Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism

Francesca Tripodi, Andrea L. Press

Description

Feminism can reflect the cultural moment, especially as media appropriate and use feminist messaging and agenda to various ends. Yet media can also push boundaries, exposing audiences to ideas they may not be familiar with and advancing public acceptance of concepts once considered taboo. Moreover, audiences are far from passive recipients, especially in the digital age. In Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism, Andrea L. Press and Francesca Tripodi focus on how audiences across platforms not only consume but also create meanings—sometimes quite transgressive meanings—in engaging with media content. If television shows such as Game of Thrones and Jersey Shore and dating apps such as Tinder are sites of persistent everyday sexism, then so, too, are they sites of what Press and Tripodi call "media-ready feminism." In developing a sociologically based conception of reception that encompasses media's progressive potential, as well as the processes of domestication through which audiences and users revert to more limited cultural schemas, Press and Tripodi make a vital contribution to gender and media studies, and help to illuminate the complexity of our current moment.
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Considering the Limits of Extreme Misogyny: Game of Thrones as Feminist? (with Sarah Johnson-Palomaki)

2. Prudes, Sluts, and Sex: The Classing of Female Sexuality in the Era of Media-Ready Feminism

3. Balancing Work and Family: What "Choice" Conceals

4. Swipe Right for Consent: Hookup Culture, Tinder, and Structural Sexism

5. Wikipedia: Sign(s) Say Keep Out

Conclusion: A World Beyond Media-Ready Feminism

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Sexualité
• sexualité
• Sexualité
• Popular culture
• Sociology
• Media studies
• Gender studies

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438481975
• Langue: English

Extrait

Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism
SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory

Michelle A. Massé, editor
Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism
How US Audiences Create Meaning across Platforms
Andrea L. Press and Francesca Tripodi
Cover art by Gregory Dalton
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Press, Andrea L., author | Tripodi, Francesca, author.
Title: Media-ready feminism and everyday sexism : how US audiences create meaning across platforms / Andrea L. Press and Francesca Tripodi.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438481951 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438481975 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
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Andrea:
To my children, Jessica Beth Press-Williams and Joshua Michael Press-Williams, who have brought immeasurable joy to my life and will help create a nonsexist future.
Francesca:
To all the women in this world fighting for equality. May this book help expose the everyday sexism that keeps us from achieving our goals.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Considering the Limits of Extreme Misogyny: Game of Thrones as Feminist? (with Sarah Johnson-Palomaki)
2 Prudes, Sluts, and Sex: The Classing of Female Sexuality in the Era of Media-Ready Feminism
3 Balancing Work and Family: What “Choice” Conceals
4 Swipe Right for Consent: Hookup Culture, Tinder, and Structural Sexism
5 Wikipedia: Sign(s) Say Keep Out
Conclusion: A World Beyond Media-Ready Feminism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
We have been working on this book for a long time and owe a great debt to many fellow scholars, administrators, and mentors. We’d like to thank the University of Virginia Office of the Vice-Provost for Faculty, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Power, Violence, and Inequality Collective for providing funding for the class that gathered the data we drew from in chapter 4 . The Departments of Media Studies and Sociology contributed to this class as well, and we offer them thanks. Many of our common colleagues in both departments offered kind advice and support as we sought to bring this project to a close. In particular we are grateful to Allison Pugh for her incisive intellectual companionship and razor-sharp criticism of earlier proposal drafts. A great debt is also owed to our fabulous editor, Rebecca Colesworthy of State University of New York Press, who has been excited by this project since she learned of it. We have benefited much from her brilliant editorial eye and skillful stewardship through the review and revision process. We would also like to thank Michelle A. Massé, editor of the SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory, for her constructive comments and support as she embraced this project. We are grateful as well to two anonymous reviewers whose comments and criticisms made this a much stronger book. In addition to our collective thanks we’d also like to take a moment to provide some individual acknowledgments.
Andrea Press: I’d first like to thank my fabulous colleagues in the Department of Media Studies for providing a generative, supportive, and inspiring intellectual home that nurtured and helped advance our ideas. In particular I’m grateful for Christopher Ali, Hector Amaya, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Andre Cavalcante, Shilpa Dave, Camilla Fojas, William Little, Jennifer Petersen, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Bruce Williams, and a whole new generation of colleagues including Meredith Clark, Kevin Driscoll, Jack Hamilton, Elizabeth Ellcessor, Aynne Kokas, David Nemer, and Lana Swartz, who will help with the next book. All have helped build one of the most exciting intellectual and collegial environments in my—or any—field. Thanks also to our Sociology colleagues, in particular Allison Pugh, Jennifer Bair, Sarah Corse, Fiona Greenland, and Josipa Roksa, who make going to work a joy. My advisees in Sociology, including Anna Cameron, Fan Mai, Bailey Troia, Mike Wayne, and Shayne Zaslow, and coauthors Francesca Tripodi and Sarah Johnson-Palomaki have made my work at the University of Virginia memorable and meaningful. Julia Adams, Laura Grindstaff, Sonia Livingstone, Peter Lunt, and Sherry Ortner—all close colleagues though living far afield—generously offered advice on earlier proposal drafts and gave extended critiques of our ideas as they germinated; we cannot imagine this effort without them. Thanks also to Julia Adams, June Deery, Tamar Katriel, Tamar Liebes, Sonia Livingstone, Angela McRobbie, Sherry Ortner, Jessica Ringrose, and Helen Wood for your invitations and your feedback on my presentations.
I have presented earlier drafts drawn from research conducted for this project to audiences in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at the London School of Economics, the Department of Cultural Studies at Beijing Culture and Language University, the Institute of Education at University College London, the Department of Communication and Journalism at Hebrew University, the Department of Communication at the University of Haifa, the Department of Anthropology at UCLA, the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, the Department of Sociology at Goldsmith’s University, the Department of Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Department of Media and Communication at De Montfort University, the International Gender Studies Institute at Oxford University, and the University of Chicago. Together with Francesca we presented aspects of the book in the Department of Sociology and Calhoun College, Yale University. Many thanks to the colleagues who gave generous feedback and critique at these presentations.
I am particularly grateful for the support of my former colleague Tamar Liebes, who is no longer with us but whose legacy and camaraderie continue to inspire. She embodied the essence of the feminist spirit with her truly untiring and comprehensive support of women’s intellectual work, and I and so many others miss her terribly. She is an enduring role model. I would like to also give a special thanks to the incomparable Sonia Livingstone for her valuable intellectual and personal friendship over the last several decades. She has been a consistent source of intellectual nurturance and I owe her an immense debt. She deserves all the awards she has garnered in her exceptional career and is a nurturant, generative presence that transcends description. I am also grateful for support from the International Gender Studies Institute, Oxford University; the Virginia Institute for the Humanities; the Yale Center for Comparative Research; and the University of Virginia for awarding me the William R. Kenan Jr. Endowed Professorship, which afforded additional research time for the writing of this book. Most of all, I am grateful to my coauthor, Francesca Tripodi, who exemplifies a collaborative academic spirit alongside a stunning commitment to do the highest quality work possible in the interests of those in society who stand to benefit most from truly feminist academic work. It has been a privilege to coauthor with her. We are both grateful to Sarah Johnson-Palomaki for her excellent research on Game of Thrones and for agreeing to collaborate with us on chapter 1 .
I am very indebted to my children, Jessica Beth Press-Williams and Joshua Michael Press-Williams, for their continuing interest in my work and their attempts to clue me in to the experiences of newer generations of media consumers. They have grown up with this book and have shared their time with me with the writing of it. They have been unfailingly supportive and generous and are great role models for their mom. I am very proud of the kind, concerned, and committed adults they have become. Finally, I am profoundly grateful to my husband, Bruce A. Williams, to whom I owe a great intellectual and personal debt. I cannot imagine writing without hearing his voice in the background urging me to go smarter, deeper, and better, all the while railing at me about politics. Thanks for your patience, Bruce, I’ll have more time to read the paper now!
Francesca Tripodi: I’d like to first acknowledge Andrea Press. Thank you for being the perfect graduate school advisor and making the experience a chance to “learn and grow.” You have been a wonderful mentor, helping me navigate the streets of academic life. It has been an honor to work alongside someone of your intellect, humor, and kindness. I am also thankful to my other mentors at the University of Virginia—Allison Pugh, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Sarah Corse were the dream team of a dissertation committee. When I was pregnant with both my children, Allison provided an immeasurable amount of support, for which I will always be grateful. I could have never made it through gra