This article examines the professional experiences of minority women journalists in Israeli newsrooms through a comparative analysis of three groups: women of Ethiopian origin, Russian-speaking immigrants, and Israeli-Palestinian women. Integrating findings from studies based on narrative interviews with 54 journalists, the article adopts an intersectional perspective that centers on the women's accounts rather than organizational diversity policies. The analysis reveals that gender operates in combination with race, ethnicity, and nationality-producing distinct configurations of exclusion and agency for each group. On the exclusion side, strategic diversity in newsrooms proves inherently gendered, extending Sara Ahmed's critique of performative diversity to reveal its gendered logic. On the agency side, the article identifies two forms of intersectional agency-advocacy rooted in racial or national marginality and tactical deployment of racialized and gendered stereotypes-alongside a non-intersectional pattern that serves as a counterpoint. The article further argues that journalism's professional specificity matters: as a field requiring public presence and voice, involving identity formation and the construction of collective consciousness, the newsroom constitutes a distinctive institutional site. In it, minority women's intersectional identities are continuously implicated in questions of representation, legitimacy, and national belonging-in ways that studies examining broad occupational categories cannot adequately capture.
The 2023 Barbie movie reveals significant tensions between feminist politics and commercial media culture, challenging contemporary media scholarship. This paper examines how audiences of popular cultural texts navigate the contradictions between feminist critique and commercial participation, what forms of feminist consciousness emerge from consuming such texts, and how commercial constraints shape the reception and interpretation of gender politics. Rather than forcing the Barbie movie into existing feminist frameworks, this paper develops the notion of bounded feminism to demonstrate how commercial constraints shape current feminist cultural politics. I define bounded feminism as a form of feminist cultural politics that operates within and through commercial constraints, explaining the complex ways audiences engage with these politics to shape new feminist consciousness. This paper employs a qualitative textual analysis of key scenes from the Barbie movie, selected based on their viral distribution, productive tensions, and structural significance. The analysis reveals that audiences created complex and sophisticated practices for using commercial content as forms of feminist discourse. This paper contributes to media studies by providing a new theoretical framework for understanding how progressive politics can operate within commercial parameters.
This paper examines how TikTok is engendering new forms of feminist digital activism through a case study from the Global South. Centering on the hashtag #NiUnaMenos, we explore how users mobilize affect and aesthetic practices to protest feminicide, harnessing audiovisual performance, viral trends, and participatory remix culture. The study identifies a dual dynamic: the aestheticization of politics, whereby political content becomes emotionally resonant and visually compelling within the platform's cultural logic, and the politicization of aesthetics, in which beauty culture is reconfigured as a tool of resistance. By foregrounding the intersection of affect, embodiment, and mediated visibility, this paper conceptualizes TikTok activism as a form of affective politics rooted in play and self-expression. Ultimately, it contributes to critical understandings of how feminist politics are enacted, circulated, and reimagined within contemporary digital culture.
This commentary stresses the political and gendered role of bodily pain in incel and looksmaxxing cultures, with particular attention to the normalization of cosmetic surgery within the manosphere. While existing scholarship has convincingly situated looksmaxxing practices within broader processes of politicization, polarization, and radicalization among young men, the central role of pain in legitimizing and politicizing these bodily interventions received limited scholarly attention. Drawing on qualitative observations of manospheric discourse and visuality, as well as research on looksmaxxing and incel ideology, the article argues that body-modification and the related pain are framed as a coerced response to perceived appearance-based injustice. Surgical pain, prolonged recovery, and bodily sacrifice are mobilized as moral and political resources through which suffering is transformed into entitlement, grievance, and protest masculinity. By situating looksmaxxing practices within longer gendered histories of pain, where aesthetic suffering has traditionally been feminized and rendered invisible, this commentary shows how men's aesthetic pain is dramatized, moralized, and politicized rather than normalized. Pain thus operates as a form of moral currency and a technology of political translation, enabling bodily suffering to become publicly legible as evidence of systemic injustice.
