Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture

Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture
Author: Anthea Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2020-12-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 042977298X

This intellectually vibrant volume is the first collection to deal with Australian celebrity in ways that account for both cultural and gendered specificities, demonstrating how gendered ways of imagining Australia are reinforced and contested in celebrity representations and self-presentations. Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture engages with celebrities across a diverse range of fields – actors, journalists, athletes, comedians, writers, and television personalities – and in doing so critically reflects upon different forms of Australian fame and the media platforms and practices that sustain them. Authors in this volume engage directly with pertinent issues relating to gender and sexuality, including celebrity feminism and the generative capacity of feminist rage; normative femininity and its instability; hegemonic masculinities; and queerness and its (in)visibility. Contributors also intervene in a number of ongoing debates in media and cultural studies more broadly, including those around the politics and affordances of digital media; whiteness and Australia’s colonial histories; celebrity labour; and methodologies for celebrity studies. This timely collection urges scholars of celebrity to attend further both to the gendered nature of celebrity culture and to local conditions of production and consumption. This book will be of key interest to researchers and graduate students in cultural studies, television and film studies, digital media studies, critical race and whiteness studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literary studies.

Germaine Greer, Celebrity Feminism and the Archive

Germaine Greer, Celebrity Feminism and the Archive
Author: Anthea Taylor
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2024-11-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351717553

Germaine Greer, Celebrity Feminism and the Archive, the first scholarly book on this internationally renowned feminist, draws upon Greer’s largely unexplored archive to demonstrate her impact on readers and viewers since the 1970s. Across many decades in the limelight and through multiple media forms, the provocative Greer has worked to shape audience understandings of gender, sexuality, and feminism. Through deep engagement with archival material, Anthea Taylor offers a compelling reassessment of Greer’s celebrity feminist labour and its effects over time. Examining archived letters from fans, anti-fans, and those in between, this innovative volume shows how and why readers and viewers have come to affectively invest – or disinvest – in this iconoclastic feminist. Advancing debates about the social and political function of celebrity, Germaine Greer, Celebrity Feminism and the Archive is essential reading for scholars in Gender Studies, History, Archival Studies, and Media and Cultural Studies.

Gender, Media and Voice

Gender, Media and Voice
Author: Jilly Boyce Kay
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2020-07-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030472876

This book explores the increasing imperatives to speak up, to speak out, and to ‘find one’s voice’ in contemporary media culture. It considers how, for women in particular, this seems to constitute a radical break with the historical idealization of silence and demureness. However, the author argues that there is a growing and pernicious gap between the seductive promise of voice, and voice as it actually exists. While brutal instruments such as the ducking stool and scold’s bridle are no longer in use to punish women’s speech, Kay proposes that communicative injustice now operates in much more insidious ways. The wide-ranging chapters explore the mediated ‘voices’ of women such as Monica Lewinsky, Hannah Gadsby, Diane Abbott, and Yassmin Abdel-Magied, as well as the problems and possibilities of gossip, nagging, and the ‘traumatised voice’ in television talk shows. It critiques the optimistic claims about the ‘unleashing’ of women’s voices post-#MeToo and examines the ways that women’s speech continues to be trivialized and devalued. Communicative justice, the author argues, is not about empowering individuals to ‘find their voice’, but about collectively transforming the whole communicative terrain.

Cultures of Authenticity

Cultures of Authenticity
Author: Marie Heřmanová
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2022-11-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1801179387

This volume contains an Open Access Chapter. This collection explores the complex and controversial idea of authenticity. Addressing the concept from an interdisciplinary perspective and offering a diverse range of topical cases.

Postfeminism in Context

Postfeminism in Context
Author: Margaret Henderson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2019-10-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351717642

Postfeminism in Context studies the representation of women in Australian popular culture over the past three decades to locate postfeminism in a specific time and place. Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor argue that ‘postfeminism’, as a critical term, has been too often deployed in ways that fail to account for historical and cultural specificity. This book analyses Australian popular culture – chick lit novels; ‘dramedy’ television shows; women’s magazines; YouTube beauty vlogs; self-help manuals; and newspapers – to reveal the tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that have always been constitutive of postfeminism, including in Australia. Examining how these popular forms intervene in dominant conversations about contemporary Australian femininities, Postfeminism in Context maps the ways in which various aspects of Australia’s history and national identity have shaped its postfeminism. While Henderson and Taylor identify some of the limited postfeminist tropes and patterns of representation evident in comparable locales, they also find that Australian popular culture has responded to feminism in a much more hopeful way. Adding some much-needed cultural specificity to the ongoing debate around this loaded term, Postfeminism in Context is essential reading for those interested in Australian popular culture, feminism, and the gendered politics of representation.

Gender and Action Films 2000 and Beyond

Gender and Action Films 2000 and Beyond
Author: Steven Gerrard
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2022-11-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1801175209

Gender and Action Films 2000 and Beyond: Transformations looks at Action Cinema from the old to the new, offering an exciting interrogation of the portrayal of gender in the new millennia. A necessity for academics, students and lovers of film and media and those interested in gender studies.

Academic Women

Academic Women
Author: Michelle Ronksley-Pavia
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2023-02-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1350274283

In this collection, both individually and collectively, the authors explore the gendering of women's experiences in academia through the lens of narratives of lived experience. This is a cogent theme throughout the book, reflecting on women's experiences as intersectional-always raced, classed, gendered, nuanced and complex. Jointly, the chapters provide important insights into individual and collective contemporary women's experiences in academia from international perspectives, such as gender equity, barriers to success, and achievement. This comprehensive volume provides a reference point for all women and their colleagues working in universities and colleges across the world.

Researching Contemporary Wellness Cultures

Researching Contemporary Wellness Cultures
Author: Naomi Smith
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2024-07-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 180455586X

Researching Contemporary Wellness Cultures brings together scholars examining the various ways and spaces in which wellness is constructed and practices within various sociological sub-disciplines across and in related fields including anthropology, cultural studies, and internet studies.

Research Handbook on Feminist Political Thought

Research Handbook on Feminist Political Thought
Author: Mary Caputi
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2024-05-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1800889135

Illustrating the collective power and relevance of feminist theory today, Mary Caputi and Patricia Moynagh have carefully selected a diverse international range of leading scholars and activists to critically assess key social and political challenges in the twenty-first century. This Research Handbook demonstrates a variety of feminist analyses that offer compelling insights into an array of topics, including police brutality, the carceral state, racial and sexualised violence, trans rights, climate change, and the denial of reproductive rights.