Abstract
In this issue, the Journal of Communication Inquiry explores the intersection of digital cultures and gendered experiences. Increasingly, media and communication scholarship have begun to assess the multiple and complex avenues of digital users and gendered rhetoric online—sometimes feminist, sometimes sexist. This special issue targets the conversation to illuminate recent examples of such gendering in online cultures and how users are implicated in their production and consumption.
Feminist scholarship acknowledges that beliefs, practices, and communities are articulated in the online cultural landscape and demonstrate the vitality of gendered ways of thinking and living in a mediated world, as well as how online media shape and inform feminist philosophies. The authors’ approaches featured in this special issue emphasize emergent notions of meaning, power, and identity across contemporary online communities.
Jolene Fisher critically analyzes how the Half the Sky Movement begun by journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn uses the concept of women’s empowerment to engage female Facebook gamers. Fisher argues that while the game has gained global media attention and endorsements from celebrities for its cause, it favors neoliberal stances on development and gaming by prioritizing individual empowerment as opposed to a wider feminist understanding of gender and empowerment.
Rosemary Lucy Hill, Helen Kennedy, and Ysabel Gerrard consider the digital “datafication” of our culture and the visualizations of data in mass media. Using Gill’s (2011) notion of “flexible sexism,” they highlight how definitions of “good” and “bad” data visualizations are gendered and call for not just feminist critiques of big data but for feminist data studies.
Raven Maragh explores the corporate functions of Twitter and the solicitation strategies of the Oprah Winfrey Network during the “live tweeting” of the documentary Light Girls. Maragh showcases how Black female users’ affective labor is exploited into production labor as they grapple with the issue of skin tone in the United States among women of color.
Elizaveta Friesem assesses three sets of online media literacy educational curriculums created by the nonprofit organizations MediaSmarts: Canada’s Center for Digital and Media Literacy, The Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media, and Common Sense Media. She argues for an interdisciplinary classroom approach that blends media theoretical concepts alongside gender theoretical concepts—such as the gender binary which is so relevant to the contemporary K-12 classroom—to show students how media representations of genders are ideological not biological.
Sarah Jackson and Sonia Banaszczyk consider the discursive labor behind the #YesAllWomen and #YesAllWhiteWomen hashtags on Twitter. Their findings explore feminist counterpublics and feminist framing of violence online while simultaneously engaging larger debates about race. User-generated content in their exploration can elevate conversations within feminist spheres.
Shinsuke Eguchi and Myra S. Washington analyze the digital cable and satellite channel LOGO and its hit show DTLA (i.e., Downtown Los Angeles). While LOGO is marketed as a lifestyle channel aimed at an LGBTQ audience, Eguchi and Washington argue DTLA reproduces normative hierarchies of gender, race, sex, and class and uniquely implicate the show’s queer male characters. As the first series funded in part by a successful crowdfunding campaign, their findings foreshadow perhaps how even user-generated content can fall prey to media-defined ideologies of gender performance.
Many thanks to those who helped this issue to completion, including JCI’s SAGE production staff, advisory board members, Dr. Meenakshi Gigi Durham, and, finally, our reviewers and authors. It has been an enjoyable year editing such innovative and important research, and I wish the same upon my predecessor John C. Carpenter in the coming year.