Critical Television Studies

La donna. Figlia della tempesta" offre una selezione di opere (grafica, pittura, fotografia, scultura) fondamentali per comprendere la ricerca artistica degli artisti della mostra. Il volume, pubblicato in occasione della mostra a cura di Paolo Rotolo, propone un interessante e ricco excursus iconografico degli artisti selezionati: Albonico Kelly, Busacca Carmen, Dávila Bucio Enriqueta Olivia, Escalante Vinces Jorge Luis, Guidi Deborah, Messina Patrizia, Rossi Ilaria, Sharf Veronica, Valenti Lucia e Giacomo Zornetta; oltre ad una sezione dedicata ai saggi sulla figura della donna. Il catalogo si presenta come un compendio essenziale per addentrarsi nelle molteplici sfaccettature dell'identità femminile contemporanea. Attraverso le sue pagine, si ripercorre il suggestivo percorso espositivo articolato in cinque sezioni tematiche, che esplorano la vulnerabilità, la resilienza, le radici culturali, le sfide sociali e la dimensione onirica e trasformativa dell'esperienza femminile. Ogni sezione è arricchita da approfondimenti critici che contestualizzano le opere e ne svelano le connessioni concettuali, offrendo una visione completa e sfumata del complesso universo della donna, "figlia della tempesta" ma anche artefice della propria rinascita.

This study investigates the ideological construction of neoliberal multiculturalism in the National Broadcasting Company's series Outsourced, starring a White male lead that manages a call center in India. We argue that the show advances global capitalism by co-opting multiculturalism to provide moral authority for Western neoliberal capitalism in the context of an inequitable global exchange. Neoliberalism benefits from postracialism by privatizing racism, thereby muting calls for antiracist structural reform. Relying on the ideological interests of neoliberal multiculturalism, Outsourced advances old racial logics by presenting unchallenged stereotypes of Indians and Indian culture and promotes a system of economic exchange that favors the global North while cloaking inequality with the veil of multiculturalism and the advancement of Whiteness as normative.

Although her name is not among the committee members, this study owes a great deal to the extensive help of Kathy Forde. It could not have been done without her. Thanks go to my mother and fiancé for helping me survive the process, and special thanks go to L. Nicol Cabe for ensuring my inescapable relationship with the Internet and pop culture.

Despite the increasingly important role played by image memes, we do not yet have a solid understanding of the elements that might make a meme go viral on social media. In this paper, we investigate what visual elements distinguish image memes that are highly viral on social media from those that do not get re-shared, across three dimensions: composition, subjects, and target audience. Drawing from research in art theory, psychology, marketing, and neuroscience, we develop a codebook to characterize image memes, and use it to annotate a set of 100 image memes collected from 4chan's Politically Incorrect Board (/pol/). On the one hand, we find that highly viral memes are more likely to use a close-up scale, contain characters, and include positive or negative emotions. On the other hand, image memes that do not present a clear subject the viewer can focus attention on, or that include long text are not likely to be re-shared by users. We train machine learning models to distingui...

In this paper, we explore new forms of networked feminist humour curated on Tumblr. First, we consider the Misandry Mermaid Tumblr by exploring how the site remediates antifeminist discourses of man-hating by deploying a sarcastic discourse of misandry. We argue that the site is plagued, however, by a form of gender binary antagonism. Then, we explore an anti-manspreading site, savingroomforcats, showing how the site challenges hetero-masculine spatial dominance through the humorous insertion of cats into manspreading images. We argue that these posts tend to lack an intersectional awareness of racialised masculinity. Finally, we explore the site critiquemydickpic, which subverts dominant understandings of dick pics as threatening, generating a queer politics of disrupting phallicoriented desire. Introduction: networked feminist humour Historically, just as humour has been used as a mode of activism to challenge the stereotyping of minority groups (C. E. Case and C. D. Lippard 2009), humour is a crucial way in which different styles of feminisms work to challenge misogyny and sexism. J. Gallivan (1992) suggests that feminist humour is characterised as "humour which reveals and ridicules the absurdity of gender stereotypes and … inequalities." Humour makes common assumptions "visible, and their stereotypical distortions laughable" (Z. M. Zimbardo 2014, 61). Feminist humour differs from the staid, outdated sexist joke that relies on tired tropes for titillation and, instead, endeavours to shed light on sexism through exposing and criticising them via satire (J. Gallivan 1992).

This paper attempts to expose the stereotyped images of women presented by the Facebook users in their statuses. It shows how their statuses, in the form of jokes, actually render stereotyped pictures of women in our society. Secondly, it tries to point out what are the socio-cultural effects of gender stereotypes occurred in Facebook. For fulfilling the purpose of the research, 183 samples of Facebook humors have been collected. Later, they are interpreted and analyzed thematically to search for their having relevance with the traits of gender stereotypes. Qualitative approach has been used for data analysis. The result shows that the samples collected from Facebook contain ample evidences of the presentation of women as stereotyped beings. The study bears the significance that the result found through it will contribute positively to further studies in social science in relation to the interaction between gender ideology and social media.

YouTube and Internet culture have changed expressions of comedy, especially on television. Some forms of TV entertainment content emphasise shock value, resulting in a satirical strain of comedy that stresses absurdity. Such a trend may be observed in The Eric Andre Show (2012-) and Nathan for You (2013-2017), two US comedy TV series which satirise an Internet style of filmmaking while simultaneously critiquing the culture that created it. This article examines these shows for how extreme methods support or detract from their perceived effect, and whether or not such satirical tactics are valid as a way of bringing about change.

Una riflessione sulla rappresentazione televisiva del femminile non
può che partire dalla consapevolezza dello stretto legame che interessa
realtà e immaginario, piano materiale e piano simbolico. Un
legame che nel caso della tv, italiana e non, si fa davvero ambivalente:
proponendo cliché e modelli femminili stereotipati, questo
mezzo ha certamente contribuito al perpetuarsi di diseguaglianze di
genere nella società, ma è stato capace anche di alimentare immagini
e immaginari alternativi, in grado di intercettare i mutamenti
in atto. A volte persino di favorirli. Daremo conto del duplice ruolo
del mezzo televisivo evidenziando linee di continuità e di rottura
rispetto al passato, influenze globali e peculiarità italian

This contribution focuses on the double process of youthification and feminization of traditionally male-dominated genres found in a wide range of popular media forms over the last ten years. The specific object of this investigation is represented by those TV series that can be classified as sci-fi, action or as hybridization of the two genres.

Male teenagers and even pre-adolescents have frequently featured as leading characters in these as well as in genres such as fantasy, spy, martial arts, superheroes, etc. (from Karate Kind, 1984, to Stranger Things, 2016-present, to name but a few). Nevertheless, the youthification process of recent audiovisual productions seems to rely mostly on female characters. In the wake of the success of the book series and movie sagas of Hunger Games (four movies released between 2012 and 2015) and Divergent (four movies between 2012 and 2017), the presence of the young action heroine has extended far beyond the boundaries of ‘young-adult dystopia’, giving birth to a ‘new type of revolutionary leader’ in its own right (Brown 2015, 170).

By using an intersectional approach, I aim to investigate the reasons for the rise of young female leads in traditionally male dominated narratives and the forms of their representations. I build on contributions on youth literacy and media that highlight how adolescents and adolescence get imbued with symbolic meaning (Wolf et al. 2010), ‘serving agendas that extend beyond the interests of youth’ (Petrone et al. 2015, 516). My research questions are the followings: if adolescence functions here as a metaphor, what is the specific meaning of female adolescents in the TV genres being considered? How are these figures of young warriors constructed? Can a precise politics of representation be identified? In order to answer these questions, ‘old’ TV series, such as La Femme Nikita (CTv, 1997-2011, Canada) and Alias (Abc, 2001-2006), are examined through discourse analysis and compared to the more recent The 100 (Cw, 2014), Orphan Black (Space, 2013-2017), and Hanna (Amazon Video, 2019).

Based on the result of the analysis presented in this contribution, I claim that a recurrent pattern is mobilized by sci-fi and action narratives centered on young female heroines, which does not apply to male characters: a young girl is trained by a man, or by an entire male system, in order to become a warrior or assassin, but this process paradoxically turns her into a ‘real’ woman. This is in line with previous analyses (e.g. Schubart, 2007), and shows that growing the adolescent stage, for young heroines, means developing a normative femininity, accepting limitations and responsibilities within the terms of their heterosexuality.

Main argument here is that TV productions such as The 100, Orphan Black and Hannah present groundbreaking elements in the construction of young female leaders, signaling that we have entered a new stage in the representation of warrior women in audiovisual products (Neroni 2005). My conclusion is that such stage mirrors the changes occurred over the last few years in the gender- relations order, changes that are characterized by the crucial role played by the teenagers, by their distinctive practices of relations and forms of political activism. From this point of view, therefore, the ‘girlification’ of sci-fi and action genres reflects a broader socio-political agenda.

Tumblr is an understudied social media site with a young, progressive, and queer user base of content creators. This study examines Tumblr posts about Here Comes Honey Boo Boo to understand the nature of Tumblr and the way a convergent culture that includes non-viewers negotiates a television show dependent on stereotypes. Discourses around authenticity, LGBTQ issues, and body acceptance resist the negative white trash connotations of the show, but this resistance is embedded in stereotypes around race, class, gender, sexuality, and geography. The result is a continuum in which users negotiate what the show means in how they use that show to communicate about other issues based on which axes of power they resist and uphold. This analysis gives insight into how online culture serves to reflect hegemonies without necessarily undermining them, how Tumblr memes serve to define the values of the site, and how an individual television show is co-opted into the online language of memes.