I’m putting together a panel for the National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference, November 7-10, 2013. See below for my CFP and please send to anyone you think may be interested in applying.

An excellent new book about feminist media called Feminist Media: Participatory Spaces, Networks and Cultural Citizenships edited by Elke Zobl and Ricarda Drueke has just been published by Transcript Press (Germany). I am honored to join many prominent global scholars such as Anita Harris and Alison Piepmeier as a contributor with a chapter that I wrote about the possibilities for transnational feminist politics on the blogosphere.

I am particularly enthusiastic about this collection though because of the anthology’s engagement with cultural citizenship as a theoretical concept that helps us to understand the relationship between girls/women and feminist media. This is a relationship that I’m exploring in my dissertation “Still Alive and Kicking:” Girl Bloggers and Feminist Politics in a “Postfeminist” Age in order to understand girls’ feminist blogging as a political intervention in the public sphere(s). I’ve been finding the literature examining (cultural) citizenship and media production from a feminist perspective to be somewhat sparse, so this book fills an key void in what I hope will be an increasingly significant area for feminist scholarly inquiry.

You can check out the introduction and table of contents here.

I just returned from the UK, where I attended an excellent conference at King’s College London titled Girls and Digital Culture: Transnational Reflections. The conference was small, but included some fascinating papers from presenters that travelled from all over the world, reflecting widespread scholarly interest in issues related to girlhood and new media. Very exciting!

I presented a paper called “Literally the Best Thing Ever: Imagining a Feminist Girlhood on Rookie.com,” based upon one of my dissertation chapters. In the paper I discuss Tavi Gevinson, the sixteen-year-old creator of Rookie as fostering what I call a “feminist girlhood subjectivity” on the site, which has made feminism as accessible public discourse to the girl publics coalescing via Rookie. Tavi and Rookie have been getting tons of media attention recently, as Rookie Yearbook One is being released this month and Tavi just wrapped up a successful cross-US summer tour to promote the website and meet her readers. An article in the Globe and Mail on Friday, September 14, 2012 even asks if Tavi is “girl power’s last chance?” suggesting that Tavi is tackling the unfinished business of 90s feminism that promised girls the opportunity to live as smart, independent agents, rather then waiting until adulthood to find a feminist consciousness.

I’m excited about the way that Rookie is bringing feminist discourse into mainstream girls’ culture, and want to think about the ways that this may allow girls’ scholars to move beyond the binary of agency/conformity that often plagues discussions about girls’ culture. In the meantime I’m looking forward to getting my yearbook in the mail…

Feel free to email me if you’d like a copy of the conference paper.

I’m really excited to be spending the summer in Toronto and teaching a class called Wired Women: Gender, Cyberspace, and New Information Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

It’s a perfect time to be teaching such as class, with debates about Internet history, troubling stories about sexism online, and inspiring political organizing on the blogosphere all receiving mainstream attention recently.

Here’s the course description:

Do gendered bodies matter on the Internet? Does racism still exist in virtual worlds? Why are computers thought of as a masculine technology?  How are women using the Internet to enact social change? Did one young woman’s tweet really start the Egyptian revolution? Is the Internet a dangerous place for girls? How are your internet practices shaped by gender, race, class, age and other identities?

These are some of the questions we’ll focus on in this course, which takes a feminist cultural studies approach to examining women’s relationship to new information technologies. In particular, we will focus on how women connect, play, learn, work, and share on the Internet, while analyzing and critiquing the dominant discourses that often position women as technologically inept.  Key discussion topics will include how concepts such as community, identity, and agency shape the experience of women and girls online as both producers and consumers of a variety of online content including websites, blogs, virtual worlds, and social networks. Special attention will be given to the ways that power relations informed by race, class, sexuality, age, and national identities get re-inscribed – and sometimes challenged – online. Readings will include scholarly research, as well as popular press articles and blog posts.

The course starts July 10th and runs through August 16th. Please email me if you’re interested in seeing the full syllabus.

After many years of recording America’s Next Top Model, following Tyra’s Twitter, and watching her live on-air sonogram one too many times, I was excited to get word that my article, “Fiercely Real?: Tyra Banks and the Making of New Media Celebrity” has been accepted for publication in Feminist Media Studies. Because it won’t be downloadable for another year, I’ll post the abstract here. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to see an advanced version of the paper.

“Fiercely Real?: Tyra Banks and the Making of New Media Celebrity

Abstract:

This paper will examine former supermodel Tyra Banks as a contemporary “celebrity entrepreneur,” focusing on Banks’ recent shift from television persona to multimedia icon within a neoliberal popular culture. I argue that our contemporary new media environment, marked by convergent media texts, self branding, and interactivity provides a particularly useful space for Banks to globally circulate her postfeminist star text. Through her websites, Facebook, and Twitter confessionals, Banks is able to successfully navigate the contradictory discourses that insist female celebrities be both “authentic” selves while maintaining a disciplined, hegemonic femininity that becomes legitimized and naturalized. I conclude that while Banks’ mobilization of a hypervisibility and sense of individual agency generates an authenticity that may resonate with her fans, she remains contained by the neoliberal and postfeminist discourses that allow her to have such a prominent Internet presence. Consequently, this paper serves to raise unexplored questions about the relationship between celebrity culture, postfeminist and neoliberal subjectivities, and new media.