Government public relations are often viewed as propaganda. However, one’s own perspective has much to do with how the communications are perceived. One example of American propaganda is linked to World War I. While there has been research devoted to the patriotic posters and films of this era, other forms of media during this same time period have been largely overlooked. This article, therefore, presents research on the communications surrounding the "Knit Your Bit" campaign, which the American Red Cross conducted with help from the U.S. government-sponsored Committee on Public Information. The campaign persuaded knitters on the home front to knit for the troops using content in the major women’s magazine of the day: Ladies’ Home Journal. This article considers how the overlooked campaign contributed to efforts to generate patriotism during World War I and how social, political, and economic factors affected the communications.
With the increasing use of innovative and expressive dramaturgical actions in contemporary social movements, activists appeal to the public’s emotional and moral convictions so as to elicit action. This study aims to investigate how the affective framing process, composed of sensual–emotional dramaturgical actions, can unleash the mobilizing and consolidating forces in social movements. I seek to elaborate upon the cognitively confined framing perspective by expanding the theoretical discussion to include the affective dimension of framing. I explore these issues through the investigation of a resistance movement in Tsoi Yuen Village, a rural community in Hong Kong, in which people rallied against the demolition of their community to make way for a regional express railway connecting Hong Kong to China. Through this investigation, I argue that dramaturgical tactics employed in social movements enhance the affective mobilization and consolidation power of framing through the mediation of emotional and moral components.
The datafication of culture has led to an increase in the circulation of data visualizations. In their production, visualizers draw on historical antecedents which define what constitutes a good visualization. In their reception, audiences similarly draw on experiences with visualizations and other visual forms to categorize them as good or bad. While there are often sound reasons for such assessments, the gendered dimensions of judgments of cultural artifacts like data visualizations cannot be ignored. In this article, we highlight how definitions of visualizations as bad are sometimes gendered. In turn, this gendered derision is often entangled with legitimate criticisms of poor visualization execution, making it hard to see and so normalized. This, we argue, is a form of what Gill calls flexible sexism, and it is why there is a need not just for feminist critiques of big data but for feminist data studies–that is, feminists doing big data and data visualization.
This study analyzes how the Half the Sky Movement uses the concept of women’s empowerment to engage female social gamers in a neoliberal development project that turns leisure time into development labor. While the Facebook game has successfully garnered global attention from mainstream media, celebrity endorsements, and impressive public participation, this study argues that it problematically reinforces a dominant approach to development at odds with a feminist understanding of gender and empowerment. Through active design choices, the organization has worked to create a gendered, social media game space that prioritizes individual financial empowerment and monetary aid.
This article uses the digital and affective labor frameworks to examine how Black women provide specific kinds of production online. The intersection of television and Twitter through "live tweeting" elucidates unique ways in which Black women function within each site as well as between them. Through a critical race analysis of the documentary Light Girls, I examine the material functions and corporate goals of Twitter coupled with the solicitation strategies of the Oprah Winfrey Network. In doing so, I show how these women’s affective labor gets refashioned as production. I argue that the grassroots functions and rhetoric of Twitter rely specifically on Black women. Similarly, television networks rely on these women as they reify the text and provide sustained feedback to its content. The exploitation of Black women occurs within and between these two media through the women’s production of affective labor.
Drawing on the literature regarding internships and cinema of precarity, this article addresses how one "learns" to intern and negotiate his or her class identity between a blue-collar past and white-collar future through an analysis of Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources. In contrast to Lauren Berlant’s astute though pessimist reading of the movie, I propose that internships may highlight the creative and organizing potential of labor power. A critique of Human Resources serves as an analytical lens through which the constitutive role of internship, its political desire to lead to crisis at work and its ability to resist precarity, albeit in a fragmented manner, may be revealed.
We argue that the representations of sex, love, and relationships in the television series Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) mirrors existing racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed hierarchies of masculinities among queer men. DTLA attempts to project a more inclusive ideology through its focus on typically marginalized groups but fails to offer a space for resisting or subverting those hierarchies. For that reason, we complicate DTLA’s representations as reproducing normative hierarchies. By doing so, we reimagine the potentiality of mediated spaces where the intersections and complexities of differences are embraced.
Television is a significant socialization tool for children to learn about their social worlds. The children's brand, Thomas & Friends, targets preschool audiences with manifest messages about friendship and utility as well as troubling, latent messages about race, ethnicity, and difference. Through critical visual and verbal discursive analyses of the film, Hero of the Rails, we expose Thomas & Friends' investment in racial hierarchies despite its broader message of friendship. We identify four ways that Hiro is "othered" in the film: (1) his glamorized description as "strange," (2) his consistently heavily accented voice, (3) his Japanese origin story, and (4) his pigmentation and powerlessness. Using theories of "othering," we argue that the representation of cultural difference to the preschooler audience is fearful and propagates racist discourses of yellow peril and Orientalism.
Media scholars see audiences as agentic, and people’s relationships with media texts and tools as complex and not easily predictable. At the same time, we are reminded that media representations of gender are ideological, and that media environment does contribute to the development of our gender identities. The article argues that it is crucial to help people understand this complexity through education and discusses the need to create an interdisciplinary approach to media and gender classes. This approach would combine a theoretical framework based on media studies and gender studies with best practices developed within media literacy education. The article offers analysis of educational materials created by three nonprofit organizations, in order to elucidate the main challenges that the interdisciplinary approach toward media and gender classes should address.
There is a long tradition in critical/cultural studies that views the raising of concerns about crime and disorder as an ideological gambit concealing a more sinister project of social control. This article offers a friendly critique and revision of this position, arguing that critical communication scholars should treat urban disorder and public fears of crime as serious policy problems, if only because pervasive fears of crime impose great harm on disadvantaged urban residents. To this end, this article reviews recent work in the fear-of-crime literature to examine both the causes of fear as well as the efficacy and ethics of specific fear-reduction strategies. Drawing on this review, the article argues that the most promising response to the fear of crime is not zero tolerance policing, but rather increasing the collective efficacy of—that is, the feeling of solidarity among—neighbors. The article concludes with a discussion of the role digital networking tools could play in building neighborhood collective efficacy.
Examining the coverage of Peter Dinklage in entertainment journalism, this article interrogates the possibilities and limitations of a celebrity with a nonnormative body to actually challenge Hollywood’s stereotyping of little people and the cultural tendency to use little people as a source of humor or voyeuristic pleasure. Although the rise of Dinklage to celebrity status created an opportunity for entertainment journalism to question Hollywood casting politics and draw attention to the stigma faced by little people, the discourses surrounding Dinklage have largely created a meritocratic narrative in which the struggles faced by little people in Hollywood are acknowledged but depoliticized. Such a narrative affirms the inherent fairness of the celebrity system, casting the structural and cultural barriers that create inequality as simple obstacles that the talented and hard working will overcome.