Fiercely Real?:Tyra Banks and the making of new media celebrity

This paper will examine former supermodel Tyra Banks as a contemporary “celebrity entrepreneur,” focusing on Banks’ recent shift from television persona to multimedia icon within a neoliberal popular culture. I argue that our contemporary new media environment, marked by convergent media texts, self-branding, and interactivity, provides an ideal space for Banks to produce and globally circulate her postfeminist star text. Through her websites, Facebook, and Twitter confessionals, Banks is able to successfully navigate the contradictory discourses that insist female celebrities be both “authentic” selves while maintaining a disciplined, hegemonic femininity that becomes legitimized and naturalized. I conclude that while Banks’ mobilization of a hypervisibility and sense of individual agency generates an authenticity that may resonate with her fans, she remains contained by the neoliberal and postfeminist discourses that allow her to have such a prominent Internet presence. Consequently, this paper serves to raise unexplored questions about the relationship between celebrity culture, postfeminist and neoliberal subjectivities, and new media

Beauty Culture in Post-Reform Vietnam: Glocalization or Homogenization?

This essay re-examines the global beauty culture and ideals as established by the West and continually re-imagined worldwide through three primary lenses of race, gender, and political economy. Based on this understanding, it then delves into how the beauty culture in Vietnam has been shaped and transformed since the country conducted economic reforms in 1986 and has become more integrated into the global economy today

REPRESENTATION, RACIALISATION AND RESPONSIBILITY: MALE ATHLETIC BODIES IN THE (BRITISH) SPORTS AND LEISURE MEDIA

The predominance of the male ‘Other’ on the pages of contemporary sport and leisure print media has become increasingly ordinary over the last decade or so. Many subjugated ethnic groups have utilised sport and leisure stages to challenge the fallacies of psychological and biological inferiority and other ill-founded vestiges of nineteenth-century bio-racist discourses (Carrington, 2002; Hylton, 2009; Messner, 1993). Evidently, whilst ‘black’ females remain underrepresented in media spaces (Knoppers and Elling, 2004), their male counterparts, particularly those of African-Caribbean heritage, have accessed the realm of the popular en masse (Carrington, 2002). The mere presence of these men no longer seems to threaten the status quo of modern Western social democracies; in fact, images of African-Caribbean males are often held as exemplars of neo-liberalism and its fetish for championing quasi-multiculturalism. Indeed, according to some, media consumers only have to open a magazine (Hylton, 2009), switch on the television (Carrington, 2002) or visit the cinema (Giardina, 2003) to experience “a bit of the Other”. Before one is falsely charmed by some gloriously liberating homily of absolute social improvement, it is important to consider the instrumentalism of these developments more critically. This paper therefore aims to address the implications of racialisation in the context of the sport and leisure media and its role in representing athletic bodies in highly stylised and particularised ways. It will be argued that the racialisation of ethnically differing athletic bodies, through modes of photographic and digital manipulation, delivers messages that disadvantage particular ethnic groups, whilst advantaging others. Throughout, racialisation is conceptualised as a process of “categorisation, a representational process of defining an Other, usually, but not exclusively, somatically” (Miles and Brown, 2003: p. 101). For the purpose of this paper, I employ this conception to foreground the negative implications of racialisation

The becoming of bodies : girls, media effects and body image.

The relations between women's bodies and images have long interested and occupied feminist theoretical and empirical work. Recently, much feminist research has focused on the relations between girls' and young women's bodies and images in “the media.” Underpinning much of this research, I argue, is an oppositional model of subject/object onto which bodies and images are mapped. Developing Deleuze's concept of becoming and exploring my own research with a small number of white British teenage girls, I develop an alternative model of the relations between bodies and images. I suggest that while the subject/object model relies upon a notion of media effects, an understanding of bodies as becoming opens up feminist research to consider the ways in which bodies are not separate to images but rather are known, understood and experienced through images. If feminist research takes seriously this conception of bodies as becoming, its task is to account for how bodies become through their relations with images; what becomings of bodies do images limit or extend

Women over 40, foreigners of color, and other missing persons in globalizing mediascapes: understanding marketing images as mirrors of intersectionality

Media diversity studies regularly invoke the notion of marketing images as mirrors of racism and sexism. This article develops a higher-order concept of marketing images as “mirrors of intersectionality.” Drawing on a seven-dimensional study of coverperson diversity in a globalizing mediascape, the emergent concept highlights that marketing images reflect not just racism and sexism, but all categorical forms of marginalization, including ableism, ageism, colorism, fatism, and heterosexism, as well as intersectional forms of marginalization, such as sexist ageism and racist multiculturalism. Fueled by the legacies of history, aspirational marketing logics, and an industry-wide distribution of discriminatory work, marketing images help to perpetuate multiple, cumulative, and enduring advantages for privileged groups and disadvantages for marginalized groups. In this sense, marketing images, as mirrors of intersectionality, are complicit agents in the structuration of inequitable societies

Feminist Editors and the New Girl Glossies:Fashionable Feminism or Just Another Sexist Rag?

Media critics and feminists have long criticized teen magazines for providing limited substance and promoting a traditional view of femininity. This article challenges this assumption by using a critical discourse analysis to examine the production of girl glossies. Through interviews with four New York teen magazine editors, I unpack some of the contradictions embedded in editors’ identifying as feminists while creating a cultural product often deemed anti-feminist. My findings suggest that editors combine practical strategies with a distinctively “third wave ethic” to navigate between corporate and cultural expectations in order to integrate a popular feminism into the magazine content. This third wave ethos however, tends to yield a conception of feminism as primarily a celebration of individual agency, neglecting a larger analysis of structural barriers and power relations. While editors have some success in refocusing teen magazines as sites for individual empowerment, I argue that this is not enough to truly empower teen girls and to challenge inequalities on a societal scale

\u3cem\u3eBataclanismo\u3c/em\u3e! Or, How Deco Bodies Transformed Postrevolutionary Mexico City

In the spring of 1925, Santa Anita\u27s Festival of Flowers seemed to follow its tranquil trend of previous years. The large displays of flowers, the selection of indias bonitas (as the contestants of beauty pageants organized in an attempt to stimulate indigenism were known) and the boat-rides on the Viga Canal, all communicated what residents of neighboring Mexico City had come to expect of the small pueblo in the Federal District since the Porfiriato: the respite of a peaceful pastoral, the link to a colorful past, and the promise that mexicanidad was alive and well in the campo. Unfortunately, wrote Manuel Rámirez Cárdenas of El Globo, the modern newspaper, the next day, this idyllic tradition was rudely interrupted by a group of audacious, scantily clad women. The culprits were actresses of Mexico City\u27s Lírico theater, who walked around Santa Anita\u27s streets in picaresque clothing —stage outfits that left little to the imagination, particularly in broad daylight—and upset visitors and campesinos alike. According to Cárdenas, abuelitas and mamás were shocked by the display, averting their eyes from the female spectacle in fear of el pecado mortal. Thankfully, for the mothers and grandmothers in the audience, the festival continued in predictable fashion after the initial uproar. Organizers continued with the traditional dances, and judges selected an india bonita from a pool of young, decente mestizo girls to represent the pueblo and the festival. Unbeknownst to the residents of rural Santa Anita, the daring actresses of El Lírico were part of a new phenomenon that had swept through Mexico City like wildfire, turned the entertainment world upside down, and pushed many to reconsider what constituted female beauty, decency, and lo mexicano. A few months earlier, on February 12th, a grand variety spectacle named Voilá Paris: La Ba-ta-clán premiered in Teatro Iris and instantly sent shock waves throughout the Mexican entertainment world and the larger metropolis. The show featured seminude and nude French actresses, who performed dances and acts that appeared to be a mix of classical ballet, Ziegfeld Follies chorus lines, and tableaux vivants. Within weeks, Mexican copycat productions capitalized on the enormous success of the show, triggering a new entertainment phenomenon named after the original production: Bataclanismo. It also launched a new kind of female star, the bataclana, who came to represent the erotic, and more dangerous, attributes of the flapper for Mexican audiences, and whose body became the site of contested and divergent notions of modernity. In this article, I explore bataclanismo as a normative discourse that reached far beyond the theater into the practice of everyday life. I do so to gauge the transition of changing ideals of femininity in Mexico from 1925 to 1935, and the influence these changes had on the development of urban space. Drawing on Elizabeth Grosz\u27 and Doreen Massey\u27s insights that place and gender are mutually constitutive, this article examines the articulation between the embodied city and changing gender norms in the wake of both the Mexican revolution and the advent of twentieth-century global capital. Analyzing these relationships from Judith Butler\u27s perspective of gender performance, especially as read through bodies, I argue that a new transnational aesthetic of feminine embodiment celebrated in bataclanismo influenced a distinct urban modernity and sociability in Mexico City. This new ideal female physique that stressed length, height, and androgyny—what I term a Deco body—helped to reconfigure Mexico City in terms of gender, space and race. It ushered in new gender ideals, helped visualize urban modernity, and bridged the gap between two divergent discourses that accompanied revolutionary reform, indigenismo and mestizaje, paving the way for a mestizo modernity

AlphaPilot: Autonomous Drone Racing

This paper presents a novel system for autonomous, vision-based drone racing combining learned data abstraction, nonlinear filtering, and time-optimal trajectory planning. The system has successfully been deployed at the first autonomous drone racing world championship: the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge. Contrary to traditional drone racing systems, which only detect the next gate, our approach makes use of any visible gate and takes advantage of multiple, simultaneous gate detections to compensate for drift in the state estimate and build a global map of the gates. The global map and drift-compensated state estimate allow the drone to navigate through the race course even when the gates are not immediately visible and further enable to plan a near time-optimal path through the race course in real time based on approximate drone dynamics. The proposed system has been demonstrated to successfully guide the drone through tight race courses reaching speeds up to 8m/s and ranked second at the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge.Comment: Accepted at Robotics: Science and Systems 2020, associated video at https://youtu.be/DGjwm5PZQT

The show must go on: making money glamorizing oppression

This article presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the glamorization of the courtesan image as proposed by Baz Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge. The film sparked the appearance of high-street fashion inspired by the image of the 19th-century Parisian courtesan, which prompted the authors to examine how and why such images might appeal to female consumers. The critical analysis reaches beyond the images themselves to identify and discuss the modes of circulation of such images, and their function in achieving both the material ends of capitalism (ever-increasing consumption and production) and the promotion of one of the system’s core values (patriarchy). Moreover, the article hopes to illustrate the possibilities offered by integrating cultural and structural analyses of current social phenomena