This thesis applies a feminist theoretical perspective to interrogate discourses of postfeminism, as well as the position of the female body, fitness, and resistance within contemporary American culture. I argue that women’s fitness blogs are a vehicle for the production of Rosalind Gill’s “postfeminist sensibility,” focusing specifically on fitness bloggers’ use of self-surveillance and monitoring, personal transformation or “makeovers”, and intensified consumerism. Using ideological textual analysis of several fitness blogs as case studies, I examine the ways in which women publicly negotiate their relationships with their body through the documentation and disclosure of their food and exercise lifestyles. This thesis also acknowledges the feminist potential of fitness blogs as spaces in which women may strive towards body positivity and recovery from eating disorders, as well as challenge cultural expectations regarding female body and appetite. / text

Media play an important role in transmitting information for citizens in a country as large as Canada. Much of what Canadians know about the larger country comes to them through the media they view. What then, is the information that media carries forward. How do the media depict political movements and political actors who are not politicians? This thesis explores the implications of media coverage for feminist organizations in Canada, using as a case study media’s response to the cuts to the Status of Women Canada by the Harper government in the fall of 2006. This analysis specifically focuses on the image of feminism created in media and the importance (or lack thereof) communicated by media about such organizations. / Thesis (Master, Political Studies) -- Queen's University, 2007-10-23 20:03:09.21

The aim of this master thesis is to contribute to a more profound knowledge of women's magazine reading by giving insights into the readerships’ interpretations of magazine texts. Three different dimensions of interpretation were thereby identified: the relation to the audiences’ own situations in life, the audiences’ reflections on their prior experiences, and the emerging emotions in the interpretation process. Audience and reception theory, as well as feminist media theory, form the theoretical framework of my research. As audience reception concerns the dynamic interaction between text and the audiences’ reception of it, I decided to concentrate on both text analysis and qualitative interviews. With my qualitative, methodological approach – comprising an analysis of three articles concerning texting advice and interviews with six regular readers, I was able to explore nuances and depths of the phenomenon. I identified four interpretative repertoires which the women used for making meaning of the texts: pleasure, rejection, self-reflection, and practical relevance. Pleasure and rejection were found to be the women’s predominant emotions in the interpretation process. Moreover, my research illustrates that women are interpreting the texting advice in a practical as well as in a self-reflexive way. Their own circumstances and prior experiences are thereby variables, which influence the reception. My work strengthens the perspective of readers as being empowered to understand, evaluate, and critique the media content they consume. This is an important finding influencing society at large. As my research outlines, critical readings were found to be superior to possible ideological influences of women’s magazines. Future research should focus on a further in-depth analysis of individual influencing variables in relation to the audiences’ interpretations as I was only able to evaluate some in my study.

This thesis explores how gender inequality in the photographic staff of the main Colombian media outlets, has established a hegemonic view of representation and examines the way recent social outbursts in the country, have been the ideal setting for the rise of citizen journalism, visual activism, and new visual citizenships. It seeks to present how diverse individuals, including female photojournalists are producing alternative visual narratives and igniting a paradigm shift on traditional photojournalism. By embracing new digital visualities and depictions of the other, these individuals are confronting traditional media organizations, questioning their visual narratives, inclusion, and representation policies.   Positioned from a Phenomenological and Feminist Media Theory standpoint, this project aims to observe this phenomenon from the bottom up, building from the experiences of the subject’s study. This project will consider emotions, affections lived experiences of three Colombian female photojournalists in active exercise of their profession, who will take part of this study, and those experiences will be basic inputs of interpretation. I contend that not sufficient research has been done on this topic, and expose an evident research gap, existing in Latin-American and Colombian Media Studies, since it’s connected to new technologies, recent social change and in general, a phenomenon still developing. Drawing from a Phenomenological Psychology field methodology, data will be obtained through semi-structured interviews and examined with coding and interpretation tools provided by this discipline. This study concludes how the female body becomes a political and visual signifier exercising an embodied practice in photojournalism, but also by emotions connected to what they are seeing through their lenses, which in turn, produces affective visualities and narratives many times, opposed to the claims of objectivity, rationality and newsworthiness traditional journalism stands for.

The intention of this thesis is to investigate whether there are consistent narrative patterns of images produced by female photojournalists under the Instagram hashtag #8mfotografascolombia in the context of the feminist mobilization of March 8, 2021, that took place in Colombia. I aim to establish if indeed these new communicative strategies in expansion respond to narratives widely used by traditional photojournalism, or if they operate under a different set of dynamics. Under the lens of Representation Theory I want to study how hegemonic depiction and absent stories form photojournalism are configuring counter narratives on social media platforms. On the other hand the perspective of Feminist Media Theory will provide understanding and context about the processes of production, circulation and absent feminine gaze within the media. The subsequent analysis shows that in fact narratives are being configured opposed to the structures of large media organizations in which the female gaze produces not only aesthetically different results, but the photographic process is intrinsically linked to performative actions, the recognition of subjects and away of the logic of spectacle and violence of the big media, but also outside of what the Instagram algorithm privileges.

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The aim of this thesis is to investigate the communicative and discursive practices used by Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) networks when marketing their network to women as both a business opportunity and as a sisterhood, in order to start and contribute to the conversation regarding the relatively unsupervised communicative practices and their potential effects of MLM distribution networks. By conducting an extensive qualitative analysis on eighteen group call videos posted publicly on YouTube by affiliates of six different MLM networks, this thesis examines the marketing practices used to appropriate feminist values in order to recruit women and sell products. The analysis is done through a theoretical framework of Feminist Media Theory with a focus on feminist values, femvertising, and corporate feminism, in combination with the concept Relational Agency. These theoretical frameworks are used to critically analyze the discursive practices used in the videos. The analysis shows that MLM contractors are utilizing discursive practices such as advertising feminist values to market products and opportunities to potential recruits and downlines. Some of the feminist values communicated are, for example, inclusivity, empowering messages, financial gain, and independency. The findings further suggests that the marketing practices used may have an effect on individuals involved, and on the greater feminist movement at large.

India experienced huge media coverage from all over the world associated with the Nirbhaya-case in 2012, when a young middleclass girl was brutally raped in a bus by five men in Delhi. After this horrifying incident a lot of demonstrations followed all over India. Women in the urban areas was arguing for the same rights as men and was standing up for a more equal society where everybody is able to live as freely as someone else, no matter what gender you was born with. This study aim to examine what experiences, perceptions and opinions Indian journalists in English written press have of their reality from a gender perspective. We wanted to know how and when Indian journalist represent women and if there is a certain way of thinking about representation of women in the media content. In interviews with a total of eleven journalists and ethnographic observations in two of India’s largest cities we tried to examine the structures and perceptions that influenced the journalist’s worldview and thus also the messages that appears in the news. By using the theory of structuration, agenda setting, performativity and intersectionality we examined what structures that the journalists live and operates within and how this is affecting the media content.

This study takes a closer look at the screenplay of the 2019 coming-of-age film, Booksmart. Using critical discourse analysis, and Fairclough’s three-dimensional method, it examines the way girls are portrayed based on the screenplay and its audience reviews. The main theories used in order to find the right perspective for this analysis, are Steiner’s (2014) feminist media theory. Gendered Language theories are also taken into account in order to find the right components in the text, such as word choices in the dialogue. Previous studies used to guide this study include Henesy (2020), Yue (2019), Shapiro (2017), Edwards (2016) and Nairn et. al. (2014). Using gendered language, performed gender and feminist values to decode the screenplay, the findings of this study show that the choices made in the screenplay of Booksmart (2019) are to distinguish the difference between the two female protagonists. The main component being how they deliver their dialogue and how certain characteristics in both conversation and personality can change the power dynamic between the two protagonists. The film also manages to split its audience into two groups: the ones who hate it, and the ones who love it.