This book explores the controversial social media practices engaged in by girls and young women, including sexual self-representations on social network sites, sexting, and self-harm vlogs. Informed by feminist media and cultural studies, Dobson delves beyond alarmist accounts to ask what it is we really fear about these practices.

This book explores the practices and the politics of relatable femininity in intimate digital social spaces. Examining a GIF-based digital culture on Tumblr, the author considers how young women produce relatability through humorous, generalisable representations of embarrassment, frustration, and resilience in everyday situations. Relatability is examined as an affective relation that offers the feeling of sameness and female friendship amongst young women. However, this relation is based on young women’s ability to competently negotiate the ‘feeling rules’ that govern youthful femininity. Such classed and racialised feeling rules require young women to perfect the performance of normalcy: they must mix self-deprecation with positivity; they must be relatably flawed but not actual ‘failures’. Situated in debates about postfeminism, self-representation and digital identity, this book connects understandings of digital visual culture to gender, race, and class, and neoliberal imperatives to perform the ‘right feelings’. Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, and media studies.

Through twelve chapters that historicize and re-evaluate postfeminism as a dominant framework of feminist media studies, this collection maps out new modes of feminist media analysis at both theoretical and empirical levels and offers new insights into the visibility and circulation of feminist politics in contemporary media cultures. The essays in this collection resituate feminism within current debates about postfeminism, considering how both operate as modes of political engagement and as scholarly traditions. Authors analyze a range of media texts and practices including American television shows Being Mary Jane and Inside Amy Schumer, Beyonce’s "Formation" music video, misandry memes, and Hong Kong cinema.

DIVFeminist essays examining postfeminism in American and British popular culture./div

This book analyzes the intersections of celebrity, self-branding, and "mommy" culture. It examines how images of celebrity moms playing versions of themselves on reality television, social media, gossip sites, and self-branded retail outlets negotiate the complex demands of postfeminism and the current fashion for heroic, labor intensive parenting. The cultural regime of "new momism" insists that women be expert in both affective and economic labor, producing loving families, self-brands based on emotional connections with consumers, and lucrative saleable commodities. Successfully creating all three: a self-brand, a style of motherhood, and lucrative product sales, is represented as the only path to fulfilled adult womanhood and citizenship. The book interrogates the classed and racialized privilege inherent in those success stories and looks for ways that the versions of branded motherhood represented as failures might open a space for a more inclusive emergent feminism.

Digital Femininities: The Gendered Construction of Cultural and Political Identities Online examines the role of new media technologies in the production of girls’ cultural and political identities. The book argues that the varied and complex spaces which make up our ‘social media’ should be conceptualised as important terrains upon which neoliberal and postfeminist subjectivities can be both reproduced and subverted. In doing so, the book explores many key issues underpinning current debates around gender politics and digital media, including gendered spatial politics, visibility, surveillance and regulation, beauty politics, and civic and political engagement and activism. Over the last decade, the position of girls and young women within the digital landscape of social media has been a topic of much debate. On the one hand, girls’ social media practices are presented as a key site of concern, wherein new digital technologies are said to have produced an intensification of individualised, neoliberal and postfeminist identities. Conversely, others have championed access to social media for young people as a potentially useful political tool, enabling previously marginalised political subjects (such as girls) to access and participate within new and exciting political cultures. Locating itself at the intersection of these two approaches, this book offers a fresh contribution to these debates. Based upon the findings from focus groups with girls and young women aged between 12 and 18 in England, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the digital cultures that emerged from the study. This timely book will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary femininity and feminism and the role of digital media in the production of cultural, political and gendered identities.

Gender and Digital Culture offers a unique contribution to the theoretical and methodological understandings of digital technology as inherently gendered and classed. The silences within, through and from the systems we experience every day, create inequalities that are deeply affective and constitute very real forms of algorithmic vulnerability. The book explores these lived and mundane algorithmic vulnerabilities across three interrelated research projects. These focus on recent digital phenomena including sexting, selfies and wearables, and particular decision-making systems used in health, education and social services. Central to this book are the themes of irreconcilability and the datalogical. It makes the case that feminism and gender politics have become increasingly irreconcilable with not only long-running debates around representation and embodiment, but also with conceptions of the technological, conceptions of the user and of the systems themselves. In keeping with longstanding feminist scholarship, these irreconcilabilities can be productive and generative; they can be used to interrogate the power politics of digital culture. By studying the lived and routine elements of digital technologies, Gender and Digital Culture asks about the many convolutions that are held together through the everyday use of these technologies, and the implications for how gender and technology are approached, discussed and theorised.