FSD Newsletter Fall 2003

The ICA conference in San Diego this year showcased many talented Scholars. FSD wishes to further applaud those individuals who have worked so hard to produce such compelling and valuable research. Following are half of the abstracts of the articles that were accepted by the FSD. The remainder of the abstracts will be published in the Spring 2004 Issue of Feminist Con/text.

The Other Other: The Chinese Peasant Girl in the Films of Zhang Yimou & Chen Kaige
Lynette Lim, Michigan State University
The early films of Chinese directors Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige have a recurring motif: the Chinese peasant girl. Feminist critics have asserted that Edward Said’s Orientalism theories have completely excluded gender from the equation. While Said has fluently articulated race and ethnic divides, he has neglected the intersections of gender and class within society. In the absence of an occidental or Western influence, the female is almost always considered to be of lesser social standing than a male of the same culture. And if that female hails from rural roots, she is on the bottom rungs of the cultural ladder. This article examines and analyzes, in an already Oriental context, the role and symbolism of the Chinese peasant girl in Zhang and Chen’s films and how it illustrates contemporary Chinese society today.

Has Feminism Caused a Wrinkle on the Face of Hollywood Cinema? A Tentative Appraisal of the 90's
Andrea Press, University of Illinois
This paper considers the question of what it means to discuss "feminist" representation in mainstream Hollywood cinema, and how the feminism of the last several decades has influenced representations in popular film. We also discuss the issue of gender in particular relationship to social class, and look at changes in the relationship of gender and class in recent cinematic representations.

Identity and Humor: Negotiating the Notion of Pleasure in South African Situation Comedy
Dorothy M. Roome, Towson University
The notion of incongruity in the establishment of certain relationships and situations can create laughter, but the creation of laughter is directly involved with understanding related to the class and cultural position or gender of the audience who negotiates its own meaning from that event. An ethnographic reception study is undertaken among thirteen focus groups of multicultural women after viewing two South African situation comedies. Cultural and ideological information supplied by the viewers is analyzed to explain their subjectivity. The groups included White, English and Afrikaans speaking, Hindu and Zulu women. The role of class, race, and gender as elements of democracy in the "New" South Africa connects to the subject and the social context indicating how consensus can be a variable and laughter can achieve a moment of cultural reconciliation.

Of Self-Hating Indians and Mindless Apes: Women and National Identity in Deepa Mehta’s Fire
Kumi Silva, University of Oregon
To underestimate the role of film in contemporary society is to ignore the historical influence that it has had in constructing identity, both of community and Self. The following paper looks at the film Fire, a 1996 release by Indian born Canadian film maker, Deepa Mehta. Specifically, the paper discusses the controversy surrounding a review of Fire in India’s renowned women’s magazine Manushi . It attempts to connect the various dialogues that arose on the South Asian Women’s Network (SAWNET) in reaction to the review and looks at the identities that were constructed both in denouncement and defense of the film. An analysis of the reactions from the members of SAWNET, who are women in and outside of India, both lesbian and heterosexual, highlight the complexity of claiming “authenticity” as Indians, especially Indian women, “outside” of India and the struggle to balance pastoralized tradition with new world (post)modernity.

The Smile of Mona Lisa: Race, Gender and the Shaping of Consumer Television in India
Usha Zacharias, Westfield State College
This paper examines the neocolonial discourses and desires that surrounded the birth of consumer television in India in the late 1980s by analyzing policy statements, advertisements, and popular responses to the medium. This historical period marked India’s transition from a state-led planned economy to its fuller integration into the global economic by 1991. I demonstrate how state-owned television as a commodity, as a medium, and as a new discourse of representation, played a significant role in transforming the ideologies of consumption and desire, rewriting gender and racial politics, and re-imagining the nation in ways that decisively departed from the postcolonial development agenda. Television was advertised through racially hybrid images that signified transnational masculine productive power and oriented desires towards westernization/ whiteness. The reception of the medium reflected anxieties that coalesced around westernization of national culture, gender modernization, and class conflict. These contradictions were partly resolved by constituting the “consuming family” as the legitimate citizen-subjects of the televisual nation, excluding classes and communities on whose behalf television was first introduced in India.

The Other Woman: Stunt Doubles Performing Women’s Work
Miranda J. Banks, UCLA
Stunt doubles perform the vast majority of the action sequences in most adventure-oriented programs on television. While a character might be adored for her looks, her wit, or her intelligence, it is her body, the body in action that that is the most beloved by many of the action hero’s fans. But the media’s coverage of the stars of these action programs, it is the star, not the double, who is celebrated as the strong, heroic performer.

The subtle erasure of the stunt double, or the downplaying of her role in the creation of the female action hero, is not unique. While the star is the primary actor in the role of the heroine, she does not necessarily play her in the moments of the program when the heroine is the most heroic. It is often the stunt double who animates the heroine, making her into the uniquely powerful woman that she is. What I wish to offer here is a study of the history of this simultaneous fascination with and erasure of the stunt double in the television production, within the text of these programs, with audiences through articles in the popular press, as well as with television scholars. While my point is not to cast blame, this analysis hopefully offers an examination of what virtually amounts to an unwritten conspiracy to negate the work of the stunt performer.

Letters to Ms.: Building a Feminist Community in the Borderlands of Women's Magazine Culture
Linnet N. Fawcett, Concordia University,Montreal, QC, Canada
This paper examines how readers of the American feminist magazine, Ms., negotiate belonging and build a sense of solidarity with other readers through their magazine’s extensive (hence unique, in the world of women’s magazines) Letters to the Editor section. Drawing on the findings of my textual analysis of 660 readers’ letters over a five-year period (1993-1998), this paper reveals how Ms.’s “writerly-readers” (Barthes, 1976) use their letters to engage in the on-going dialogue that is feminism and in so doing, forge connections to other readers. Positing that it is through epistolarity, not the shared act of reading, that this particular textual community is constituted, I question what it means to be part of a self-selecting community brought together out of allegiance to a cause, and an often conflicted “yearning for connected-ness” (Probyn, 1996). In drawing attention to the centrality of the Letter to the Editor in Ms., this paper aims not only to raise an awareness of the non-participatory reality of most women’s magazines, but to highlight how Ms.’s unusual way of addressing readers and of soliciting and featuring their correspondence compels and enables readers to become active participants in the making and shaping of the text. In discussing the methodological dilemmas encountered in undertaking this analysis of letters, this paper also raises our awareness of the need for feminist scholars to bring to light that which has traditionally remained hidden below the surface as we conduct our probings into the Communication field’s borderlands.

Sylvia on Sundays, Feminism on Fridays...
Nicole Jacqueline Maurantonio, University of Pennsylvania
Until the turn of the twentieth century, cartooning was male turf plain and simple. But when America finally proved ready for strong female personalities, that was precisely what female cartoonists delivered. Despite overarching similarities between many women cartoonists, who have incorporated a particular brand of humor distinctive from the “mainstream” (i.e. male-dominated) cartooning world, Nicole Hollander’s “Sylvia” offers a unique case study. “Sylvia,” named after the strip’s brassy main character, began within the frames of “The Feminist Funnies,” a weekly comic published in The Spokeswoman in the late 1970s. The strip’s move from Spokeswoman to magazines such as Mother Jones and Ms. and finally to national dailies such as the Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune tells the story of not only a comic strip, but a movement incorporating itself into a realm that historically marginalized women. “Sylvia” is a microcosm of developments simultaneously transpiring within the second-wave feminist movement.

International Women's Magazines -- A Local Reading
Yvonne Chi Wan Loong, National University of Singapore
The research aims to investigate how the international women’s magazines, ELLE, Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire, published in Hong Kong are read by local readers and how the women’s magazines become meaningful in readers’ daily lives. It is hoped that by having a better understanding of the (1) production of the magazines, (2) the content of the magazines as well as (3) the reading practices and appropriation of content of the readers, the possible roles of women’s magazines in the feminist project with a social change orientation can be identified.

Womanhood in Japanese Anime: A New Cultural Borderland to U.S. Gender Politics
Kukhee Choo, University of Texas, Austin
As an emerging field of popular culture, Japanese anime has been steadily entering the discourse of media studies in the U.S. as an alternative to the Hollywood film industry. This study will examine the portrayal of womanhood in Japanese anime to better understand the Japanese concept of womanhood. With the increasing amount of anime imported into the U.S., American viewers are exposed to images and narratives that are ridden with Japanese cultural values that may sometimes conflict with the western gender politic. Within the Japanese societal framework, the public sphere has been dominated by the male’s voice, including that of popular culture. However, since the emergence of the sh?o (girls) manga industry during the 1960s-1970s, the female manga artists and readers seemed to have created a sphere where they could possibly resist, subvert, and reappropriate the existing patriarchal ideology that constricted them within limited social participatory roles. Depiction of womanhood in manga and anime is important not only because of the breadth of its readership and viewership in Japan, but also because they may function as an Althusserian ideological state apparatus. Manga and anime as media can function as a vehicle in maintaining the Japanese’s own sense of womanhood, which may then become important tools into the insight into Japanese gender culture. I have selected the Japanese Fruits Basket television animation series because of its significance as a U.S. imported series that will be aired on Toonami in the near future. Through examining the female portrayals in anime texts, American viewers may develop a better understanding of the emerging cultural borderland of Japanese anime to the U.S. media.

Adolescent girls and media culture: Unpacking the politics of pleasure
Meenakshi Gigi Durham, University of Iowa
Teenage girls are a multi-million dollar market niche for media products, and the circulation of "teen media" texts are geared to specific constructions of femininity. The idea of pleasure is a contested concept in studies of girls’ reading of so-called teen media. In this paper, ethnographic field observations of teenaged girls’ peer group conversations about teen media are used to problematize and socially situate their pleasure in the texts. Pleasure is shown to be a complex term that addresses not only girls’ attraction to the ideologies of femininity encoded in the texts, but their resistance to dominant ideologies. The pleasure of resistance is a politically potent force that may open up the possibility of a critical feminist praxis among adolescent girls, if it is recognized as a beginning and not an endpoint.

Is There Gender Equality in Online Media? The Photo Analysis of the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics and the 2002 Pusan Asian Games Coverage
Jong Hyuk Lee, University of Missouri, Columbia
Yun Jung Choi, University of Missouri, Columbia The purpose of this study is to examine if gender bias exists in the U.S. and Korean online media. For this purpose, this study compared male photos and female photos presented by two countries’ online media coverage of the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympic Games and the 2002 Pusan Asian Games respectively. The collected male and female photos were analyzed in four ways: (1) how many photos were posted (2) how impressively the athletes were described in the photos (3) how importantly the photos were presented (4) which sports categories were more prominently covered according to gender.

The findings showed that there was an inequality between photos featuring male and female athletes in terms of frequency and sports categories. However, there was no significant discrimination between photos with male and female athletes in presenting importantly. Impressiveness of athletes in photos was not different between male and female in the U.S. online media, but difference was found in Korean online media.

The result of this study suggested that online media have a more potential of treating males and females equally compared with traditional media. However, this online media’s potential should be interpreted according to different cultural contexts.

Popular Feminism -- The Rebel with A Cause: A Study of the Korean TV Series, Viva Women (Yeoja Manse)
Bongsoo Park, University of Minnesota
The advancements of Korean women’s status have been attributed to modernization and westernization. Although women were encouraged to work in the 1970s and 1980s, women’s status was marginalized then and is still so in 2002. Since the end of the Cold War and, especially, the birth of second civilian government, Korean women’s status has been gradually changing. Democratization of the state made the rise of popular feminism possible. The study explores how cultural and political changes intersect. Popular culture, as a barometer of people’s sentiment expressed at a given time, resonates with the changes. As an example of popular feminism that captured women’s repressed wishes of reform of patriarchal society, a Korean television show Viva Women and its bulletin board messages are studied. While not inherently political, the messages express the repressed wish that has political implications and can help initiate collective activities that resist dominant consensus on womanhood.

Changing identities as we cross the borderlands: Communicatively negotiating life course transitions with spirit (work in progress)
Kathleen D. Clark, University of Akron
Patricia S. Hill, University of Akron Life course literature as well as that of women's spiritual development suggests that two significant transitions occur as a woman moves from late adolescence into adulthood and when she moves through menopause. This work in progress focuses on women's use of spirituality to help negotiate these personal borderlands. We wish to explore women's changing spiritual identities during such times of transition. Based on previous research, we contend that the communicative negotiation and management of transitions as reflected in changing understandings of spiritual identity can be seen in a woman's negotiation of social identities in flux as well as the resilience provided by more enduring intrapersonal identities. We believe that we can gain understanding into this phenomenon by observing communicative behaviors associated with it. We plan to conduct group and individual interviews using Sense-Making Methodology protocols, and then use Feminist Standpoint Theory and Sense-Making Methodology to analyze the interview material.

Schools without Patriarchy: A Reconceptualization of Our Current Educational System
Sara M. Mathis, University of New Mexico
The purpose of this study is to examine how our current educational system is rooted in patriarchy, examine the harmful impacts patriarchy has on our students, and reconceptualize the structure of our schools using feminist and anarchist principles. The presence of patriarchy is identified through the use of hierarchical structures, value of external criteria, and emphasis on obedience and deference to authority. Impacts of patriarchy include violating the integrity of students, teaching them to be "self-haters," and making them passive recipients of information. Using the three tenets of anarchism, liberty, equality, and solidarity and the feminist rhetorical options of desire, enfoldment, collective efforts, inherent value, and mystery, a new structure for our current educational system is created.

Whose Critical Pedagogy? Communication Education in the Postmodern 'Community'
Leda Cooks, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
This study examines the role of teachers and of pedagogy in developing students’ critical skills toward reflective and critical engagement as citizens in society. Two field studies serve as a framework for this analysis of the ways fieldwork can contextualize and make problematic the "vision" of critical pedagogy. Within this context, I locate power and empowerment within critical pedagogy to examine the ways in which the theory frames not only the struggle but who does the fighting and the site at which the battle occurs.

“We Were Allowed”: Investigating the Presence of a Bureaucratic Pentad in Women’s Maternity Leave Discourse
Rebecca Jean Meisenbach, Purdue University
Robyn V. Remke, Purdue University
Patrice M. Buzzanell, Purdue University
Meina Liu, Purdue University
Venessa A. Bowers, Purdue University
Cynthia E. Conn, Purdue University
Burkean pentadic mapping of maternity leave discourses suggests that women in pink-collar occupations primarily recreate an agency-dominated pentad that favors a bureaucratic managerial perspective. In particular, we found many examples of how the agency-agent ratio is articulated in the interviewees’ words. The women articulated companies, human relations departments, bosses, doctors, generalized others, and pregnant women as agents subservient to the bureaucratic means of setting up maternity leaves. However, there is some evidence of an alternative pentad and map in the discourses that aligns with feminist transformation processes. We offer an initial attempt at what one such alternative might look like, and suggest that some of these women may want to focus on an agent-agency ratio in which the mother has more control over maternity leave.

The Possibilities of Pedagogy and Philosophy:Fostering Gender Equity and Equality in the Communication Discipline
Laura C. Prividera, Bowling Green State University
This study utilized a feminist perspective to examine how communication teachers talked about gender issues in their introductory communication classes and displayed gender equity and equality in their pedagogical practices. The two primary methods of data collection were in-depth interviews and participant observation. Participants were recruited from seven academic institutions located in midwestern communities. Fifteen in-depth interviews were conducted and three hours of classroom time were observed for each study participant. The following six themes emerged through the data analysis process: (1) historical traditions, (2) course standardization, (3) patriarchal language, (4) neutral positioning, (5) authority, and (6) technological prowess. These themes revealed how gender was marginalized and minimized in the talk and teaching practices of many of my research participants who instructed basic courses. Such marginalization may perpetuate disparities in the academic experiences of male and female students taking introductory communication courses. Even though the preservation of white patriarchy was common in many research participants' talk and teaching practices, data were reported from two critically reflective teachers who disrupted patriarchal ideologies in their basic courses and as a consequence achieved greater gender equity and equality.

Promotion and Senior Women Faculty: A Study of the Status of Tenured Faculty Women
Janet Staiger, University of Texas, Austin
Patricia A. Stout, University of Texas, Austin
Nancy Jennings, University of Texas, Austin
In this study, we conducted a series of focus groups to learn how women tenured associate professors perceive their status as faculty women and their progress towards academic advancement to full professor. Questions explored career-related beliefs and practices, feelings about academic career progress, issues encountered while in the academy, and strategies used to manage these issues. Qualitative analysis of recurring themes as well as self-narratives of participants suggests that women associate professors are an overlooked or “forgotten” group. Evidence refutes the common wisdom in the academy that, if more women are hired at the junior levels, growth in the number of senior women faculty will happen with time. Women in the study expressed a sense of resignation and felt demoralized based on their experiences as assistant and associate professors in the academy. Recommendations to address the “accumulation of disadvantages” (Moore, 1987) are proposed.

Sisterdjs in the House: Electronic/Dance Music and Women Centered Spaces on the Net
Rebekah Farrugia, University of Iowa
This essay examines an alternate means by which women who engage in artistic endeavors create women-centered spaces to deal with male biases. Specifically, the paper addresses the role of women DJs and their positioning within electronic/dance music (hereafter, E/DM). First, I investigate the marginalization of women in E/DM DJ culture. Second, this paper looks specifically at the functions and purposes of the Sisterdjs listserv for its participants. Ultimately, I argue that the Sisterdjs listserv is an educating and encouraging space for its participants with no offline equivalent. My findings suggest that Sisterdjs is important to the identity construction of female DJs. Collectives such as this one provide support to women who are pursuing interests beyond the borders of their traditional gender roles. Such encouragement and reassurance works to break down beliefs in the necessity and naturalness of performing prescribed gender roles, both within and beyond the borders of E/DM communities.

The Spears Paradox: Binary Britney's Negotiation for Power among the Patriarchy, Feminism and Turn-of-the-Century Girl Culture
Hillary A. Lake, University of Oregon
Using political economic and feminist theories, this paper explores the operation of power and the extent to which mediated discourse about Britney Spears, including magazine and television samples, articulates ideologies associated with third-wave feminism’s girl culture. Through a seven-step approach to discourse analysis, six themes are identified in mediated discourse about Spears. These themes include: girl, woman, virgin, sex symbol, entertainer, and private person, which provide three avenues to Spears’ power: sexuality, economic clout, and ambiguity. Spears’ power, which is manifested in mediated discourse about her, articulates ideologies that are associated with girl culture through a web of contradictions. In other words, mediated discourse about Spears defines Spears paradoxically, while it expresses girl culture ideologies. Additionally, this research further verifies the need for continued studies of the girl culture movement and it’s relationship to the advancement of the feminist agenda.

The American Burqa and 'Blues Power': Sexuality and Empowerment of Women
Rodney A. Dunham, Tezukayama University
Stemming from an experience at a blues festival, this paper shows how women in the United States are forced to wear a burqa in the same way that African Americans have had to wear a veil since Emancipation. The circumstances surrounding the Civil War led to the birth of blues music, which was created to do the cultural work of an oppressed people. The same music can serve women to take back control of their sexuality and to gain empowerment to reverse the conditions of the American burqa. Two songs are offered as examples of the role the blues can play in asserting personal identity and revealing desires that include celebration of ones sexuality. By creating dialog and making connections, the blues reveals the hypocrisy of patriarchal society to be replaced by the multiplicity of real people.

'When It's Deep - You Know It': Sexuality, Liminality, and Hebrew in Corinne Allal's Pop Songs
Gilad Padva, Tel-Aviv University
Corinne Allal, one of the leading Israeli female singers and musicians, officially came-out to her audience in 2001, at the age of 46. Earlier, in her album "When It's Deep" (1996) she had performed her own original lyrics (and those of other songwriters) that included same-sex love manifestations. Her "unofficial" coming-out has been ignored by the Israeli media which have hardly related to her sexual identity although her lesbianism was a kind of "open secret" among journalists, musicians and the many of her female and male, straight and lesbian fans who have identified with her messages for many years. Significantly, this erotic knowledge was manifested in her album "When It's Deep" not only in the texts themselves but also in the subtexts, double and subtle meanings, alternative presentation, and particularly in the sophisticated linguistic manipulations of Hebrew, a gender grammatical language that "frames" the speaker's gender and sexuality.

Negotiating Boy Culture: Young Women Working in College Radio
Ellen Riordan, Gustavus Adolphus College
Over the last two decades college radio has become commodified in various ways, resulting in two identifiable trends at specific college stations: standardization and professionalization. This essay suggests that these two trends have affected feminist cultural production by creating an andocentric climate, silencing young women at college radio stations. Relying primarily on interviews with women working at four different college stations in the US, and applying a feminist political economic theoretical framework, this essay highlights and interprets their experiences working in college radio. Throughout the course of this project, the young women interviewed demonstrated two distinct reactions to commodification occurring at these stations. These reactions are significant because they point to an important legacy of Riot Grrrl. Women who self identified as having a Riot Grrrl feminist sensibility responded in more nuanced, informed and critical ways than women who did not claim such an identity.

Instant Identity: Girls, Adolescence and Negotiation of Identity in the New Culture of Instant Messaging
Shayla M. Thiel, University of Iowa
Recent studies show that millions of adolescent girls in the past few years have turned to a relatively new real-time communication technology, Instant Messaging, as a primary means of communication with their peers. This raises intriguing questions about how adolescent girls – a group that historically was placed at the margins of study – may use Instant Messaging to negotiate and articulate identity at a particularly turbulent time in their lives. This preliminary study uses the qualitative methods of interview and narrative analysis to investigate this phenomenon with a framework grounded in poststructuralist feminist theory and cultural studies views of identity construction. Its findings suggest adolescent girls have come up with creative uses for the technology that are at once empowering to them but also suggest adherence to patriarchal cultural norms.

“Women Were in the Forefront as Always”: Analysis of Three Middle Eastern On-line Newspaper Sites
Johanna L. Cleary, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Given that nearly 80 percent of all Internet content appears in English, it is important to know what kind of images are placed on English language, Middle Eastern-originated, media sites. Among the most important issues examined there are those concerning the status and rights of women. Using discourse analysis, this paper examines three English-language newspaper websites from three politically different Middle Eastern countries – Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia - to see how women are portrayed. This paper examines from a feminist perspective how women are portrayed on these Internet sites and extrapolates from the images some observations about the status of women in those countries.

The review of the Jordan Times, the Gulf News and the Arab News found that there were three major ways in which women were most frequently portrayed: (1) as victims, (2) as “angels of mercy,” and (3) as increasingly important to development of economic assets of the region. When female authority figures were represented, they were generally members of royal families and were providing either commentary on the victimization of women by the Israelis or were leaders of relief efforts aimed at helping these victims.

Military Metaphors, Masculine Modes, and Orientalist Others
Radhika E. Parameswaran, Indiana University
Analyzing the rhetoric of trade publications that target journalism professionals in the United States, this paper examines the ways in which journalists and editors interpreted their experiences in producing news narratives on September 11 for their audiences. Conducting a feminist and semiotic analysis of stories that appeared in the American Journalism Review, Columbia Journalism Review, Communicator, Broadcast and Cable, and Quill, the paper argues that journalists’ public memories of their work relied on masculine metaphors of military and sport, reproduced Orientalist images of Muslim men, and privileged empiricist tasks of knowledge production over complex processes of internal reflection and historical contextualization. Exploring the reasons for such a masculinist construction of the profession, the analysis will situate the profession of journalism within other discourses of masculine capability and public ignorance of the Muslim world. Finally, fleshing out the implications of the analysis for pedagogy, the paper will offer recommendations for the training of future journalists in the classroom.

Feminist Scholarship Division Panel Session:
Manufacturing Post-feminism:Race, Youth Cultures, and the Boundaries Between Feminism and Post-feminism in American Mass Media

Participant(s):
1. Angie C. Beatty, University of Michigan
2. Sarah B. Crymble, University of Michigan
3. Susan J. Douglas, University of Michigan
4. Patricia Kim-Rajal, University of Michigan
5. Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, University of Michigan

Ever since October 1982, when the New York Times Magazine featured an article titled “Voices From the Post-Feminist Generation,” a term was coined, and the women of America have heard ever since, through multiple media outlets, that we are in a post-feminist age. What is post-feminism, and what role have various media forms played in circulating and naturalizing this construct as the new common sense about women’s status in the United States? And how is post-feminism represented to different groups of women, through different media forms, by age, race and ethnicity? We see post-feminism as a site where the flows between the boundaries of anti-feminism and feminism are publicly negotiated. The recently established program at the University of Michigan on Gender, Media and Social Change is paying special attention to the ongoing social construction of post-feminism, and especially to the way media discourses, often under the guise of female empowerment, mask the persistence of a sexual double standard, the persistence of racial stereotyping, and the persistence of efforts to re-domesticate women by insisting that their place, first and foremost, remains in the home and subservient to men.

This proposed panel will examine how niche marketing to particular groups of women—African American fans of female rap artists, Latina viewers of telenovelas, adolescent fans of youth oriented programming like Dawson’s Creek, and mothers—all use the discourse of empowerment, individualism, choice, and post-feminism (women have achieved equality so it is time to move on) to sell age-old, often retrograde stereotypes about women’s proper place. These papers explore the traffic between dominant white media fare and that geared to women of color, and between youth markets and those designed for older women. Thus we are interested in how the boundaries between different niche markets divide women by race, age and class, and yet work together to contain and coopt the challenges posed by feminism. And these papers argue that the seemingly most banal or innocent or peripheral media fare play a central, crucial role in the weekly and monthly engineering of consent around an acceptance of post-feminism as the only possible subjective stance and political position for women to inhabit in the early 21st century.

Feminist Scholarship Division Panel Session:
MAPping Feminist Borderlands through Global and Local Womentoring in the Academy: Feminist Insights from Intercultural, International, Media, and Organizational Communication Scholars for Creating Gender Equity in Communication and Media Studies
(Jointly Sponsored with Admin)

Participant(s):
1. Paige P. Edley, Bowling Green State University (Chair)
2. Patrice M. Buzzanell, Purdue University
3. Carolyn M. Byerly, University of Maryland
4. Cynthia Carter, Cardiff University
5. Patricia Geist-Martin, San Diego State University
6. Annika Hylmo, Loyola Marymount University
7. Erika Kirby, Creighton University
8. Laura Lengel, Bowling Green State University
9. Noemi Marin, Florida Atlantic University
10. Emily A. Monago, Bowling Green State University
11. Victoria Newsom, Bowling Green State University
12. Julie Lynn Parenteau, Bowling Green State University
13. Laura C. Prividera, Bowling Green State University
14. Linda L. Putnam, Texas A&M University
15. Karen Ross, Coventry University
16. Sheida Shirvani, Ohio University, Zanesville
17. Alice Tomic, Richmond American International University in London, England
18. Paaige K. Turner, Saint Louis University
19. Jennifer F. Wood, Towson University

In this interactive roundtable session, we explore the importance of feminist womentoring in the academy at the local level and the imperatives of international womentoring with women around the world. Within and among simultaneous roundtable conversations, this group of feminist intercultural, international, media, and organizational communication scholars seek to dialogue about how we can womentor the up-and-coming women scholars, especially our sisters in developing nations and in the lower economic regional colleges and traditionally African American colleges in the developed nations. This interactive session will not consist of paper presentations but rather will provide an opportunity for roundtable participants and audience members to engage the questions posed at the end of this proposal concerning feminist womentoring of female faculty and graduate students around the world. The imperative guidance of women through the stages of their academic careers was highlighted in the findings of the Media Associations Project’s (MAP) initial stage of an international study of men’s and women’s experiences in the academy. MAP found a lack of mentoring networks for women scholars, especially women of color, to be a significant barrier to gender equity in communication and media studies departments.

The rationale for this ICA panel is to advance MAP’s goals to the level of activism in the form of guiding young women’s academic careers through feminist womentoring. The foci of womentoring include challenging the patriarchal structures and policies that govern work-family balance and sexual harassment, as we seek to tear down the glass walls and ceilings of discrimination that constrain and marginalize multiple voices, including discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, marital status, and age. The purpose of womentoring is not only to guide women who are at various phases of their academic careers, but also to open up avenues for publishing and to encourage feminist and gender studies scholarship within communication and media studies. Moreover, we seek to educate college and university administrators and the legislative boards of ICA, NCA, MeCSSA, AEJMC, etc., to break down the barriers of inequity in our discipline and in higher education in general.

Through dialogue we seek to describe the meanings and interpretations of feminist womentoring as well as the potential benefits this form of guidance has over more traditional mentoring means. Panelists represent both dominant and marginalized voices, including multiple religions, races, ethnicities, marital status, and sexual orientation. We are mothers and daughters. Most importantly, we are all sisters in a male dominated profession in which we situate ourselves within multiple political positions and geographical locations.

Participants from the US, UK, Southeastern Europe, Middle East, and South Asia will share experiences and ideas about ways in which they have engaged in feminist womentoring, received this type of guidance, and how we can incorporate womentoring in our goals and missions of feminist organizing practices in ICA and our other national and international communication and media studies organizations.

Several questions will be addressed during this interactive session:

1. How can we as feminist womentors reach out to women (and men) in developing countries to aid in their scholarly development?
2. How can we reach across the digital divide to encompass those without access?
3. How can feminist womentoring move beyond more traditional means of mentoring to benefit marginalized women?
4. How can womentoring achieve our goals of gender equity as part of our university commitments, service, and tenure?
5. How do we mentor women who choose not to remain in academe?
6. How do we mentor women for critical moments such as interviews and tenure review?

The roundtable participants welcome all individuals, representing multiple and diverse voices, to participate and generate questions, ideas, and insights into global and local feminist womentoring in the communication discipline and the academy.

Democratic participation and public access broadcasting: Caller Perspectives on Election Call
Karen Ross, Coventry University
There has been much recent discussion about the changing nature of ‘the public sphere’ with the relatively new genre of RealityTV being viewed as a space in which the public can at least perform, if not always engage in meaningful debate. This paper considers the perspectives of callers to a political talk show – Election Call – in terms of why they call in, what they think about their interactions with politicians and how they regard the programme’s potential to constitute a public sphere. It also looks at the gendered aspects of caller experiences and beliefs in order to tease out if gender has any influence on the public’s practice of politics. The programme – Election Call – is a BBC production which has been broadcasting since 1974, going out simultaneously on radio and TV (and the web for 2001), in the days immediately preceding the British general election. I argue that whilst callers mostly felt very positive about the experience of appearing on the show and having the opportunity to put their point of view, and believed that Election Call fulfilled an important democratic function, they were much more negative in their assessment of their interactions with politicians, believing that it continues to be difficult to get a straight answer out of our elected members.

Feminist Scholarship Division Panel Session:
Of Gendered Bodies, Politics and Global Spaces
Participant(s):
1. Radha S. Hegde, New York U (Chair)
2. Cynthia Carter, Cardiff University
3. Radha S. Hegde, New York University
4. Sujata Moorti, Old Dominion University
5. Radhika E. Parameswaran, Indiana University
6. Angharad N. Valdivia, University of Illinois

The changing global landscape has given rise to new cultural formations and social practices that have serious consequences for feminist cultural studies scholarship. Feminist scholarship has always paid critical attention to epistemological issues in the hope that the doing of scholarship reflects feminist political aspirations. It seems appropriate, even pressing , to partake in that type of stock taking and self reflection right now. This panel is designed to advance a conversation about emerging sites of feminist inquiry.

While the dynamics of globalization and the time-space compression have accelerated the easy flow of capital and technology, it has at the same time exacerbated older forms of exploitation and oppression. With the shifting axes of power, the very fabric of everyday life has faced some interesting changes which need to be examined. Globalization has thrown static views of culture, communication and identity into crisis. The challenge that confronts us is to expand research and broaden the theoretical scope of feminism to unravel the layers of visible and invisible circuits of power. In order to do so, we need to problematize cultural practices and performative routines that write and overwrite the female body in multiple sites across the globe.

The female body is what recedes from view both materially and discursively. How do we as feminist scholars perceive and analyze these sites where women’s bodies are being constructed and denied simultaneously? The motivation to study the receding subject of feminist inquiry is what brings this panel together. Together we hope to address issues concerning how women’s bodies are constructed, appropriated within media representations, historical narratives, theoretical tracts, institutional discourses and in everyday talk of social actors. Through an examination of these sites, the panel will collectively build an argument for the multiple ways in which the female body/subject is denied presence.

The pressing global scenario demands a new feminist outlook, one with an attitude to use Probyn’s phrase. As feminists we cannot lose sight of the project – the goal is to explain and expose the workings of a complex network of connotations, histories and power structures that both colonize and debilitate women’s lives world-wide. By bringing together research conducted in diverse sites on thematically related question of the receding female body, we hope to stimulate a discussion about the directions of feminist inquiry in communication.

The panelists will present their current work that together will cover a spectrum of research that collectively demonstrate the crisis that continues to erupt in new formations around the female body. Women’s bodies will become the point of departure to address the larger question of what constitutes research that is committed to a feminist vision of transformation. By discussing research concerning the politics of gendered bodies in global sites, we hope to advance a dialogue on new borders and directions of feminist cultural studies in a global context. We hope the presentations on cutting edge themes will be a catalyst to address directions and challenges facing feminist research.