Constructing a feminist icon through erotic friend fiction: millennial feminism on Bob’s Burgers

This study engages in current scholarly debates regarding third-wave versus postfeminist media icons through an analysis of Tina Belcher, the eldest daughter in the animated series Bob’s Burgers and a paragon of what I coin “millennial feminism.” In it, I argue that Tina rejects popular postfeminist discourses and experiences a politicized feminist awakening. While Tina is significant in her own right, most remarkable is the way millennial audiences have utilized the internet to position Tina as a feminist folk hero. Ultimately, I trace how popular critics use Tina to theorize a millennial feminism that reflects the values and characteristics of the millennial generation. Revisiting Sarah Banet-Weiser’s (2004. “Girls rule! Gender, feminism, and Nickelodeon.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21, pp. 119–139) argument that Nickelodeon’s girl power programming demonstrated third-wave feminist politics for its audiences, I argue that adult-oriented animated sitcoms lend themselves to an absurdity and disregard for hegemonic gender ideologies which have the potential to unsettle dominant ideologies of gender and sexuality and can define contemporary feminist politics for viewers.     

Feminine,Competent, Submissive: A Multimodal Analysis of Depictions of Women in U.S. Wartime Persuasive Messages During World War I and World War II

This analysis used Peirce's triadic approach to interpret 58 public depictions of women during the two world wars. The images, appearing in government posters or as ads and illustrations in U.S. magazines and newspapers, endeavored to convey the seriousness of the war effort and mobilize audiences to support it. Aligned in five thematic clusters (competence, domesticity, heterosexual attraction, beauty maintenance, and romantic longing), many invited polysemy through discrepant visual and verbal cues aimed at different audiences. Women as viewers and as objects of representation were addressed in the context of both citizenship and consumption. The analysis explicates ideological points about wartime gender relations and points to the objectification of women's bodies as implied sexual rewards for product purchase in WWII.     

I'm Going to Instagram It! An Analysis of Athlete Self-Presentation on Instagram

Using Goffman's notions of self-presentation and gender displays, the following study examines the Instagram feeds of 27 professional athletes to determine how athletes are using the visual social media site for self-presentation. A mixed methods approach examined the photographs and captions to determine what behaviors and themes emerged. Through content analysis, the self-presentation styles of athletes of both genders, as well as the main differences between them were examined, and significant differences emerged that confirmed the previously established gender norms. Through textual analysis, findings with respect to captions align with previous research on athlete self-presentation on social media. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as directions for future research are discussed.     

Norman Thomas at the Townsend convention of 1936

Frederick Wiseman's film High School is a rhetorical documentary about the exercise of power in an institutional setting. Wiseman uses selection, framing, and editing within and between sequences to depict the high school as a place where power is exercised through the double bind, reducing students to conformity, boredom, apathy, and empty gestures of rebellion. The double bind is most forcefully expressed in the invisible network of contradictory messages about the relations between power and sexuality. This essay examines the verbal and visual elements of the film to describe how Wiseman invites his audience to respond.     

Ellen,Television, and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility

–The discourses constructing the coming-out of Ellen DeGeneres/Ellen Morgan, star of and lead character in the ABC television sitcom Ellen, were permeated with implications of authenticity and liberation, illustrating the continuing power of the confessional ritual described by Michele Foucault in The History of Sexuality. In contrast to the popular interpretation of the coming-out as an escape from repression, media treatment of the Ellen phenomenon was productive, in Foucault's sense, constructing a regulatory discourse that constrained the implications of gay visibility on commercial television by channeling it through a narrative of psychological autonomy, through television norms for representing homosexuality, and through an overarching strategy of personalization. I conclude with a discussion of the problems of “poster-child politics” as exemplified by the Ellen discourse.     

Hiding homoeroticism in plain view: the Fight Club DVD as digital closet

–The DVD format has emerged as the dominant digital means of repackaging films for home consumption. In this essay, we theorize this new viewing experience and identify some of the challenges it poses for the media critic. We argue that the additional material DVDs typically offer, coupled with the format's interactivity, constitute a rhetorically powerful means of directing the consumer's viewing experience and protecting the commercial viability of the product. To illustrate, we offer a critical analysis of the DVD release of the controversial film Fight Club. Our analysis suggests that Fight Club's DVD “extra text” dissuades the viewer from acknowledging the film's homoerotic elements as representing homosexual experience.     

Global risk,domestic framing: coverage of the North Korean nuclear test by US,Chinese, and South Korean news agencies

Comparative framing analysis on coverage of the North Korean nuclear test in the US Associated Press, Chinese Xinhua, and South Korean Yonhap news agencies identified four major media packages. First, a common ‘threat’ frame dominated coverage by all news agencies, represented by reconfiguration of geopolitics and an emphasis on global cooperation in both perception and resolution of the nuclear test. Second, with each nation positioning itself differently in the world power system, the issue was notably domesticated in the news, with Associated Press connecting the nuclear test to the broader ‘War on Terror’ framework found frequently in US media, Xinhua promoting a negotiation principle in handling the issue, and Yonhap framing the test with a ‘Cold War’ perspective. In all three cases, national political interests exerted important impacts on the construction of frames. The compatibility of the seemingly opposite packages (globalizing vs. domesticating) signifies both intensification of worldwide social relations and reassertion of national stands. This finding lends support to the transformationalist view of globalization, which suggests that the nation state still matters in a globalized world, but is being recontextualized in a more complex world of politics and culture.     

First and second-level agenda-setting in the 2014 Indian general election: a time-series analysis of party-media relation

The role of the press as a political watchdog is crucial to the functioning of democracy. Especially in the run-up to elections, voters depend on the media's presentation of parties and candidates to make informed, responsible choices at the ballot box. But who, then, influences the news media? Empirical evidence in the United States and Europe suggests that political party campaigns and election coverage in the news media are interconnected and influence each other. This study tests whether such agenda-setting effects between party campaigns and the media also take place in the general elections in the world's largest democracy, India. India's western-type political system has a distinct media system characterized by high competition, diversification, non-consolidation and formal and informal ties between the media, commercial interests and political actors. Content analysis and Granger's causality test of newspaper coverage (N?=?716) and party campaign messages (N?=?458) found that agenda-setting effects do occur in India, but are largely bi-directional. We also found an overwhelming focus of both newspapers’ election coverage and of all major party campaigns on one single candidate, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s Narendra Modi. This, we argue, is a result of the broader trends that have shaped Indian politics in recent years. The significant correlations and non-significant causal effects between party campaign and media coverage also indicate a trade-off situation between political power negotiation and political balance in the press.     

New media–new voices: satirical representations of Nigeria’s socio-politics in Ogas at the top

New media are increasingly providing spaces and opportunities for media houses and activist groups engaged in socio-political reform in Africa. In Nigeria, social media are becoming platforms for communicating messages of resistance against oppressive political and exploitative economic power structures. This study analyzed Ogas at the top (OATT), an online puppetry series by Buni TV, as a way of examining new platforms and message content in Nigeria’s rapidly changing media sphere. Relying on semiotics and critical discourse analysis perspectives, the study analyzed select episodes of the series, to gauge how producers constructed powerful visual and linguistic messages to boldly satirize social injustices perpetrated by Nigeria’s political elites.     

Tense Futures: The Work of Cultural Studies

Currently, scholars grapple with media that depict Third World women as either victims of unchanging contexts or agents of liberation. To explore how a widely distributed and popular documentary film can destabilize a First World gaze, this essay examines Iron Ladies of Liberia (ILL), which traced Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's first year as president of Liberia. ILL foregrounded women's rhetorical and political agencies to alter a postwar context, while it also situated their agencies within an enabling and constraining constellation of power relationships. Through its unique relationships between filmmaker and subject, ILL suggested a transnational feminist perspective on women in media.     

Relational power,marital schema,and decisions to withhold complaints: An investigation of the chilling effect on confrontation in marriage

Previous research on dating relationships suggests that perceptions of a partner's power exert a chilling effect on the expression of relational grievances. This paper extends the chilling effect perspective by examining two issues: (a) whether a partner's power corresponds with decisions to withhold complaints within marriage, and (b) whether the manifestation of the chilling effect varies as a Junction of individual differences in marital schema. Married individuals (N = 215) completed questionnaire measures of a partner's power, marital schema, and decisions to withhold complaints from spouses. Findings underscore the importance of both power and marital schema within spouses’ decisions to express complaints.     

Cyber Ethics: Bodies or Bytes?

Information ethics requires: (1) an ethical theory that recognizes the importance of the body; and (2) a materialist theory of information. Alasdair MacIntyre's ethics of acknowledged dependence is an example of the former. It holds that the virtues we need to achieve both personal and common moral goods recognize networks of dependence based upon bodily vulnerability and disability. Pierre Lévy's theory of collective intelligence is an example of a view that disregards both requirements. Based upon a secular appropriation of medieval angelology, it holds that in cyberspace, social relations are dematerialized, and that information is an incorporeal substance flowing between disembodied minds. The new anthropological space of virtuality that Lévy holds to be ushered in by new electronic information technologies proposes a radical rethinking of ethics. But on close inspection, his information ethics turns out to be stripped of any serious moral dimension. To address serious moral issues, information ethics cannot abstract from our bodily animal nature. Several recent studies recognize that information is an effect of social relations between embodied subjects. They provide the materialist information theory required for meaningful information ethics.     

Challenges & compromises in Spike Lee's Malcolm X

–This study looks at Spike Lee's Malcolm X as an important text in understanding Afrocentric perspectives that challenge the ideological stereotypes of mainstream Hollywood film. Malcolm X intervenes between Lee, the filmmaker, and the powerful media industry and is emblematic of the larger discussion of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic views in media culture. This film is not only an interesting case study but a significant part of an ongoing cultural discourse that is as relevant now as when Malcolm X lived. The relevance of this essay lies in its contribution to the discussion of media perspectives with a focus on furthering media literacy. It aids the viewer in understanding the social discourse surrounding a mediated racist ideology and the ongoing cultural work of social equality in the United States. This research finds that in the continuing struggle over media representation, Lee's film is an instrument of media politics, controversy, and commercialization.     

The Men and Women of non-no: Gender,Race, and Hybridity in Two Japanese Magazines

This article compares the hybrid constructions of race, gender, and culture offered by two Japanese magazines very similar in nature, although one is targeted at men, the other at women. Locating non-no and Men's non-no within a larger transcultural discourse of commodified cultural representation, this comparison reveals significant differences in the magazines’ constructions. While the magazines’ hybridities may offer opportunities for subversive gestures, their representations of race and gender are ultimately likely to legitimize longstanding power relations, both globally and locally.     

State–press relations revisited: a case study on how American media portray the post-war Vietnam

This study revisited the state–press relations theory by analyzing the coverage of Vietnam over the 30 years between 1980 and 2009 in two leading American news magazines, Time and Newsweek . A contribution of this research is its context of the long-term and volatile relationship between these two countries. Despite progress in the diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam, the portrayal of Vietnam in US media remained unchanged. This finding indicates that American media do not always support the US government's political stance when covering international news. It suggests a new direction for future research applying this theory.     

Lord of the Rings,Star Wars,and participatory fandom: mapping new congruencies between the internet and media entertainment culture

The culture of media entertainment, as exemplified in the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars film franchises, is being infused with new modes of authorship, production, marketing, and consumption that are characterized by Internet fan clubs, online producer‐consumer affiliations, and real‐world legal controversies over the proprietary ownership of digital bits of information. To analyze these new interactive patterns being employed by two competing media franchises, Bourdieu's theory of cultural production is supplemented with Jenkins's study of participatory fandom. Then, the contested nature of computer‐mediated communication is explored using a model that brackets the opposing potentialities of Internet influence on offline society.     

STEM领域中女性生涯选择影响因素研究述评

中国国际“互联网+”创新创业大赛不仅是我国推进创新创业教育的一个新举措,而且还是促进高校科学技术成果落地转化的新路径。“互联网+”双创大赛融合科学教育与科学传播的优势,“互联网+”双创大赛既是一种项目导向式创新型科学教育,也是一次面向大众的科学传播活动,对于高校教师、在校大学生和高校管理者都有重要意义。     

Presidential silence,C. Everett Koop,and the surgeon general's report on AIDS

On October 22, 1986, C. Everett Koop released the Surgeon General's Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. This essay examines that report as a rhetorical watershed in the national dialogue about AIDS. We suggest that this report—and the media attention that attended it—dramatically shifted the socio‐political environment concerning AIDS and contextual‐izfd Reagan's silence concerning the disease as a lack of presidential leadership on the issue.     

The semantics of social influence: threats vs. persuasion

This study investigates how language is used to make sense of influence attempts. More specifically, the perceived potency and evaluation of both influence agents and targets and the influence tactic used are examined for their effect on the actors' perceived power and influence success. The two influence tactics examined are threats and attempts to persuade. A pilot study (N=145) and main experiment (N=189) were conducted to create 84 simple sentences, the units of analysis for this investigation. Agents are perceived as more powerful than targets of influence. The tactic used to secure compliance (threaten versus attempt to persuade) does not affect the perceived power of either the agent or the target. A bad agent is seen as more powerful than a good agent, and a bad target is considered more powerful than a good target. Furthermore, good agents have more success in gaining compliance by using persuasion than by using threats, and they have more success when influencing a good target than a bad target. Implications of these findings are discussed.