Archive - Topic - Gender and Media

“As no doubt we all know, no single instant, no atom of our life (of our relation to the world and to being) is not marked today, directly or indirectly, by that [atomic] speed race.” – Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” Diacritics The history of (the) Bikini [1] An...

Introduction [1] Contemporary celebrity culture allows for the configuration of certain discourses about male violence against women. By paying attention to this form of culture, changes in the cultural landscape, particularly in relation to the emergence of new forms of social media (such as celebrity gossip blogs and websites), are...

[1] This article addresses gender and popular music-making in the city of Hamilton, New Zealand, a moderately prosperous provincial city (population 130,000) which services a large rural sector (the Waikato). Starting from the observation that few women enroll in tertiary commercial music courses in Hamilton, I aim to examine both...

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I’m sorry. This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It’s for the women that stand beside me, Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color that...

[1] At first she looks like a transient, slouching in an alley. Her hair is disheveled, her face dirty, and her clothing in disarray. But the sudden flashing of a photographer’s bulb suggests otherwise. The Manhattan alley in which she poses looks too clean and the people ambling by her...

[1] In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration was quick to assimilate the terror attacks into a simplistic binary opposition of good and evil, absolving the U.S. of any foreign policy role in triggering the anger which prompted the attacks. As in the buildup to the first...

Setting the terms: after the Fire [1] While it would be problematic to fix a monolithic moment of change from invisibility to visibility in the context of queer citizenship in India, it could be argued that the events following the screening of Fire (1997) performed an important epistemic shift in...

[1] The recent film, Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee and based on Annie Proulx’s short story, received an overwhelmingly admiring response from newspaper and magazine film critics, won a series of prominent film awards, and roused a large, fervent fan base. Several large on-line discussion forums created in the...

[1] When Sylvia is selected to be a contestant on Fox’s makeover and pageant reality show The Swan, we are told that she has faced a lifetime of romantic rejection because of her appearance. In documentary-style footage, Sylvia critiques her bikini-clad body in front of a mirror, speaking of her...

[1] In her groundbreaking essay “When the Woman Looks,” Linda Williams argues that “Brian De Palma’s film Dressed to Kill extends Psycho ‘s premise by holding the woman [Kate Miller, played by Angie Dickinson] responsible for the horror that destroys her” (94). De Palma extends much more than Psycho’s premise...