Cultural and Critical Studies 2015 Abstracts
Desiring Biracial Whites: Daniel Henney and Cosmopolitan Whiteness in Contemporary Korean Media • Ji-Hyun Ahn, University of Washington Tacoma • Contextualizing the rise of white mixed-race celebrities and foreign entertainers from the perspective of the globalization of Korean popular culture, this article aims to look at how Korean media appropriates whiteness as a marker of global Koreanness. Specifically, the article utilizes Daniel Henney, a white mixed-race actor and celebrity who was born to a Korean adoptee mother and an Irish-American father, as an anchoring text. Analyzing how Henney’s image as upper-class, intelligent, and cosmopolitan constructs what whiteness means to Koreans, the study asserts that Henney’s (cosmopolitan) whiteness is not a mere marker of race, but a neoliberal articulation of a particular mode of Koreanness. This study not only participates in a dialogue with the current scholarship of mixed-race studies in media/communication but also links the recent racial politics in contemporary Korean media to the much larger historical and ideological implications of racial globalization.
Academic Revanchism at Century’s End: Communication Studies at the Ohio State University, 1990 – 1996 • Vicente Berdayes, Barry University; Linda Berdayes, Barry University • This paper describes the dissolution of Ohio State University’s Department of Communication in the mid-1990s, which ended an ambitious attempt to define a distinctive presence for critical communication research at the end of the 20th century. This episode is analyzed in terms of the confluence of changes forced upon communication studies in light of the neoliberal reorganization of higher education and the episteme of empiricist social science, which redefined inquiry across the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
The Role of the Producer in Unboxing Videos • Christopher Bingham, University of Oklahoma • On YouTube exist thousands of unboxing videos (UBVs), in which a producer opens a product for the first time and critiques the package’s contents. Due to their prevalence, UBVs require more scholarly attention. This paper presents a multimodal content analysis of UBVs in order to define the role of the UBV producer. Data suggest that producers seek to emulate sensory experiences, provide helpful expertise, establish community with audience members, and share a sense of exploration.
Filmic Narrative and Authority in the Cop Watching Movement • Mary Angela Bock, University of Texas at Austin • Police accountability groups in the U.S are proliferating thanks to smartphone penetration and online social networks. This qualitative project theoretically situates cop-watching and its videos. Using the basic foundation of Foucault’s ideas about the negotiation of truth, it examines the discursive struggles over the evidentiary value of police accountability activism and its challenges to conventional narratives about police work. This exploration finds that police accountability activists employ the technical but not discursive routines of journalism.
Good Gay, Bad Queer: Heteronormtive Shaming and Homonormative Love in Network Television Situational Comedies • Robert Byrd, University of Memphis • This analysis of primetime situational comedies that feature LGBTQ characters argues that through heteronormative and homonormative constructions of sexuality many LGBTQ people are rendered invisible in the mainstream. Through discourse analysis, the study examines how these television programs work to normalize gay and lesbian identity, which then resembles the dominant heterosexuality, by shaming queer sexual practices and excluding all alternatives to the prescribed homonormative construct of love. This research is important in understanding the Americans’ most recent shifts in public opinion on issues of marriage equality and moral acceptance, but also in understanding what groups of LGBTQ people may be further marginalized from the mainstream. Further, it is important to examine the underlying ideology of these programs to extract meanings that have the potential to further subvert queer notions of sex and sexual politics, which only work to advance the marginalization of those who do not fit the dominant mold.
#IfTheyGunnedMeDown: Postmodern Media Criticism in a “Post-Racial” World • Christopher P. Campbell, The University of Southern Mississippi, School of Mass Communication and Journalism • Abstract: This paper examines social media postings that surfaced in the wake of the 2014 fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an African American, by a white Ferguson, Missouri police officer. It argues that the postings reflect keen insight into the notion of media representation; that is, the young African Americans who posted the photos perceptively and concisely identified the problems with journalistic representations of black people as pathological criminals, representations that have been identified as enormously problematic by cultural studies scholars. The paper asks if the social media postings and other elements of contemporary media could significantly advance the discussion about race in America.
Telling Us What We Already Know: Decoding the Absence of Poverty News in Appalachian Community Media • Michael Clay Carey, Samford University • This study examines the ways audiences in rural Appalachian communities can interpret a lack of local news coverage about local poverty and related issues. Community media in the communities under study provided little coverage of local poverty. Using Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model as a theoretical framework, this study examines readers’ notions about the motives for that lack of coverage, and how those ideas influenced their views of local news outlets as voices for the community.
Framing English: The reproduction of linguistic power in Korea’s locally-based English language press • John C Carpenter; Frank Durham • This study analyzes the framing process generated by Korea’s English language press about the implementation of an English-only instruction policy at the elite Korean science university, KAIST, in 2007. It focuses on Korean language ideology to conceptualize the adoption of English in Korea. In its textual analysis of related news coverage, the study shows that the English-language press employed frames of “necessitation”, “externalization”, and “self-deprecation” to variously position English as hegemonic in Korea.
“It’s Biology, Bitch!”: Hit Girl, the Kick-Ass Franchise, and the Hollywood Superheroine • Phil Chidester, Illinois State University • The general critical response to Kick-Ass (2010), the widely popular comic-book send-up, has been a condemnation of the film for its abusive representations of its core female protagonist, 11-year-old Hit Girl. Yet as I argue in this essay, the film and its sequel, 2013’s Kick-Ass 2, are better understood as a broader treatise on gender and difference in a contemporary America. Through their depictions of Hit Girl’s struggle to choose between an essential femininity and an essential heroism, the texts embody Americans’ blunt refusal to embrace what is perhaps the most radical and threatening of all depictions of the feminine: that of woman as true superhero. In doing so, the films also serve as touchstone moments in the culture’s ongoing politics of gender.
Televisuality, Movement, and the Market on CNBC’s The Closing Bell • Diane Cormany, University of Minnesota • The Closing Bell communicates affect through cable news’ endemic graphic style and television’s characteristic motion and liveness. Real-time graphic updates show the second by second change in stock prices, usually accompanied by line graphs that are designed to indicate movement over time. Likewise a digital clock displayed in the lower right of the screen counts down the seconds until the market close and calls viewers to action. Movement is both literal, through the changing second count, and figurative by communicating that action is required. This article demonstrates how The Closing Bell goes beyond representation to actually embody market movement through the affective impact of its aesthetics. The ups and downs of the securities market are actually tied to perceptions of its movement, which are communicated through financial news media. The Closing Bell therefore participates in market movement by mobilizing affect through its use of televisuality–the graphics and movement-intensive style that characterizes cable news.
The New Columbia Heights: How Gentrification Has Transformed a Local Washington, D.C. Community • Christian Dotson-Pierson; Ashley Lewis • “In 2012, the Fordham Institute cited Columbia Heights, a historic neighborhood in Ward 1 of Washington, D.C., as 14 out of 25 of the fastest gentrifying neighborhoods in the United States. Gentrification or “revitalization” is a phenomenon in urban planning which often displaces poorer residents while also transforming neighborhoods demographically and socially. This study includes interviews from 15 Columbia Heights residents about their preferred news sources for obtaining information about gentrification in their neighborhood.”
The “Public” and the Press: Lippmann, the Interchurch World Movement, and the 1919-20 Steel Strike • Frank Durham • This historically situated rhetorical analysis examines Walter Lippmann’s understanding of the Interchurch World Movement (hereafter, “Interchurch”), which was a short-lived, but prominent, Progressive ecumenical organization that investigated the Great Steel Strike from 1919-1920. The Interchurch’s Progressive, social science-based study of anti-labor coverage by the Pittsburgh press informed Lippmann’s concept of such organizations, because he felt they could monitor journalistic practices from their positions outside of the field.
Citizens of the Margin: Youth and resistance in a Moroccan YouTube web-series • Mohamed El Marzouki, Indiana University • This paper examines a user-generated YouTube web-series, Tales of Bouzebal, as a performance of marginality and a social critique of state hegemonic institutions in the post-Arab Spring Morocco. Using a combined method of textual and discourse analyses, the paper argues that the new media practices of producing and consuming user-generated content among North African youth are best understood as practices of cultural citizenship that facilitate change through the production counter-discursive political subjectivities among youth in MENA.
Print vs. digital: How medium matters on House of Cards • Patrick Ferrucci, University of Colorado-Boulder; Chad Painter, Eastern New Mexico University • This study utilizes textual analysis to analyze how journalists are depicted on the Netflix drama House of Cards. Through the lens of orientalism and cultivation, researchers examine how depictions of print and digital journalism would lead viewers to see digital journalists as less ethical and driven by self gain, while also viewing technology as an impediment to quality journalism. These findings are then discussed as a means for understanding how these depictions could affect society.
Pornography, Feminist Questions, and New Conceptualizations of “Serious Value” in Sexual Media • Brooks Fuller, UNC-Chapel Hill • During the 1980s, anti-pornography advocates waged a litigious, regulatory war against perceived social ills caused by pornography. A cultural dialogue persisted, questioning the social value of pornography. Proposed criminal regulations of pornography ultimately stalled in American Booksellers v. Hudnut (1985). This paper analyzes post-Hudnut cases under legal and qualitative methodological frameworks and finds that although courts generally assume pornography’s direct media effects, several recent cases reflect pro-pornography feminist conceptualizations of social value.
Image Control: The Visual Rhetoric of President Obama • Timothy Roy Gleason, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh; Sara Hansen, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh • President Barack Obama was elected upon a wave of change he described as “hope.” Journalists have found the Obama administration offers little hope in providing greater access to information than that offered by the previous administration, exemplified by the exclusion of photojournalists from a number of events. Using Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus and branding, this critical analysis examines the process of image control and interprets the resulting photographs to argue against current White House practices.
Digital Exclusion in an Information Society: How ISP Competition Affects the American (information) Consumer • Jenna Grzeslo, Penn State University • Using political economy, this paper explores competition amongst the largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the United States. Specifically, this analysis asks how do the conditions created by ISP competition affect digital exclusion? The goal of this paper is to illustrate the state of digital exclusion in the United States providing evidence of a racial, cultural, and class divide between those who have home Internet access and those who do not.
Behold the Monster: Mythical explanations of deviance and evil in news of the Amish school shooting • Erica Salkin, Whitworth University; Robert Gutsche, Jr, Florida International University • In October 2006, Charles Carl Roberts IV walked into an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and killed five female students. Through an analysis of 215 news articles published in 10 local, regional, and national newspapers in 2006 and 2007, this paper examines news characterizations of Roberts that cast him as a ‘Monster,’ an archetype missing in studies on ‘news myth.’ This paper expands how to examine the nature of evil in loss in news myth scholarship.
How the American News Media Address the n-Word • Frank Harris, Southern Connecticut State University • This study surveyed American newspapers, television and radio stations on how they address the word “nigger” or “nigga” in today’s news stories. It found the overwhelming majority have encountered the words in some part of the news process. While most do not have a formal policy for addressing the words, they nearly all apply euphemistic words, phrases and editorial approaches to keep the explicit words from being seen, read or heard by the public.
Digital Mobilities as Dispersed Agencies: An Analysis of Google Glass, Microsoft Kinect and Siri • Matthew Corn; Kristen Heflin, Kennesaw State University • This study proposes a conception of digital mobility as a contemporary assemblage of forms and practices that pose contradictions for ideas about agency. By doing so, the focus of scholarly inquiry moves from individuals, particular devices or institutions, to the assemblages through which they are constituted and practiced. This study presents analyses of digital mobility exerted across three discernible assemblages enabled by Google Glass, Microsoft Kinect and Siri as part of various Apple products.
Speaking Out: Networked Authoritarianism and the Virtual Testimonios of Chinese Cyberpetitioners • Vincent Guangsheng Huang • In this study, the online narratives created by Chinese cyberpetitioners were identified as “virtual testimonios.” Critical narrative analysis was used to explore the ways in which virtual testimonios both challenge and are shaped by networked authoritarianism. The cyberpetitioners were found to construct “local testimonios” to expose the institutional root causes of social injustice and mobilize the public against injustice. To evade censorship, they structured their plots and characters according to a central-local binary opposition that allowed them to criticize local government authority without compromising their expression of loyalty to the central government. The cyberpetitioners were also shown to use the narrative strategy of “central intertextuality” to construct and occupy the collective subject positions of “citizens” and “the people,” thereby justifying their cyberpetitioning activities.
The Gendered Frames of the Sexy Revolutionary: U.S. Media Coverage of Camila Vallejo • Bimbisar Irom, Edward R. Murrow College of Communication • The paper analyzes news stories pertaining to Camila Vallejo, the Chilean student leader famously dubbed as “the world’s most glamorous revolutionary”, to examine the kind of frames used to represent female activists. What role does cultural distance play in media frames? How are female activists outside of the electoral process framed differently than female politicians who practice a more ‘legitimate’ form of politics? What media frames for representing female radicals persist over historical time?
The 90s, the Most Stunning Days of Our Lives: Cultural Politics of Retro Music in Contemporary Neoliberal Korea • Gooyong Kim, Temple University • This paper critically interrogates socio-cultural implications of the recent resurgence of 90s popular music in Korea, which was epitomized by the unprecedented success of MBC’s Infinite Challenge: “Saturday, Saturday is Singers.” The program staged special reunion performances of the decade’s most iconic popular musicians. Focusing on how the program re-constitutes a cultural memory of the decade, this paper examines the cultural politics of retro music in contemporary neoliberal Korea.
Dialectics of book burning: Technological reproducibility, aura and rebirth in Fahrenheit 451. • Shannon Mish; Jin Kim • Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 provides productive debating points in media studies, such as memory, information and technological reproduction. This paper aims to examine such repetitive motifs as library, book and phoenix from Bradbury’s book through Benjamin’s theoretical lenses of aura, technological reproducibility and collection. We found dialectics of media in the Bradbury’s book: technologies threaten but embrace aura, which is unique but historical, and phoenix symbolizes death as well as birth of knowledge.
Authorship, Performance and Narrative: A Framework for Studying Cultural Production on YouTube • Mark Lashley, La Salle University • This paper presents a framework for textual analysis of YouTube videos. First, it conceptualizes the collective output of video bloggers (“vloggers”) as forms of cultural production. Second, it breaks these cultural productions/cultural practices into three component parts that can be used for analysis: the role of authorship in the YouTube space, the nature of the performances that can be read as textual analysis, and the narrative that is presented through an individual’s YouTube creations.
Friday Night Disability: The Portrayal of Parent-Child Interactions on Television’s Friday Night Lights • Ewa McGrail, Georgia State University; J. Patrick McGrail, Jacksonville State University; Alicja Rieger, Valdosta State University; Amy Fraser, Georgia State University • Studies of television portrayals of parent/child relationships where the child has a disability are rare. Using the social relational theory perspective, this study examines interactions between parents and a young man with a disability as portrayed in the acclaimed contemporary television series, Friday Night Lights. We found a nuanced relationship between the portrayed teen and his parents and a powerful influence of the community on the parent-child relations and family life.
Journosplaining: A case of “Linsanity” • Carolyn Nielsen, Western Washington University • This study explores the idea of “journosplaining” using the case of news coverage about pro-basketball star Jeremy Lin’s meteoric rise to fame. Journosplaining is the way in which journalists use their privilege as mass communicators to report the issues of the day by relying on stereotypes as shorthand explanations, thus perpetuating them. News coverage of Lin focused on his Asian-Americaness as primary to his identity as an athlete. “Linsanity” coverage drew on Asian-related puns and “jokes” about Asian Americans, conveying that this type of humor was acceptable. This essay connects Asian American studies scholarship with mass media scholarship to show how journosplaining perpetuates racialized stereotypes.
Transnational and domestic networks and institutional change: A study investigating the collective action response to violence against journalists in Mexico • Jeannine Relly, The University of Arizona; Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante, The University of Arizona • As the number of journalists killed and disappeared in Mexico has climbed past 125 lives lost and the culture of impunity has persisted in a period anticipated as the country’s democratic transition, a host of organizations have worked together to press the Mexican government toward institutional change. Utilizing the framework of collective action in its broadest sense, we applied Risse and Sikkink’s spiral model of institutional change in this exploratory qualitative study. Our interviews with 33 organization representatives examined the activity related to organizational mobilization, funding, transnational and domestic engagement, normative appeals, information dissemination, coordination, lobbying, and institutional change in governmental response to violence against journalists in Mexico.
David Foster Wallace: Testing the Commencement Speech Genre • Nathan Rodriguez, University of Kansas • David Foster Wallace delivered the commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, in what would be his only public speech. The writer’s 23-minute speech, which went through nine distinct drafts, eschewed the standard offering of vague platitudes. Rather, Wallace discusses the “boredom, routine, and petty frustration” that await the graduates, and in doing so, tests and reaffirms both the value of a liberal arts education and the commencement speech genre itself.
“The Best Minute and a Half of Audio”: Boundary Disputes and the Palin Family Brawl • David Schwartz, University of Iowa; Dan Berkowitz, University of Iowa • In an introduction to an audio recording of Bristol Palin describing her family’s involvement in an Alaska house-party brawl, CNN anchor Carol Costello commented: “This is quite possibly the best minute and a half of audio we’ve ever come across.” Through textual analysis of news items and blogs, this situation illustrates the challenge of conducting media boundary work—and the role strain that results—when the subject occupies space within both entertainment and news.
Buyer Beware: Stigma and the online murderabilia market • Karen Sichler • When eBay issues value-laden judgment on what may or may not be sold on the site, it sends a very definite and definitive message as to what is and what is not a culturally acceptable product for the site. Using Erving Goffman’s theory of stigma, this work traces the virtual migration of murderabilia, collectables which have their value due to their connection with violent criminals, from eBay to stand alone, specialized virtual storefronts
Public Relations and Sense-Making; the Standard Oiler and the Affirmation of Self-Government, 1950-52 • Burton St. John, Old Dominion University • Corporations may attempt to co-create meaning by pursuing what Heath (2006, p. 87) calls a “courtship of identification.” However, exploring the Standard Oiler through the lens of the concept of self-government, this work offers that public relations sense-making may strike a more nuanced mode by offering a courtship of affirmation—an approach that attempts to leverage apparent existing areas of consonance between a public relations client and particular audiences.
Knowledge Workers, Identities, and Communication Practices: Understanding Code Farmers in China • Ping Sun, School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong; Michelangelo Magasic, Curtin University • Extending the concept of “knowledge workers”, this paper studies the identity dynamics of IT programmers in China. Through the discursive analysis of programmer’s personal memoirs (collected via personal interview and online ethnography), four themes of identity dynamics emerge: IT programmers demonstrate identification to professionalism and technology; they naturalize the high mobility and internal precarity of their work via discourses of self, and social, improvement; the term “manong” (“coding monkeys” or “code farmers” in English) is used to support a sense of selfhood amidst high pressure schedules and “panopticon control”; the disparaging term “diaosi” (“loser” in English) is appropriated in order to activate a sense of self expression and collective resistance regarding the programmers’ working and living conditions. These four themes are integrated into: 1) hegemonic discourses of economic development and technical innovation in modern China; and 2) the processes of individualization among IT programmers on a global scale. Our findings suggest that being a knowledge worker means not only providing professional expertise like communication, creativity and knowledge, it also interrogates questions of survival, struggle, and solidarity.
A Critical Legal Study of Minors’ Sex and Violence Media Access Rights Five Decades After Ginsberg v. New York • Margot Susca, American University • In the United States, it would be illegal for a merchant to sell “girlie” magazines to a minor, according to the landmark 1968 Supreme Court Ginsberg v. New York case that ruled laws limiting minors’ access to sexual media do nothing to impact adult access to the same material. Although California lawmakers in 2005 applied that legal philosophy—known as “variable obscenity” as a framework for controlling minors’ access to violent video game content, the law never took effect. The Supreme Court in the 2011 Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association ruled that California law unconstitutional, stating the government overstepped its authority in trying to control minors’ access to violent games. This paper hopes to add to the literature on violent video game law through a critical legal studies analysis of the Ginsberg and Brown cases. Conclusions address the continued power of industry over parents in media decision making and access, and societal concerns about sex outweighing those about violence despite medical warnings.
The Misinterpreted Grin: The Development of Discursive Knowledge About Race Through Public Memory of Louis Armstrong • Carrie Teresa • This project explores how expressions of public memory that engage with Louis Armstrong reflect the “tensions and contestations” (Zelizer, 1995, p. 217) in the study of memory generally and consideration of his legacy specifically. Expressions of public memory as they relate to Armstrong reflect a lack of understanding of the black community’s struggle for freedom. Armstrong has been posited as a “racial figure” and as such race itself has been diluted to understanding only binary conceptions of “Tomming” and militant activism. Where public memory has missed the mark in properly commemorating Armstrong’s legacy has been its reticence to engage with the dynamic nature of Armstrong’s life as reflective of the plurality of the black community itself over the course of the 20th century.
Pleasantly Deceptive: The Myth of Main Street and Reverse Mortgage Lending • Willie Tubbs, University of Southern Mississippi • Reverse mortgage commercials appear throughout local and cable television programming. Multiple companies use various commercial appeals in an attempt to convince citizens aged 62 and older who own their homes to accept a loan based on the equity in their homes. Among the more common appeals, both verbal and visual, is a connection between accepting this type of often-costly debt and the sanctity of small-town or suburban living. Yet, the Main Street of the American psyche exists primarily in myth, making this advertising tactic particularly troubling. In this paper, an American Advisors Group (AAG) commercial is unpacked and examined via a critical cultural lens of lifespan studies. Using Hall’s three levels of reading, the author suggests multiple interpretations of this commercial, which is titled “Too Good to Be True.” This commercial, indeed many of the shows during which it has been broadcast, bolsters the myth of Main Street and suggests unrealistic and potentially damaging misrepresentations of reality.
Media Representations in Travel Programming: Satire, Self, and Other in An Idiot Abroad • Zachary Vaughn, Indiana University • This paper focuses on two episodes from the first season of An Idiot Abroad to explore media representations of the self and the other. The principal focus of An Idiot Abroad is between the host’s conceptions and interactions of other cultures and people with his own British cultural framework. Deploying humor, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and Karl Pilkington satirize traditional English and Western concepts of often exoticized cultures in order to critique dominant Western ideology.
The Discursive Construction of Journalistic Transparency • Tim Vos, University of Missouri; Stephanie Craft, University of Illinois • This study culls references to journalistic transparency from a broad range of journalism trade publications from more than a decade in order to examine the discursive construction of transparency within the journalistic field, paying. Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory, the study explores how journalistic doxa and cultural capital come to be discursively formed. The analysis focuses on how transparency is defined by members of the journalistic field and how transparency is or is not legitimized.
Neo-Nazi Celebration and Fascist Critique in the Mainstream Music of the Former Yugoslavia • Christian Vukasovich, Oregon Tech • Following the Balkan civil wars ethno-nationalism continues to impact identity both in the former Yugoslav republics and abroad among the diaspora. In this paper the author examines how two popular rock groups (Thompson and Laibach) rearticulate fascist symbolism through their polarizing concert events. More specifically, the author conducts a rhetorical analysis of both groups’ music, images, pageantry and lyrics in order to interrogate the celebrations of fascism in their performances. The author examines the tensions reproduction and representation, as well as how the concerts discursively construct history, culture, nationhood, religion and belonging in two radically divergent ways – on the one hand endorsing and reproducing a violence-endorsing neo Nazi fascist identity, and on the other hand undermining contemporary ideologies of fascism through extreme performance and deconstruction.
Sabotage in Palestine, terrorists busy: Historical roots of securitization framing in the press • Fred Vultee, Wayne State University • The role of mass media in securitization – broadly, the public construction of a state of existential threat to a cherished political or cultural institution, requiring the imposition of extraordinary measures for an indefinite time – has drawn increasing attention in security studies from both normative and empirical perspectives. Little attention has yet been paid, though, to security discourse earlier in the era of mass media. This paper tries to close that gap by looking at press accounts of the anti-British revolt in the late days of the Palestine mandate. In the light of the heavily securitized political response to the rise of the Islamic State organization in 2014, this paper addresses how and whether anti-British political violence was cast as an existential threat or as a political challenge to be addressed by existing political and security institutions.
The Naked Truth: Post-Feminism in Media Discourse in Response to the Kardashians’ Nude Magazine Images • Joy Jenkins, University of Missouri; David Wolfgang, University of Missouri • In November 2014, Kim Kardashian appeared nude on the cover of Paper magazine. The next month, a pregnant Kourtney Kardashian posed for a partially nude photo shoot in online magazine DuJour. Media outlets quickly responded to both, publishing articles critiquing the photos and Kim and Kourtney’s motivations. This study assessed the presence of typical media gender representations in these articles as well as facets of post-feminism, including more nuanced representations of power and feminist solutions.
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