Mediating Post-Socialist Femininities

Mediating Post-Socialist Femininities
Author: Nadia Kaneva
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2017-10-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317379721

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this collection of essays examines the ways in which popular media re-construct ideas and ideals of femininity in the post-socialist cultural space. The authors explore a comprehensive range of questions including: How have post-socialist women engaged with media as media producers and consumers, as well as objects of media representation? What are the consequences of the commodification of femininity in the post-socialist context? How does the female body serve as a battleground for the enactment and renegotiation of gendered identities and ideologies? How can we understand and theorize post-socialist women’s activist movements? In seeking answers to such questions, this volume highlights the need to reconsider feminism as a political and theoretical project with many faces. It bridges research on the mediation of post-socialist femininities with broader concerns about the transnational trajectories of feminism today. This book was originally published as a special issue of Feminist Media Studies.

Mediating Post-Socialist Femininities

Mediating Post-Socialist Femininities
Author: Nadia Kaneva
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2017-10-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 131737973X

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this collection of essays examines the ways in which popular media re-construct ideas and ideals of femininity in the post-socialist cultural space. The authors explore a comprehensive range of questions including: How have post-socialist women engaged with media as media producers and consumers, as well as objects of media representation? What are the consequences of the commodification of femininity in the post-socialist context? How does the female body serve as a battleground for the enactment and renegotiation of gendered identities and ideologies? How can we understand and theorize post-socialist women’s activist movements? In seeking answers to such questions, this volume highlights the need to reconsider feminism as a political and theoretical project with many faces. It bridges research on the mediation of post-socialist femininities with broader concerns about the transnational trajectories of feminism today. This book was originally published as a special issue of Feminist Media Studies.

Femininities and Masculinities in the Digital Age

Femininities and Masculinities in the Digital Age
Author: Karl Kaser
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-08-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030784126

This book provides a fresh overview on the debate about the remarkable regression of gender equality in the Balkans and South Caucasus caused by the fall of socialism and by the revitalization of religion in Turkey. Contrary to the prevailing opinion of researchers who state continuous male domination, the book presents strong arguments for an alternative outlook. By contrasting the realia of gender relations with the utopia of new femininities and new masculinities driven by digital visual communication, the book provokingly concludes with the arrival of two utopias: the Marlboro Man – still authoritative but lonely – conquering and refusing family obligations; and with the emergence of a new femininity type – strong and beautiful. As such this book provides a great resource to anthropologists, demographers, sociologists, gender and media researchers and all those interested in feminist issues.

Unequal under Socialism

Unequal under Socialism
Author: Miglena S. Todorova
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2021
Genre: Feminism
ISBN: 1487528418

Unequal under Socialism examines the formation of racial, gender, and national identities and relations in the socialist state. With a specific focus on Bulgaria, a former socialist country in the Balkans, Miglena S. Todorova traces the intertwined local and global forces driving racialization, socialist state policies, and Eurocentric Marxist and Leninist ideologies, all of which led to valued and devalued categories of women. Roma women, Muslim women, ethnic Bulgarian women, sex workers, and female factory and office workers were among those marked by socialist authorities for prosperity, accommodation, violent reformation, or erasure. Covering the period from the 1930s to the present and drawing upon original archival sources as well as a constellation of critical theories, Unequal under Socialism focuses on the lives of different women to articulate deep doubt about the capacity of socialism to sustain societies where all women prosper. Such doubt, the book suggests, is an under-recognized but important force shaping how women in former socialist countries have related to one another and to other women in the global North and South.

Urban Horror

Urban Horror
Author: Erin Y. Huang
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2020-02-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1478009101

In Urban Horror Erin Y. Huang theorizes the economic, cultural, and political conditions of neoliberal post-socialist China. Drawing on Marxist phenomenology, geography, and aesthetics from Engels and Merleau-Ponty to Lefebvre and Rancière, Huang traces the emergence and mediation of what she calls urban horror—a sociopolitical public affect that exceeds comprehension and provides the grounds for possible future revolutionary dissent. She shows how documentaries, blockbuster feature films, and video art from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan made between the 1990s and the present rehearse and communicate urban horror. In these films urban horror circulates through myriad urban spaces characterized by the creation of speculative crises, shifting temporalities, and dystopic environments inhospitable to the human body. The cinematic image and the aesthetics of urban horror in neoliberal post-socialist China lay the groundwork for the future to such an extent, Huang contends, that the seeds of dissent at the heart of urban horror make it possible to imagine new forms of resistance.

Communicating National Image through Development and Diplomacy

Communicating National Image through Development and Diplomacy
Author: James Pamment
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2018-05-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319767593

This edited collection draws upon interdisciplinary research to explore new dimensions in the politics of image and aid. While development communication and public diplomacy are established research fields, there is little scholarship that seeks to understand how the two areas relate to one another. However, international development doctrine in the US, UK and elsewhere increasingly suggests that they are integrated–or at the very least should be–at the level of national strategy. This timely volume considers a variety of cases in diverse regions, drawing upon a combination of theoretical and conceptual lenses that combine a focus on both aid and image. The result is a text that seeks to establish a new body of knowledge on how contemporary debates into public diplomacy, soft power and the national image are fundamentally changing not just the communication of aid, but its wider strategies, modalities and practices.

Commercial Nationalism

Commercial Nationalism
Author: Zala Volcic
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2016-02-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1137500999

This book intervenes in discussions of the fate of nationalism and national identity by exploring the relationship between state appropriation of marketing and branding strategies on the one hand, and, on the other, the commercial mobilization of nationalist discourses.

Media and the Image of the Nation during Brazil’s 2013 Protests

Media and the Image of the Nation during Brazil’s 2013 Protests
Author: César Jiménez-Martínez
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2020-04-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030382389

This book explores the struggles over the mediated construction and projection of the image of the nation at times of social unrest. Focussing on the June 2013 protests in Brazil, it examines how different actors –authorities, activists, the national media, foreign correspondents– disseminated competing versions of ‘what Brazil was’ during that pivotal episode. The book offers a fresh conceptual approach, supported by media coverage analysis and original interviews, that demonstrates the potential of digital media to challenge power structures and establish new ways of representing the nation. It also highlights the vulnerability of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ media to forms of inequality and disruption due to political interferences, technological constraints, and continuing commercial pressures. Contributing to the study of media and the nation as well as media and social movements, the author throws into sharp relief the profound transformation of mediated nationhood in a digital and global media environment.

Transforming Gender Citizenship

Transforming Gender Citizenship
Author: Éléonore Lépinard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2018-07-19
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108665152

Gender quotas are a controversial policy measure. However, over the past twenty years they have been widely adopted around the world and especially in Europe. They are now used in politics, corporate boards, state and local public administration and even in civil society organizations. This book explores this unprecedented phenomenon, providing a unique comparative perspective on gender quotas' adoption across thirteen European countries. It also studies resistance to gender quotas by political parties and supreme courts. Providing up-to-date comprehensive data on gender quotas regulations, Transforming Gender Citizenship proposes a typology of countries, from those which have embraced gender quotas as a new way to promote gender equality in all spheres of social life, to those who have consistently refused gender quotas as a tool for gender equality. Reflecting on divergences and commonalities across Europe, the authors analyze how gender quotas may transform dominant conception of citizenship and gender equality.