This study explores the impact of women-only new media training on women's everyday lives examining the effect women-only new media training has on their career trajectories, life/work balances, self-esteem as well as their hopes and ambitions for the future. The study examines whether women-only new media training gives women a better understanding of the gender-technology relations at play in the workplace and how this affects their career choices and the decision making process. It looks at the everyday lives of two groups of women currently working in the new media sector, focusing on their individual experiences. One group attended a course entitled Multimedia for Women in the Cultural Industries (MUWIC) at the Women’s Electronic Village Hall (WEVH), a women-only Information and Communication Technology centre. The other group attended other new media courses that were not women-only. The study builds on previous gender and technology studies and adds to both knowledge and theory by exploring the effects of women-only new media training on women’s experiences of working in the new media industry, an emerging sector where the knowledge of women-only training is minimal. The study provides information about training in creative technologies that are seen as crucial to the creative economy and that link has not been explored before. The study’s contribution to knowledge is that it focuses on the views of the women interviewed and is critically located in opposition to current policy initiatives that encourage women into the new media industry with no due consideration to the women who they are trying to attract or the reasons why some women may not be attracted to those workplaces. It builds on past research calling for more information on women's individual experiences of technology and shows how women-only networks can indeed create a much needed space virtually and in real life to transform existing gender roles creating real and lasting change.

This thesis explores the way in which teenage girls form relationships with female television presenters and how they incorporate these images into their everyday living. Furthermore, it investigates the ways in which girls are able to use collective discussion to articulate their understanding of images of women within television texts. Drawing on my ethnographic research with a group of female teenage peers, I suggest that girls use conversations about female television presenters as a way of communicating with their peers, exploring ideas of femininity and scoping out the female landscape in preparation for their own adult lives. I argue that these female presenters are representational and are used as cautionary tales and not as aspirational role models. The focus group members demonstrate that they are knowledgeable about and cognisant with the ways in which and how the media addresses women. This contradicts commonly held assumptions about teenage girls as susceptible and easily manipulated by media images, and it also reveals a complex gendered interaction with media texts. The ‘friendships’ formed with female television presenters are a way of negotiating these girls’ teenage years, and they offer an opportunity to create a roadmap for their futures, express their anxieties and reflect nostalgically on the passing of their girlhood. Through focus group sessions, and adapting Wood’s (2009) text-in-action method, I found that my transcripts of the focus group discussions could be broken down into themes. The most commonly occurring set of terms, which appear also to anchor contemporary feminist research, are choice, empowerment, sexualisation, equality, liberation and individualism. The transcripts can also be characterised through the terms ‘disparagement’, ‘affectionate disparagement’ and ‘knowingness’. This research will discuss the ways in which such terms account for young girls’ negotiation of images of women on television. I have discovered that it is easy to underestimate the ability of young girls – they are constantly conflicted by the media images they experience and their own sense of identity, and they work hard at negotiating through this conflict.

Against widespread prognostications, the Internet has not entailed the demise of commercial women's magazines. Yet print publications are being supplanted by online versions, which are proliferating. These websites offer similar content free of charge and significantly greater opportunities for interaction. This thesis is a feminist qualitative study of contemporary online magazines targeting young women, based in the UK and in Spain. Focusing on twelve publications- six from each country- the research inquires into the different but interrelated dimensions of text, user and production. In particular, it asks questions about changes and challenges brought about by the online environment. Of especial interest are representations of gender, sex, sexuality and intimate relationships. In the context of a resurgence of interest in feminist ideas and engagement, the thesis also examines the ways in which women's magazines relate to- and reconfigure- feminism. The research adopts a multi-methods approach, and draws on a large body of different data. Comprising the primary data are: a) 270 editorial articles; b) 2.657 peer-to-peer messages posted on the sites' discussion forms; and c) 68 interviews with producers, primarily editors and writers. Additionally informing the study is an assortment of supplementary material, including: magazine public communications, archived print copies, trade press, news reports on the sector, and field notes from events organised by interested parties. Influenced by a social constructionist perspective, the analysis uses thematic, discourse and conjunctural approaches, thereby making connections between the details of text and talk, wider cultural sensibilities, and the socio-historical context at large. It deploys postfeminism as a critical analytical term to capture gendered features of contemporary cultural life, and engages with feminist work aiming to understand the operation of power under neoliberalism. A number of new concepts are advanced to make sense of the identified landscape of patrioarcho-neoliberal power, including 'postfeminist biologism' and 'confidence chic', and to capture shifts taking place in the industry, such as an all-encompassing 'authenticity turn', together with the interpellation of a new subject online: the 'shareaholic'. The research contributes empirical insights and critical theorisations concerning the contemporary young woman's (online) magazine, and digital journalism and Internet cultures more generally. Furthermore, this thesis offers understandings about cultural discourses and contestations around sex, gender and sexuality, and about the relationship between femininity, feminism, commercial and popular media cultures: capturing both Spain/UK national specifities and transnational patterns.

When SlutWalk marched onto the protest scene, with its focus on ending victim blaming and slut shaming, it carried the promise of a renewed feminist politics. Focusing on SlutWalk London, this study examines representations and selfrepresentations of the protest in British national newspapers, blogs and Tumblr posts to explore how this promise has been negotiated in the contemporary media space. Building on the notion that contemporary media culture is characterised by a postfeminist sensibility, this study asks: how and to what extent is SlutWalk London represented as a feminist intervention in this culture? In particular, how do representations of the protest, by the media and by activists themselves, reproduce or challenge a postfeminist sensibility? Following Rosalind Gill, the thesis conceptualises the elements of postfeminist sensibility as: choice; individualism and empowerment; natural difference; irony and knowingness; and a view of feminism as passé or ‘done wrong’. The elements of feminist sensibility are conceptualised as: equality; solidarity and politicisation; intersectionality; anger and hope; and a view of feminism as current and relevant. To explore representations and self-representations of SlutWalk, texts and images from newspapers and social media platforms, as well as interviews with organisers and participants, are analysed using content, discourse and thematic analyses. The findings reveal that protestors’ self-representations (on social media and in interviews) are characterised more consistently by a feminist sensibility, while newspaper representations of protestors and of the SlutWalk protest display a more mixed picture of both postfeminist and feminist sensibilities. This indicates a process of negotiation between feminist and postfeminist sensibilities in social and mass media, and suggests that, while contemporary media culture maintains an overall postfeminist sensibility, SlutWalk is nevertheless represented in some spaces by a feminist sensibility. In particular, news items are characterised more consistently by a feminist sensibility, which marks a significant achievement; however, columns (especially by female, feminist authors) show a more postfeminist sensibility. This discrepancy highlights some surprising barriers facing feminist protestors seeking to intervene in the postfeminist media culture and fulfil their feminist promise.

This thesis investigates the link between the precarious lives of underemployed young Korean women in the post IMF crisis and their use of digital media. It draws on precarity and immaterial labour, key concepts in studies on new forms of labour and life in neoliberal, post industrial society. The thesis contributes to this field of research in two main aspects. Firstly, moving away from an ahistorical, Eurocentric, and androcentric tendency, through ethnographic fieldwork, it reveals the particular gendered nature of precarity historically formed in a particular geographical site, South Korea. Secondly, it links the two concepts, which are closely related theoretically but located in different fields. It demonstrates how precarity is a condition leading to individuals taking up forms of immaterial labour in an attempt to manage their precariousness. The research underpinning this argument consisted of a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul, investigating young women's life stories, work trajectories and, following media anthropologists, use of digital media as part of their communicative ecology. The thesis shows how fifteen underemployed young women with different education levels and social backgrounds negotiated precarity, producing various ways of living: lives encircled to an extreme level of social withdrawal; lives juggling with various part-time jobs; lives stuck in permanent training; lives protesting on the street. Their respective modes of underemployment meant that they experienced personal isolation, frustration, and fear of people, forming a strong desire to be ‘normal' in society. Their digital media use was deeply integral to attempts to become normal in everyday life. In this respect, I argue that precarity is a condition to form a vast amount of ‘free labour' workforce for the digital economy.

This research is premised on the investigation of Muslim women working in the Iranian Radio and Television Organisation (IRIB). The study is structured on a number of principal questions: why these women joined IRIB and how they managed the reactions of sceptical family members; how they construct the meaning of womanhood in relation to work, family and motherhood; what challenges these women encounter in the workplace; and how they negotiate and persevere to overcome those challenges, achieve success and make changes in a male-dominated organisation. The main focus is on the post-1979 Islamic revolution, when many practicing Muslim women, who were largely excluded from the film and media industries before the Revolution, began working in radio and television. Modern media that were considered instruments of ‘westernisation’ and ‘decadence’ before the Revolution were re-legitimised by religious authorities and even elevated to the status of ‘public universities’. Many Muslim women, therefore, entered this male dominated ‘forbidden space’ that had a largely secular and liberal work culture before the Revolution. Through 30 semi-structured interviews with these women, this research examines gender relations within the workspace, family domain and in the public arena. The research manifests complex dynamics of gender relations in the context of Iran and in the IRIB organisation. It argues that gender is a relational concept; and an area of constant negotiation and contest. In particular, the study demonstrates that gender relations are defined in negotiation with religious beliefs, traditional norms and political ideologies. They are also reinforced in the family and embedded in the culture of organisation. Overall, it is concluded that after the Islamic revolution, Muslim women found new opportunities to enter spaces in the public domain that were previously considered as being ‘inappropriate’ for women. Despite confronting many challenges in this respect, they have exercised their agency and achieved considerable success in changing traditional and prejudiced attitudes within structures that are underpinned by Islamic gender ideology. In doing so, they have also constructed a new identity of Muslim women that goes beyond simplistic stereotypical dichotomies such as liberated/oppressed, western/eastern, and secular/Muslim.

This dissertation explores how representations of women in the media function as heterodesignations in response to the current socio-economic cultural complex of globalization. In its merger with reality, the media has become the dominant discourse and the means through which prevailing modes of self-understanding are made available in postmodern society, of which the simulacrum is a key feature. Representations of women in the media in general, and in television advertisements in particular, are not, in any way, subversive of hegemonic discourse and, despite the prevalent ambiguity of these images, construct women in conformity with traditional gender stereotypes. Through practices of deconstruction, such as feminist counter-cinema, of which the film Female Perversions is an example, feminism has an important role to play in liberating women from the oppressive effects of these representations, even if these efforts are not, in themselves, free from ambiguity. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This study is part of the AHRC funded project “A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947-1989”. The research is based upon the data gathered from interviews carried out with thirty geographically and generationally dispersed women about their memories of watching television in Britain between 1947 and 1989. I have used generation and gender as analytical categories, and have paid particular attention to the role of memory work in this type of historical research. This thesis aims to build upon previous work which has investigated the connection between generation and interaction with popular culture, but which has not theorised those relationships (Press, 1991; Moseley, 2002). The shifts and, indeed, continuities in the lives of different generations of British women are considered to gain a sense of the importance of generation in the production of identity. Significant differences arose between generations in terms of reflexivity and around questions of quality, value and taste as generations intersected with feminist and neoliberal cultures at different life stages. What was particularly interesting, however, was that despite the dramatic social change wrought by this post-war period, the narratives of women of different generations were surprisingly similar in terms of their everyday lives. Their memories largely centred around domestic relationships, and the women’s role as mother was often central to these. Following my investigation of the significance of motherhood to women’s production of gendered identity I consider the moments which disrupted that pattern and where women are enabled to conceive of an identity outside their familial role. Talk around pop music programming and desire had generational significance in the production of individual identities, again pointing to the importance of generation as an analytical category.

This dissertation explores how representations of women in the media function as heterodesignations in response to the current socio-economic cultural complex of globalization. In its merger with reality, the media has become the dominant discourse and the means through which prevailing modes of self-understanding are made available in postmodern society, of which the simulacrum is a key feature. Representations of women in the media in general, and in television advertisements in particular, are not, in any way, subversive of hegemonic discourse and, despite the prevalent ambiguity of these images, construct women in conformity with traditional gender stereotypes. Through practices of deconstruction, such as feminist counter-cinema, of which the film Female Perversions is an example, feminism has an important role to play in liberating women from the oppressive effects of these representations, even if these efforts are not, in themselves, free from ambiguity. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This study examines how working women are represented in the news media, and its main aim is to determine to what extent ‘social class’ figures in the representations of women in news content. Using language, visual and narrative analysis, the thesis comprises four case studies each focusing on portrayals of different women from different socio-economic backgrounds determined by their occupation. The first two case studies examine portrayals of low paid working women through coverage of the National Minimum Wage introduction into Britain in April 1999 and the Council Workers’ Strike in England and Wales in 2002. The latter two case studies focus on women in particular professions: elite businesswomen, military women and women war reporters. The study concludes by noting that multiple voices occur in news texts around the key contrasting themes of progress/stagnation and visibility/invisibility and which can give contradictory discourses on the intersection of gender and class. From the massification and silencing of working class women, to the celebrity and sexualisation of the business elite, and the professional competency news frames of middle class women, class was shown to be a determining factor in how women figure in news content. However, these class determinants combined with other news frames pertaining to gender, whereby powerful and established myths of femininity can come to the fore. These myths can be particularly powerful when women enter non-feminine work ‘spaces’ such as business and the military, and class, particularly in the latter case, can tend to slip out of view, as sexist coverage is commonplace and debates are formed about the right and wrong behaviour for women.