Utilizing a critical approach to media studies, this essay presents data from focus groups with emerging adults about the film Mean Girls (2004). Participants were asked to interrogate the representation of "mean girls" behavior in the film as well as account for their own sense-making of interpersonal experiences with relational aggression. Ultimately, audiences produced complicated and complex responses to relational aggression, identifying the behavior as universally stigmatized both problematizing and normalizing relational aggression. Participants also provided commentary on how aspects of the mediated representations of relational aggression in the film manifest in day-to-day experiences with relational aggression. Implications for the intersections of critical media studies and interpersonal communication are explored.

This essay examines the representation of Autism Spectrum Dis-order (ASD) in the K-drama Extraordinary Attorney Woo (2022). Through an ideological analysis, we examined the depiction of Woo Young-woo as she navigates her autism, her workplace, and her relationships. Specifically, we address several stereotypes of ASD represented in the series, including savant abilities, dependency on a caretaker, and an inability to successfully navigate interpersonal relationships. By evaluating the depiction of ASD in Extraordinary Attorney Woo, this research aims to contribute to a wider understanding of how media portrays disabled characters. In addition, it offers insight into the potential for more humane and inclusive portrayals of individuals with ASD.

Greta Gerwig catapulted to the center of popular culture in the summer of 2023 when Barbie grossed over $600 million in U.S. box office returns making it the highest grossing female-directed film in history. Gerwig's career warrants scholarly attention because her films contain a specific signature style that position Gerwig as a feminist film auteur. Through an examination of Gerwig's auteur portfolio, we find four key elements define Gerwig's auteur style: 1) "out of place" female protagonists, 2) a rejection of traditional gender norms, 3) explicit feminist critiques, and 4) critiques of men and masculinity. By critically unpacking numerous films in her portfolio, our study illustrates the cultural value of content creators in the media industry.

In this essay, I narrate my experience with secondary infertility through autoethnography. Nearly three million women in the United States struggle with secondary infertility, defined as the inability to become pregnant and/or carry a child to term after the successful birth of a first child. Through a layered autoethnographic account, I illustrate the simultaneously embodied and disembodied experiences of my journey with secondary infertility utilizing Cloud’s concept of the “null persona.”1 By stressing common experiences on this path—painfully slow lag times toward diagnosis, increased psychological distress, demanding and rigorous physical treatments, and the exorbitant costs associated with assisted reproductive technologies—my work contributes to academic conversations about both infertility and the value of autoethnographic methods to chronicle and critique “past experience to make better, hopeful experiences possible.”2

Book Review| April 01 2021 Review: Narrating Midlife: Crisis, Transition, and Transformation, edited by Lori West Peterson and Christine Elizabeth Kiesinger Narrating Midlife: Crisis, Transition, and Transformation. Edited by Lori West Peterson and Christine Elizabeth Kiesinger, Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 2019, 238 pp., $95.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-4985-8410-4, $90.00 (eBook) ISBN: 978-1-4985-8411-1 Michaela D.E. Meyer Michaela D.E. Meyer Christopher Newport University, mmeyer@cnu.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Autoethnography (2021) 2 (2): 274–276. https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2021.2.2.274 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michaela D.E. Meyer; Review: Narrating Midlife: Crisis, Transition, and Transformation, edited by Lori West Peterson and Christine Elizabeth Kiesinger. Journal of Autoethnography 1 April 2021; 2 (2): 274–276. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2021.2.2.274 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Autoethnography Search At the 2020 International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry conference in Tampa, Florida, a small group of colleagues and I were chatting about our experience over the course of the weekend. One of the women commented that she’d been taken aback by something she’d heard earlier in the day. Apparently, a service worker at a restaurant had commented that she “looked good for her age.” This produced a wide smattering of responses from the group—I recounted being asked for my photo identification earlier in the weekend when ordering a drink at a restaurant and being told, “I certainly wouldn’t have guessed your age!” while another indicated that she’d recently been offered a “compliment” from a colleague about being “quite fit for your age.” As we continued to recount these stories, something became painfully clear in our discussion: all of these comments were ageist, and we experienced them quite frequently.... You do not currently have access to this content.

ABSTRACT This essay interrogates queer erasure from the film Black Panther. The implications of queer erasure from one of the most recognizable and lucrative franchises in film history are particularly problematic as Black Panther envisions “a Pan-African past, present, and future” where queer bodies are both invisible and unwelcome. By continuing to relegate queer sexualities to spaces of Otherness in superhero films, the film reifies dominant discourses of heteronormativity and patriarchy, producing a paradoxical image of Black (queer) women.

This case study explored the representation of medical illness diagnoses on Grey’s Anatomy. Through the use of qualitative content analysis, we compared fictional medical diagnoses to publically available data on the rates of medical diagnoses within contemporary U.S. hospitals. We found that nearly half of the diagnoses made within our sample would be considered either rare, very rare, or extremely rare. Moreover, the most common medical diagnoses in contemporary U.S. hospitals account for a mere 6% of all diagnoses made on Grey’s. These findings extend and support prior observations that medical melodramas misrepresent the hospital context. Fictional portrayals of health care have the capacity to impact viewer expectations about real hospital care, and thus, our study adds to conversations involving the intersections between media representations and public health culture.

Shonda Rhimes is one of the most powerful players in contemporary American network television. Beginning with her break-out hit series Grey’s Anatomy , she has successfully debuted Private Practice , Scandal , How to Get Away with Murder , The Catch , For The People , and Station 19. Rhimes’s work is attentive to identity politics, “post-” identity politics, power, and representation, addressing innumerable societal issues. Rhimes intentionally addresses these issues with diverse characters and story lines that center, for example, on interracial friendships and relationships, LGBTIQ relationships and parenting, the impact of disability on familial and work dynamics, and complex representations of womanhood. This volume serves as a means to theorize Rhimes’s contributions and influence by inspiring provocative conversations about television as a deeply politicized institution and exploring how Rhimes fits into the implications of twenty-first century television.

This essay explores the ill-fated television series Off the Map. Through the use of an ideological critique, we argue that this installment of Shondaland failed due to its possessive investment in whiteness. Through a lack of cultural sensitivity in televisual representation of its main characters, the setting of the series, and televisual melodrama, Off the Map failed to obtain enough of an audience to sustain it for a second season. Our analysis re-veals that studying popular texts that fail can often teach us something those that succeed cannot.

"Reinhard, CarrieLynn D., and Christopher J. Olson, editors. Heroes, Heroines, and Everything In Between: Challenging Gender and Sexuality Stereotypes in Children’s Entertainment Media. Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. 280 pp. $105.00 (hardback). ISBN: 978-1-4985-3957-9.." Women's Studies in Communication, 42(1), pp. 107–108

In this essay, I interrogate the role time plays in the three most common social support messages I received post-pregnancy loss. In doing so, I illustrate how our most common "social support" responses to pregnancy loss, while uttered from caring, intentional places of support, can actually serve to marginalize and invalidate experiences of pregnancy loss.

This essay theorizes intersectional representation as a strategic device used in twenty-first century television narrative by examining the generically "Other" woman in television drama. This character is often racially, ethnically, economically and sexually "othered". She appears on numerous broadcast television programs, and yet remains relatively invisible in cultural discourses of television. I offer a critical reading of the intersectional representation used on FOX' s series Bones as a means of exposing how intersectional imagery functions to recenter identity politics on White, heteronormative, middle-class values. That these images remain largely invisible in academic discussions of race, ethnicity, sexuality and class on television while appearing frequently in the most economically successful television narratives speaks to the complexity of intersectional identity politics in contemporary media studies.

Abstract At early stage of the project, the CLOV project developed an innovative training with the target to certify new junior operators with a diploma (level 2 French Diploma) and hire them as operators for Total E&P Angola. For the first time in an affiliate, CLOV conducted an 18-month training program in Angola divided in 3 steps: an intensive English course (3 months), a scientific refresher course (2 months) and the upstream operators certification (13 months) in cooperation with Institut Français du Petrole (IFP). This part-time training was divided into 22 weeks of scientific and technical courses and 18 weeks of "on the job training" meaning offshore training onboard FPSO. During all the period, numerous dedicated trainers from IFP and from Total E&P Angola were involved to supervise the trainees and interact with them. At the end of this program, trainees were selected and certified as upstream operators and hired by Total E&P Angola. Then they attended a "specific training" for CLOV. This new phase lasted 5 weeks during which the new operators had theoretical courses on CLOV facilities and hands-on exercises with a 3D tool, the Immersive Training Simulator (ITS). This ITS allowed them to familiarise with CLOV FPSO facilities and process, not yet achieved at that date. Then, the new operators were sent in Korea to participate in the commissioning activities before the FPSO sail away. They continued their training onboard Block 17 FPSOs in Angola during the FPSO tow and came back onboard at the arrival of CLOV FPSO in Angola to prepare the first oil. They are now professional operators for CLOV. This complete training program currently being deployed in Total affiliates will allow graduate operators with a 2 years diploma, to strengthen skills of local workforce and to build a win-win partnership with the country.

"#Thevagenda's War on Headlines: Feminist Activism in the Information Age." Feminist Media Studies, 14(6), pp. 1107–1108

Keywords Communication, Identity, Romantic relationships, Family relationships, Technology, Interpersonal Relationships

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgementsA previous version of this essay received the 2012 Top Paper Award from the Women's Caucus of the Central States Communication Association. The author would like to thank Yih-Shan Shih for her support of this project.