In the summer of 2022, Twitter (now X) users took to their platform to highlight the "lad culture" and misogynistic actions of the men contestants on Season 8 of the reality show Love Island. In this article, we examine their interpretations of two aspects of lad culture-"banter" and the "lads' holiday"-and associated misogyny. We found that Twitter users who watched Love Island had a complex relationship with banter. Some valorised it as an important form of social capital and intimacy, while others noted banter and the geo-temporal liminal space of the "lads' holiday" were used by the men contestants to discursively distance themselves from their own misogynistic actions. We add to the literature about British lad cultures and feminist analyses of masculinities in reality TV by highlighting how the social practices of banter and the lads' holiday are represented on Love Island and interpreted by Twitter users. We advance theoretical approaches by bringing together affect, hybridised, and hegemonic masculinity theories to analyse the role of homosocial "affective intensities" as part of discursive distancing. We conclude with recommendations for makers of reality TV and those involved in anti-misogyny education.
As US troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban regained control of the country, concerns about women's rights centered many discussions-including a focus on women's clothes. Through the lens of transnational feminism, this paper examines the viral Twitter campaign, #DoNotTouchMyClothes created by a member of the Afghan diaspora. Analysis of 1,443 tweets through critical discourse analysis reveals how Afghan women strategically use dress as discourse, engaging in struggles over meaning and control. Ultimately, findings illustrate tensions related to voice, diasporic activism, and transnational allyship.
In this paper, I draw from my decade-long fieldwork based on the production of soft-porn films in Malayalam language cinema produced in the South-Indian state of Kerala, to tease out the varied ways media ethnographers navigate the research process when they work on questions of sexuality, desire, and intimacy. The pseudonym-mediated soft-porn production foregrounded female characters as pleasure-seeking subjects. If feminist media ethics is predominantly associated with a certain criticality in addressing questions of gender inequalities (Steiner 2009), what would a redefinition of feminist ethics look like when we work with culturally degraded forms like soft-porn? How can we theorize the consumption of soft-porn by female viewers who formed a minuscule portion of the overall viewers, but who still had access to these films as DVDs from video lending libraries? What are the ethical concerns that a researcher of adult media must navigate as they straddle the fine line between sexual desire and consumption on the one hand, and social mores on the other? By interrogating such questions, I argue for a kind of embodied ethicality that a media ethnographer has to engage, balancing between research rigor, care for research subjects, and the vulnerability of the researcher's own subject position.
Social media has emerged as a critical site for negotiating fertility discourse, particularly in China, where a severe demographic crisis clashes with traditional pronatalist norms. Focusing on Xiaohongshu, this study combines computational topic modeling (LDA) with critical discourse analysis to examine 35,023 notes related to fertility. The analysis reveals that fertility discourse on Xiaohongshu centers around thematic clusters of pragmatic policy negotiation, fictionalized reproductive revenge, medical rationalization, the financialization of demographic anxiety, and the gendered articulation of the motherhood penalty. Theoretically, the findings demonstrate a dual process at play: on the one hand, the discourse reflects the intersection of biopolitics and affective capitalism, manifesting as the instrumentalization of reproduction and the commercialization of uncertainty, which subtly transforms structural challenges into issues of personal discipline and consumption. On the other hand, these narratives collectively form a fragmented and commercialized digital public sphere. Drawing on the framework of heteropessimism, the study interprets the user engagement not merely as resistance, but as a structural ambivalence: women adopt an instrumental practice in policy and medical discussions as a psychological defense against reproductive exhaustion, while employing a confrontational narrative practice in topics related to autonomy to seek fictionalized catharsis and negotiate the "cruel optimism" of contemporary womanhood. The concept of structural ambivalence, as deployed here, refers to the durable, irresolvable tension produced when state governance, market logic, and patriarchal norms impose simultaneously contradictory demands on women's reproductive subjectivity-a tension that individual discursive strategies can negotiate but never dissolve. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that navigating the fertility landscape is less about the act of giving birth itself, and more about managing the profound entanglement of state governance, market logic, and female agency.
Miranda July's autofictional novel All Fours (2024) follows an unnamed American artist in her late-forties embarking on a period of self-discovery as she navigates the hormonal changes and associated symptoms of perimenopause. The New York Times called it the "first great perimenopause novel." Several feminist media scholars have argued that menopause is "having a moment," charting the pronounced increase in discussion of menopause in Anglo-American news media and representations of menopause in popular culture in the early 2020s. All Fours hit shelves when media interest in menopause was at its height. Critical reviews were mixed, but on social media the book took off, quickly developing a reputation as being a dangerous, transgressive book with the potential to change women's lives. This article asks how we can make sense of the popular response to All Fours and what it might contribute to contemporary debates surrounding therapeutic cultures, postfeminism and social media. I argue that the autofictional mode, together with the affordances of social media in a therapeutic culture in which confession is celebrated, led to the book being read by many as an instructional fantasy for navigating perimenopause. I then consider the broader implications of the multi-media autofictional mode as a potential source of feminist solidarity.
This article reports on a study which explored feminist artists' perceptions and experiences of Instagram's content moderation of their work. Using qualitative research methods, 15 individual, semi-structured interviews were conducted with UK-based artists who explore feminist themes such as body positivity, self-love, sexism, and female sexuality, among others. Guided by feminist theory, interviews sought to understand the diverse ways artists understand, experience, resist, and negotiate platform governance. Findings demonstrate how their work challenges gendered stereotypes and inequalities, thus constructing oppositional representations of female sexuality, femininity, and gender. They also suggest that moderation practices target and label feminist art as inappropriate, resulting in its removal. Through these discussions, we expose an unequal, powerful, and confusing governance system that grants a limited and negotiated agency to users who depend on these platforms for income, creative expression, and visibility.
Google's advertisement "Black Girl Magic: A Moment in Search" features clips of prominent Black women celebrities, activists, and youth. This visual and sonic montage forms a constellation of celebratory femininity, accomplishment, and change-making legacy. Yet to congeal a list of results for the ad, Google renews a history of oppression as the one-minute video neglects to attribute CaShawn Thompson, the widely accepted creator of the popular phrase "Black Girl Magic" (BGM). This article resists the tech giant's assertion of digital media power, likened to a smoke and mirrors metaphor, through redefining the "magic" of BGM using a metaphor of witchcraft. Identified as the confluent gestures of flight, brew, and brood, this rhetorical shift attunes to the differences between Black women, surfacing the underappreciated feelings of BGM such as fear and sadness, suppressed by the veneer of Google's advert. Since Black women and their experiences exceed the hegemonic visual and sonic registers of representation prioritized for profitability in the video, this article reframes the advertisement's limitation as a moment of defeat wherein Google is left searching for answers.
