Sex robots carry significant implications for both the technology and adult entertainment industries. This paper applies moral philosophy within a critical political economy framework to evaluate prevailing moralistic and absolutist discourses. By analyzing 297 texts from the RealDoll sex robot company and the Campaign Against Porn Robots advocacy group, the study identifies surprising parallels in these two groups' discursive logic. Stakeholders on both sides employ absolutist arguments to frame their positions as essential to the social good and to avoid sexual violence. While the Campaign Against Porn Robots focuses on potential harms against women and children, RealDoll highlights the artistic nature of the technology to legitimize its value and the robots' potential for decreasing sexual violence. Ultimately, these findings underscore the need for more robust political-economic and institutional research into the sex technology industry.
This article critically analyzes transcripts of the Google-produced podcast Where the Internet Lives to demonstrate how this corporate-produced science communication podcast participates in infrastructural politics. Our analysis of 30 episodes of Where the Internet Lives indicates five overlapping themes: educative, aesthetic, social, ecological, and promotional, all of which are suffused with ideologies reinforcing Google as a socially progressive force investing economically in the planet's future without addressing the complex lived realities of how data centers create strain on environments, economies, and cultures. Where the Internet Lives represents Google as a globally beneficent caretaker of the Earth and communities. This podcast's production corresponds to a time period where data centers are under increased scrutiny for their global energy consumption, environmental impacts on local communities, and economic impacts on regions. As such, Where the Internet Lives indicates how podcasts participate in the dyadic power/knowledge relationship that seeks to manage and mitigate how publics can understand the value and cost of media infrastructures. These findings contribute to understandings of the relationship between imaginaries and infrastructure. They additionally reinforce how media representations construct understandings of infrastructures that reproduce existing power relations while masquerading as science communication.
Former President Joseph Biden's late departure from the 2024 U.S. election gave his Vice President, Kamala Harris, just months to garner support for her campaign as the new Democratic candidate. Curiously, on social media the discourse around Harris's entering the race was marked with coconut and tree emojis, two apolitical symbols that had no official connection to her budding operation nor her opponent's. In fact, the emojis were in reference to a speech Harris gave in May 2023 that resurfaced in July 2024 with the news of her running in Biden's place. This essay uses the online commentary and memes around the viral "coconut tree" video to explore the interplay of political memes and (mis)representations of Black women through a qualitative analysis of 100 posts sampled from X and TikTok. On the one hand, the online discourse engendered sexist and racist stereotypes to discredit Harris and her political aspirations. On the other hand, the production of visual and audio memes produced a narrative of joy and happiness that subverted controlling images of Black womanhood. Across both agendas, memes and other forms of digital content reshape how users communicate about politics.
After two years of #OscarsSoWhite-a critique of the lack of people of color in Oscars acting categories-the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2016 proposed rule changes to speed up diversification of its voting membership. At the time, a subset of Academy members voiced their discontent at the prospect of losing their vote, and nowhere was their consternation more visible than in The Hollywood Reporter, which published a series of Oscar voter guest columns in response to both the critique of the nominations and the Academy's diversification efforts. The guest columns along with the trade publication's editorial practices emphasized more of the organizational conflict than the systemic bias in question. This article analyzes The Hollywood Reporter's (THR) coverage of #OscarsSoWhite during the 2016 post-Oscar nominations period to demonstrate that (1) editorial framing by THR's awards beat maintains the status-quo of the industry establishment by reporting on #OscarsSoWhite more as a procedural debate and membership quarrel over boycotts and the Academy's rules than as a systemic phenomenon, and (2) the collective content of their Academy member guest columns uses discourses of strategic whiteness and color-blind racism to forward a narrative of meritocracy and white aggrievement.
Through a survey of 2,627 media fans about generative AI, I find overwhelmingly negative sentiment despite nuanced distinctions across different AI applications and differences by demographic factors. Fans expressed substantial concern about social effects of generative AI like copyright infringement, environmental impact, corporate control, and threats to creator livelihoods. Qualitative analysis revealed that fans frame generative AI through moral discourse centered on labor, effort, and authenticity, frequently invoking concepts of "laziness" and "theft" while demanding clear disclosure through labeling. Respondents indicated willingness to enforce anti-AI norms through blocking, warning others, and, occasionally, public shaming, though many also asserted fandom values of community inclusivity and avoiding harassment. The findings demonstrate that fan communities are negotiating generative AI through frameworks of consent, credit, and creative labor that have long governed fan production, while grappling with tensions between individual autonomy and collective norm enforcement.
Drawing on Stuart Hall's work on popular culture and Mark McPhail's concepts of complicity and negative difference, this article examines season one of Dance Moms as a case study in the racial politics of reality television. Situating the series within the political economy of unscripted programming, the analysis argues that the show produces Black femininity through constrained visibility, token inclusion, and narrative structures that privilege conflict and spectacle. Through a rhetorical cultural analysis of all 13 episodes of the first season, this study attends to dialogue, editing, costuming, and character positioning to demonstrate how Black girlhood is rendered hypervisible yet structurally marginalized. The Black mother-daughter duo's resistance to racialized treatment is reframed as disruption, allowing hegemonic racial order to persist while appearing to engage difference. Ultimately, Dance Moms exemplifies how reality television naturalizes racial hierarchy and transforms inequality into consumable entertainment.
This media analysis examines Survival of the Thickest, a Netflix comedy series created by Michelle Buteau, using hyper(in)visibility theory to explore how plus-size Black womanhood is represented in contemporary media. While nearly half of U.S. women identify as plus-size, their narratives are largely absent or stereotyped in mainstream television. Through a collaborative media analysis of Season 1, we advance three central claims: we demonstrate how the show exemplifies hyper(in)visibility, creates discourses of endearment, and reflects negative societal messaging toward plus-size individuals. Through scene-by-scene coding and repeated viewing, we identify examples of four forms of visibilityinvisibility, visibility, hypervisibility, and hyper(in)visibility-and document how the show challenges discursive, physical, political, economic, and legislative violence through humor, joy, and embodied resistance. Rather than reducing its main character to a trope, Survival of the Thickest centers a complex, stylish, and ambitious plus-size Black woman navigating love, friendship, and career. Our findings suggest the show models what affirming, intersectional fat representation can look like on screen. This representation matters. With the release of Season 2, this text continues to serve as a compelling site for further scholarly engagement on body politics and media power.
This essay introduces the concept of queer anatopism to analyze disruptions of place in Call Me by Your Name (2017). Queer anatopism involves the rhetorical dislocation of objects into places where they "do not belong" as a means of questioning binaristic logics that normatively define and divide places. We explore anatopism by examining how Call Me by Your Name merges outside and indoor place. While much queer scholarship celebrates outdoor nature as a queer refuge, we argue that the film troubles the outdoor/indoor binary and portrays the outdoors not only as a site of queer expression but also as an invasive force that enters into, meets, and queers interior place. Through this framework, we show how queer worldmaking emerges by collapsing placial boundaries.
Calls to decolonize media and communication scholarship have grown louder in recent years, yet little empirical work has examined the barriers African researchers face in contributing meaningfully to this agenda. This study explores the lived experiences of 32 African media and communication scholars across the continent, using semi-structured interviews. Our thematic analysis revealed systemic constraints, including epistemic discrimination in publishing, institutional neglect, digital exclusion, and skewed global collaborations that position African scholars as peripheral contributors. The findings expose how publishing is often driven more by promotion requirements than scholarly curiosity and how visa regimes and internal gatekeeping further limit global academic engagements. The study calls for strategic shifts in institutional policies and global publishing norms to support the resilience and visibility of African scholarship. It offers both scholarly insight and practical recommendations for fostering more inclusive and equitable knowledge production in media and communication research.
Focusing on Netflix's Last Chance U: Basketball (LCUB) 2021-2022 docuseries, we interrogate how LCUB's filmmakers frame the East Los Angeles College (ELAC) Huskies men's basketball team's performances of Black masculinity. At the intersections of race, gender, and class, we explore how LCUB's storytelling invites its viewers to take a "good news" missionary orientation toward Black players and coaches and how that orientation contributes to a rhetorical economy of whiteness. The missionary orientation includes plotlines, religious motifs, and character arcs that work to veil the past and present structural inequalities that traumatize Black men in American society; further, the missionary orientation ties the deservedness of Black players and coaches to their willingness to accept faith, mentorship, selflessness, and obedience. Moreover, we argue LCUB constructs a reality within which ELAC Head Coach John Mosley embodies the paradoxes of performing Black messianic masculinity. Ultimately, we assert that LCUB pathologizes Blackness and sustains and inflates a rhetorical economy of whiteness. In doing so, we nuance how mediated texts, like sports docuseries, can encourage the use and exchange values inherent to a rhetorical economy of whiteness. Our analysis focuses on three main points: 1) how LCUB's storytelling negotiates the deservedness of a Black athlete's "way out;" 2) how filmmakers both promote and question Mosley's performances of messianic masculinity; and 3) how a rhetorical economy of whiteness relies upon anti-Blackness and storytelling that consistently pathologizes Blackness.
Communication research has extensively examined the police killing of Black individuals in the United States. There are, however, no prior critical analyses of press conferences held by authorities following these killings. In this study, we take a Foucauldian approach and use critical discourse analysis to analyze the reactions and responses of Minneapolis's Mayor Frey, Interim Police Chief Huffman, and three activists: Nekima Levy Armstrong, Jaylani Hussein, and Michelle Gross, during a press conference two days after the police killing of Amir Locke on February 2, 2022. The killing occurred roughly 18 months after the murder of George Floyd. This analysis focuses on what the mayor, police chief, and three activists valued or dismissed, and what biases were presented during the press conference. The findings indicate that power resides in the authorities. The response of the police chief is defensive and evasive, and the mayor's response can be perceived as apologetic.
This study examines young Mexicans' perceptions of representation in superhero films, revealing a paradox: While advocating for diversity, the films reinforce whiteness as the norm for representation. Using Stuart Hall's identity framework, the findings highlight how Hollywood's dominance and Mexico's pigmentocracy shape audience views. Participants concluded that inclusion is accepted in secondary roles but perceived as forced when it comes to main characters, and authenticity is tied to cultural fidelity (and stereotypical representation) rather than racial diversity. Ultimately, superhero films sustain whiteness as the aspirational standard in Mexican and global media.
This essay explores the effects of media ownership and funding sources (e.g. public subsidies, philanthropic donations, commercial investments) on newsroom staffing decisions. Drawing on an original data set of journalism employment in one American city, it analyzes changes in staffing levels across news organizations from 2015 to 2025. Results indicate a growingly non-commercial basis of newsroom employment, with increased numbers of journalists employed by public media or holding jobs supported directly by either philanthropic donations or government funding. These findings highlight transformations in the funding basis of U.S. journalism employment as well as the "institutional logics" that guide staffing decisions. The results challenge narratives regarding the inevitability of newsroom cutbacks and instead highlight how the incentives of different owners-as well as the choices of politicians, philanthropists, and citizens-shape journalism employment.
Popular narratives centered on online trans communities implicitly associate transgender digital networks with forwardness and social radicalism. This association has become idealized, or taken as theoretically granted, after the "transgender tipping point," which causally associates trans people's appearance in the media with progress. Extending communication and media studies' critiques of trans media visibility, this essay attends to backwards attachments cultivated by trans subcultures on a notoriously harmful digital platform. Through an attachment genealogy of transgender identity categories on the imageboard 4chan, I argue that depressive, recalcitrant, and self-negating affects play a constitutive role in online trans identity construction. Trans people on 4chan deploy the platform's ironic mode to identify within an array of deliberately confusing, insincere, and antagonistic genders. Adoption of these identities affords users legibility on the platform as they develop a sense of everydayness opposed to the drives for authenticity and legibility which typify mainstream platforms. These unredeemable yet constitutive affective attachments reflect transgender users' habitual appearance within and resentment toward the Internet's trans misogynistic visual culture. The heuristic of de-idealization promises to plumb rose-tinted attachments to the constitutive habits of queer and trans digital subcultures.
Sport has played a central role in the memorialization of 9/11, characterized by ritualized affirmations of patriotism and unity. The 20th anniversary of 9/11 fell in the midst of new challenges, namely the COVID-19 pandemic, a resurgence of racial justice activism, and political instability best characterized by the January 6, 2021, insurrection. In response, the National Football League (NFL) commemorated 9/11 with a short film dedicated to 9/12-that is, the day after the attacks that purportedly revealed a nation of unified Americans. The film presents football as both an escape from political anxiety and the means by which such anxiety can be transcended. However, as a memory text, it also explicitly romanticizes Americans' responses after the attacks and implicitly minimizes the legitimate reasons political conflicts exist. In doing so, the NFL's production is an important vehicle for reinventing the public memory of 9/11, shifting it from a commemoration of the past to a lament about the present.
This article analyzes bureaucratic forms-the ubiquitous documents issued by official bodies and filled by subjects-as facilitating the Fordization of communication. It assumes that fillable media (registrars, ledgers, etc.) do not merely carry information but also enact social relations. The prominence of forms in the context of modern state bureaucracy has been understood via three theoretical frameworks: as a means of rationalization, as creating subjectivities, and as performative devices. Building on these three (complementary) interpretations, this article offers a fourth framework. Drawing on the homology between the production of goods and the production of communication, and aided by the Marxian critique of the assembly line, it understands forms as facilitating the Fordization of communication between sovereigns and subjects, and as a key technology in rearranging communicative social relations. Most importantly, it depicts the page as a site of struggle over the dominance of communication between the sovereign and subjects, and lays bare the role that Fordization plays in that struggle.
This essay examines H. P. Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook" and Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom to explore how anti-Black violence and colonial desire constitute the conditions of possibility for weird horror. Drawing from theories of anti-Blackness, social death, and racial monstrosity, we argue that LaValle's novella refigures Lovecraft's racist constructions of Otherness by placing Blackness as both the site and revelation of horror in civil society. Where Lovecraft identifies immigrants and Black bodies as the cause of "strange egress" and cosmological disruption, LaValle locates the origins of horror in the colonial desire to master and exploit the Other and articulates Blackness as a mode of critique. Through this inversion, The Ballad illuminates the weird affective potentiality of anti-Black violence, revealing how speculative horror relies upon the same logics that structure anti-Black social death. By linking the "weird" to lived experiences of racialized terror, the essay situates LaValle's rewriting as an immanent critique of speculative horror and its underlying racial assumptions, offering a framework for understanding monstrosity as a mode of defiant subjectivity against the symbolic order of whiteness.
This article examines the socio-political potential of trans-topping in gay pornography through a case study of Trans Guys in Sweatpants. Using Audre Lorde's conception of the erotic, this essay positions trans-feminist pornography as a critical theoretical foundation for analyzing the intersections of transness, sexuality, and power. Through a critical reading of Trans Guys in Sweatpants and its corresponding media, this essay mobilizes the erotic as a means of conducting critical textual analysis, interrogating how trans bodies are positioned within dominant socio-cultural and political frameworks. By engaging with pornographic production as a site of resistance, this work argues that performances of trans-topping disrupt hegemonic understandings of sex, gender, and masculinity. Ultimately, this analysis demonstrates how trans sexual performance in gay porn can expand representations of trans desire, reimagine erotic expression, and serve as a tool for challenging normative ideological constructions of transness and sexuality.
Developed by Nintendo and the satellite broadcasting company St.GIGA, the Satellaview once allowed Super Famicom users to access a rotating collection of games, digital magazines, and other content using a satellite dish. Due to its broadcast distribution model and rewritable memory packs, much of the Satellaview's software library appears lost in the aether. In this article, I discuss the methodological and epistemological challenges the Satellaview poses to platform studies and how "satellite archaeologists" have developed informal techniques to pry open the black box of the Satellaview and bring game preservation outside of formal institutions of memory.
Anna Anthropy's Queers in Love at the End of the World (2013, https://w.itch.io/end-of-the-world) is one of the most celebrated works to emerge from the "queer games scene" of the early 2010s. But the game is not what we remember-no game ever is. This essay examines how games are stored, remembered, and theorized, attending to both digital memory and the disciplinary imaginaries of queer game studies. Through the discovery of a glitch that refreshes the game's ten-second timer, this article explores how Queers in Love transforms from a meditation on fleeting intimacy to a reflection on the ways technology and culture binds us to the past.Even without patches or updates, games change: links decay, code references shift, and social media accounts disappear or are overwritten. Building on trans theory and archival studies, this article proposes a trans understanding of games as sites of perpetual becoming. Through an autopsy of Queers in Love, tracing how its glitches, dead links, and digital remnants entangle with personal archives-IRC logs, Discord messages, and forum posts-this essay asks how trans designers and players haunt games, and how we might care for games as unstable, ephemeral, and affective archives.
