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Gender and Digital Culture offers a unique contribution to the theoretical and methodological understandings of digital technology as inherently gendered and classed. The silences within, through and from the systems we experience every day, create inequalities that are deeply affective and constitute very real forms of algorithmic vulnerability. The book explores these lived and mundane algorithmic vulnerabilities across three interrelated research projects. These focus on recent digital phenomena including sexting, selfies and wearables, and particular decision-making systems used in health, education and social services. Central to this book are the themes of irreconcilability and the datalogical. It makes the case that feminism and gender politics have become increasingly irreconcilable with not only long-running debates around representation and embodiment, but also with conceptions of the technological, conceptions of the user and of the systems themselves. In keeping with longstanding feminist scholarship, these irreconcilabilities can be productive and generative; they can be used to interrogate the power politics of digital culture. By studying the lived and routine elements of digital technologies, Gender and Digital Culture asks about the many convolutions that are held together through the everyday use of these technologies, and the implications for how gender and technology are approached, discussed and theorised.
This book explores the practices and the politics of relatable femininity in intimate digital social spaces. Examining a GIF-based digital culture on Tumblr, the author considers how young women produce relatability through humorous, generalisable representations of embarrassment, frustration, and resilience in everyday situations. Relatability is examined as an affective relation that offers the feeling of sameness and female friendship amongst young women. However, this relation is based on young women’s ability to competently negotiate the ‘feeling rules’ that govern youthful femininity. Such classed and racialised feeling rules require young women to perfect the performance of normalcy: they must mix self-deprecation with positivity; they must be relatably flawed but not actual ‘failures’. Situated in debates about postfeminism, self-representation and digital identity, this book connects understandings of digital visual culture to gender, race, and class, and neoliberal imperatives to perform the ‘right feelings’. Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, and media studies.
This book explores the controversial social media practices engaged in by girls and young women, including sexual self-representations on social network sites, sexting, and self-harm vlogs. Informed by feminist media and cultural studies, Dobson delves beyond alarmist accounts to ask what it is we really fear about these practices.
Emphasizing an intersectional and transnational approach, this collection examines how social media and digital technologies have impacted the sphere of LGBTQ activism, advocacy, education, empowerment, identity, protest, and self-expression. This edited collection adopts a critical and cultural studies perspective to examine queer cyberculture and presence. Through the lens of representation and identity politics, it explores topics such as race, disability, and colonialism, alongside sexuality and gender. The collection examines how digital technologies have made queer cultural production more expansive and how such technological affordances and platforms have enabled queer cultural practices to be more transformational. Bringing together contributors and case studies from different countries, the contributions grapple with the tensions that arise when visibility, hiddenness, renditions of the self, and collective contractions of identity must be negotiated in a variety of global contexts and explores this influence on contemporary political identities. This book provides an essential introduction to LGBTQ digital cultures for students, researchers, and scholars of media, communication, and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to activists wanting to learn more about the transformative potential of digital media and technology in LGBTQ advocacy and empowerment around the globe.
Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture explores the recent rise in different types of men using digital media to sexualise their bodies. It argues that the male body has become a key site in contemporary culture where neoliberalism’s hegemony has been both secured and contested since 2008. It does this by looking at four different case studies: the celebrity male nude leak; the rise of young men sharing images of their muscular bodies on social media; RuPaul's Drag Race body transformational tutorial, and the rise of chemsex. It finds that on the one hand digital media has enabled men to transform their bodies into tools of value-creation in economic contexts where the historical means they have relied on to create value have diminished. On the other it has also allowed them to use their bodies to form intimate collective bonds during a moment when competitive individualism continued to be the privileged mode of being in the world. It therefore offers a unique contribution not only to the field of digital cultural studies but also to the growing cultural studies literature attempting to map the historical contradictions of the austerity moment.
Announcing presidential decisions, debating social issues, disputing the latest developments in television shows, and sharing funny memes—Twitter has become a space where ordinary citizens and world-leaders alike share their thoughts and ideas. As a result, some argue Twitter has leveled the playing field, while others reject this view as too optimistic. This has led to an ongoing debate about the platform’s democratizing potential and whether activity on Twitter engenders change or merely magnifies existing voices. Constructing Digital Cultures explores these issues and more through an in-depth examination of how Twitter users collaborate to create cultural understandings. Looking closely at how user-generated narratives renegotiate dominant ideas about gender and race, it provides insight into the nature of digital culture produced on Twitter and the platform’s potential as a virtual public sphere. This volume investigates arenas of discussion often seen on Twitter—from entertainment and popular culture to politics, social justice issues, and advertising—and looks into how members of ethnic minority groups use and relate to the platform. Through an in-depth examination of individual expressions, the different kinds of dialogue that characterize the platform, and various ways in which people connect, Constructing Digital Cultures provides a critical, empirically based consideration of Twitter’s potential as an inclusive, egalitarian public sphere for the modern age.
Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission argues that despite the prevalence of generational narratives within feminism, the technical processes through which knowledge is transmitted across generations remain unexplored. Taking Bernard Stiegler's concept of the already-there as its starting point the book considers how the politics of transmission operates within digital culture. It argues that it is necessary to re-orient feminism's political project within what is already-there so that it may respond to an emergent feminist tradition. Grounded in the author's work collecting and interpreting the music-making heritage of the UK Women's Liberation Movement, it explores how digital technologies have enabled empassioned amateurs to make 'archives' within the first decade of the 21st century. The book reflects on what is technically and politically at stake in the organization and transmission of digital artifacts, and explores what happens to feminist cultural heritage when circuits shut down, stall or become diverted.
Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture is an introductory text for students specialising in gender studies. The truly interdisciplinary and intergenerational approach bridges the gap between humanities and the social sciences, and it showcases the academic and social context in which gender studies has evolved. Complex contemporary phenomena such as globalisation, neo-liberalism and 'fundamentalism' are addressed that stir up new questions relevant to the study of culture. This vibrant and wide-ranging collection of essays is essential reading for anyone in need of an accessible but sophisticated guide to the very latest issues and concepts within gender studies. 'Doing Gender in Media, Art, and Culture' is an indispensable introduction to third wave feminism and contemporary gender studies. It is international in scope, multidisciplinary in method, and transmedial in coverage. It shows how far feminist theory has come since Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex and marks out clearly how much still needs to be done.'........Hayden White, Professor of Historical Studies, Emeritus, University of California, and Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University, US
Contemporary Art and Digital Culture analyses the impact of the internet and digital technologies upon art today. Art over the last fifteen years has been deeply inflected by the rise of the internet as a mass cultural and socio-political medium, while also responding to urgent economic and political events, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. This book looks at how contemporary art addresses digitality, circulation, privacy, and globalisation, and suggests how feminism and gender binaries have been shifted by new mediations of identity. It situates current artistic practice both in canonical art history and in technological predecessors such as cybernetics and net.art, and takes stock of how the art-world infrastructure has reacted to the internet’s promises of democratisation. An invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of contemporary art – especially those studying history of art and art practice and theory – as well as those working in film, media, curation, or art education. Melissa Gronlund is a writer and lecturer on contemporary art, specialising in the moving image. From 2007–2015, she was co-editor of the journal Afterall, and her writing has appeared there and in Artforum, e-flux journal, frieze, the NewYorker.com, and many other places.
"This book examines the complexity of World of Warcraft from a variety of perspectives, exploring the cultural and social implications of the proliferation of ever more complex digital gameworlds.The contributors have immersed themselves in the World of Warcraft universe, spending hundreds of hours as players (leading guilds and raids, exploring moneymaking possibilities in the in-game auction house, playing different factions, races, and classes), conducting interviews, and studying the game design - as created by Blizzard Entertainment, the game's developer, and as modified by player-created user interfaces. The analyses they offer are based on both the firsthand experience of being a resident of Azeroth and the data they have gathered and interpreted.The contributors examine the ways that gameworlds reflect the real world - exploring such topics as World of Warcraft as a "capitalist fairytale" and the game's construction of gender; the cohesiveness of the gameworld in terms of geography, mythology, narrative, and the treatment of death as a temporary state; aspects of play, including "deviant strategies" perhaps not in line with the intentions of the designers; and character - both players' identification with their characters and the game's culture of naming characters." -- BOOK JACKET.