This paper therefore traces the transformations of the discourses of femininity and television and explores how they regulate, constrain, or enable women's engagements with Korean drama. In doing so, this paper aims to highlight the hierarchically structured gendered discourses in the process of social formation in contemporary Taiwan.     

“We want to see you sex it up and be slutty:” post-feminism and sports media’s appearance double standard

The notion that women in the United States’ electronic sports media face greater standards of appearance is not new (Sheffer, M. L., & Schultz, B. (2007) Double standard: Why women have trouble getting jobs in local television sports. Journal of Sports Media, 2(1), 77–101). What has not been explored, however, is the persistence of this double standard through a Foucauldian lens. Using Michel Foucault’s (Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Vol. 1, an introduction. New York: Vintage Books) power/knowledge paradigm, this Foucauldian discourse analysis uses one-on-one interviews with women sportscasters and textual analysis to grapple with this previously unexplored aspect of one of electronic sports media’s longest standing gendered double standards.

Using these data, this article argues that post-feminist discourses (Gill, R. (2007) Gender and the media. Cambridge: Polity Press; McRobbie, A. (2004) Post-feminism and popular culture. Feminist Media Studies, 4(3), 255–264) have a mutually informing relationship with three manifestations of the electronic sports media’s gendered double standard of appearance: sportscaster hiring and retention, inequitable media consumer evaluations of on-screen appearance, and expectations for sportscaster dress, the latter of which have required many women to wear increasingly revealing clothing, a trend this article refers to as nightclubification. While post-feminist analysis explicates the nuances of the appearance double standard and the electronic sports media’s contributions to our culture’s constructions of gender relations, Foucauldian discourse analysis demonstrates how the appearance double standard has been taken for granted and how it might inform other obstacles women in the industry must navigate.     

Opposing verdicts in the Webb/Dotson rape case: Legal vs. news constructions

This essay compares legal and mainstream news discourses surrounding the Webb/Dotson rape recanting case, focusing on reasons why the two discourses derived opposing conclusions about Dotson's guilt. It argues that the tendency of mainstream news media to highlight emotional and personal elements helped construct a picture of Dotson as innocent and affable, while the tendency of legal discourse to emphasize mutually exclusive categories contributed strongly to a picture of Dotson as guilty regardless of Webb's recanted story.     

In Our Own Voices: Reproductive Health Radio Programming in the Peruvian Amazon

This article examines the political and social implications of broadening public discourse and facilitating a collective mediated space in which gendered inequities, interests, and identities are debated via the feminist reproductive health radio program Bienvenida Salud! The article describes the mediascape in rural and indigenous Peruvian Amazonian communities and the ways in which feminist reproductive rights discourse has been introduced and interpreted in communities that have limited exposure to global feminism. By analyzing the reception and listening practices among the Bienvenida Salud! audience, the authors explore arguments about the limits and possibilities of participatory media to effect social change. Finally, the article examines the capacity of Amazonian women to use alternative media to voice their traditionally ignored reproductive health priorities, goals, and practices, and in so doing, critically assesses the potential of participatory media interventions to influence the discourses of global feminism and population planning.     

Riding in Cars Between Men

Through an analysis of public discourse surrounding two different controversies featuring professional race car driver, Deborah Renshaw, this article foregrounds contemporary relationships between gender and (auto)mobility. It draws on both theories of gender performativity and media ecology to outline the ways in which the automobile as a technology influences gender performance and the ways in which the automobile is understood through cultural discourses that are already largely gendered. The essay uses the discourse surrounding the Renshaw case to problematize both contemporary gender norms and understandings of the relationship between prosthetic media and the body.     

Sex and the City-State: A Study of Sexual Discourse in Singaporean Women's Magazines

Singapore's print media now presents frank and open discussions of sexuality, signalling what appears to be a liberating overhaul of the strict moral codes that have restricted media content for decades. The intensely competitive magazine market is leading the charge. This paper examines how magazines such as The Singapore Women's Weekly reframe discourses on sexuality to allow them to operate within Singapore's tightly controlled media system. Drawing from a Foucauldian approach to discourse and censorship, and broader themes of global capitalism and state rule, this paper contends that despite immense pressures to allow the print media and its wealth-generating advertisers a high degree of autonomy in terms of content, Singapore's sexual revolution operates within parameters set by a government keen to strike a balance between maintaining ‘traditional’ moral values and a more pragmatic approach toward sexuality centred, in part, on attempts to promote ‘civic nationalism’ and to arrest the declining birth-rate.     

Discourses on Somali Piracy

Piracy off Somalia's coast has gained the imagination of the public and the attention of the media. Using critical discourse analysis, this paper considers stories about Somali piracy on the international BBC news website. A twin analysis is undertaken to determine how those involved in piracy and their actions are represented as well as how macro-discursive strategies of legitimation are employed. An historical contextualisation of Somalia and piracy complements the analysis. These analyses reveal how news stories do not focus on Somalis but on negative representations of pirates and positive representations of Western military powers. A number of linguistic strategies are identified that emphasise Western powers and articulate discourses that legitimate the continuing presence and actions of Western militaries. These discourses are drawn upon at the expense of discourses sympathetic to the plight of Somalis. These findings not only call into question the BBC's claims to objectivity, but also highlight the fact that stories do not promote conditions suitable for an end to piracy.     

E-government discourses: An inductive analysis

This article offers a new perspective on e-government by documenting the categories of e-government discourses, and evaluating them within a public value framework. Understanding e-government discourses is significant, since these discourses represent contested visions of e-government, and one can derive a feel for public sentiment about e-government from the discourses used in the media. The findings are accumulated through an inductive analysis of 85 newspaper articles, published during the year of 2010, in three top-selling, ideologically different, nationally circulating Turkish newspapers. In these 85 articles, 98 discourses presented by 90 policy actors are found. Five positive and four negative discourse categories and their relationships emerged from the analysis of the data. The results show that, government reform efforts shaped by the New Public Management movement and Turkey's harmonization efforts with the global political system in general, and with the European Union in particular, are influential in the presentation of e-government projects to the Turkish public through newspapers.     

The corpus of Daniel Pearl

Acts of terrorism and their presence in mass media have long intrigued scholars throughout a wide range of academic disciplines. The kidnapping and execution of Daniel Pearl and the subsequent release of a videotape that made his execution public on a global scale raise substantive questions regarding the rhetorical nature of such acts and the competing nationalist discourses that make claims on the human body. This essay traces the role of Pearl's body in discourses that constitute Pakistani and American nationalist identities. Through a rhetorical analysis of the execution videotape and news reports in both countries, the role of the human body as a rhetorical resource within the mediated discourse on terrorism is elucidated.     

Naming Neda: Digital Discourse and the Rhetorics of Association

This article analyzes several online discourses centering on the death of Neda Agha Soltan, a young Iranian shot and killed during Iran's post-election protests in the summer of 2009. Hours after the tragic event, cell phone footage of Agha Soltan dying on camera was posted online by an anonymous citizen-journalist. Immediately, media users began juxtaposing images sampled from the footage with words, texts, photographs, drawings, and music. All sorts of competing and complimentary discourses emerged as media makers attempted to define the significance of the life and death of a young woman who became known to millions as simply, Neda.     

Culture and comparative media research: Narratives about Internet privacy policy in Chinese,U.S., and UK newspapers

This article compares American, British, and Chinese news coverage of Internet privacy policies. Specifically, we examine media discourse about the “real-name” policies established by Facebook and Weibo. We find that U.S. and UK news coverage of Internet privacy policy is broadly similar, when compared with the more authoritarian–corporatist media system in China. British and U.S. newspapers were much more independent from state control, and were able to maintain a more critical stance than the Chinese newspapers. But there were additional factors that shaped the patterns in news discourse in complicated ways, which are related to (a) the difference between domestic and international news genres, (b) specific narratives about national identity, and (c) more general discourses about civil society, democracy, and the public good. We suggest that the range of comparative media research can be extended by paying attention to how these cultural factors interact with media system dynamics.     

MAKING TELEVISION HISTORICAL

This article considers the role of cultural memory in the interpretation of a long-standing television programme by analysing the development of cultural memory on the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) on Finnish television and print media from 1961 to 2005. Following a cultural historical approach to television history, the article identifies four memory discourses on the ESC: Eurovision history as a national narrative of disappointment (from the 1960s onwards); histories of decline (from the 1970s onwards); the ESC as part of a national heritage of popular culture (from the 1980s onwards); and camp readings of Eurovision history (increasingly in the 2000s). The case study illustrates how even a live television event like the ESC, although not explicitly concerned with history, produces a wealth of memory discourses. The article also shows how the ESC has been commemorated increasingly since the 1980s, anticipating the current memory boom in television culture.     

Producing soldier boy: sperm donation discourse and militarism in Israeli media culture

In this paper I examine the ways in which public discourse about the sperm donation industry in Israel, as appearing in mass media and advertising culture, bridges militarist, pro-natalist, and neoliberal ideologies. In constructing the sperm produced by combat soldiers as superior and in emphasizing the potential dangers of inferior sperm or the lack of enough sperm to meet demand, mainstream media and sperm banks adopt, utilize, and exploit a culture of fear that is linked to Israel’s perceived existential threat in order to serve their own commercial goals. At the same time, the tensions between national-collective and individual perceptions of gender and body occasionally rise to the surface, with media simultaneously embracing and questioning dominant cultural narratives concerning masculinity and militarism. Implications of the relations between media discourses of blood, sacrifice, and death, and those of sperm, reproduction, and cultural regeneration are discussed.