Women looking at women, women looking at men

Akane Kanai, an MSc student at the LSE’s Gender Institute studying Gender, Media and Culture. Here she muses over differing utilisations and perceptions of masculine and feminine beauty, the diverging experiences of presenting the self and experiencing the presentation of others

The hypervisibility and discourses of 'wokeness' in digital culture

From its origins in Black grassroots activist and political consciousness raising spaces, the term ‘woke’ has shifted in its significance. Now broadly synonymous with statements on social media that are assumed to indicate an investment in tackling social injustices, specifically, antiblackness and racial injustice, it has also become the subject of heated critique. Using key case studies such as the ‘I take responsibility’ and Instagram ‘blackout’ campaigns of 2020, this commentary clarifies how the cultural conventions and affordances of both social media and celebrity have shaped conceptualizations of ‘wokeness’. In its marketization, we suggest that ‘wokeness’ goes beyond the associations of progressive politics that advertisers attempt to attach to brands. Rather, we suggest that ‘wokeness’ is also conceptualized in terms of the quality of individual practices connected with antiracism and left politics more broadly. Observing that desires for ‘wokeness’ underpin its visibility and contestation, we explore the affective entanglements of ‘wokeness’ with whiteness, neoliberal identity culture, genres of social media content, and perceived expressions of sincerity. In doing so, we theorize the digital development, hyper-visibility, and marketization of ‘wokeness’, to grapple with how internet, consumer, and celebrity culture is implicated in contemporary understandings and expectations of social justice work

The hypervisibility and discourses of ‘wokeness’ in digital culture

From its origins in Black grassroots activist and political consciousness raising spaces, the term ‘woke’ has shifted in its significance. Now broadly synonymous with statements on social media that are assumed to indicate an investment in tackling social injustices, specifically, antiblackness and racial injustice, it has also become the subject of heated critique. Using key case studies such as the ‘I take responsibility’ and Instagram ‘blackout’ campaigns of 2020, this commentary clarifies how the cultural conventions and affordances of both social media and celebrity have shaped conceptualizations of ‘wokeness’. In its marketization, we suggest that ‘wokeness’ goes beyond the associations of progressive politics that advertisers attempt to attach to brands. Rather, we suggest that ‘wokeness’ is also conceptualized in terms of the quality of individual practices connected with antiracism and left politics more broadly. Observing that desires for ‘wokeness’ underpin its visibility and contestation, we explore the affective entanglements of ‘wokeness’ with whiteness, neoliberal identity culture, genres of social media content, and perceived expressions of sincerity. In doing so, we theorize the digital development, hyper-visibility, and marketization of ‘wokeness’, to grapple with how internet, consumer, and celebrity culture is implicated in contemporary understandings and expectations of social justice work

The creativity of the meaning of the dream in PCAGIP Dreamwork : How a horror nightmare turned into a friendship dream

本研究では、夢PCAGIPにおいて夢提供者自身が、夢の体験過程が促進された場面を特定し、そこでの相互作用及び意味の生成過程について検討し考察した。夢PCAGIPは8名のメンバーで行われ、Participant-Observer方式を採用した。すなわち、「被験者」が同時に「実験者」であった。ワークの結果、夢提供者自身の体験が促進された場面は全13場面であり、それらの場面における体験の促進要因は6つにパターン化された。さらに、これら6つのパターンから4つの観点が導き出された。それらは、夢の精緻化、夢の拡張と再構成化、追体験と交差による夢の文脈の変化、現実との交差による夢の意味の創造であった。In this study of the PCAGIP Dreamwork process, the dreamer identified instances where the experiencing of the dream was carried forward. The interaction and generation of meaning in these instances were examined and discussed. PCAGIP Dreamwork was conducted with eight members using a participant-observer methodology, where the subject of the study was also the researcher. As a result of the PCAGIP Dreamwork process, 13 instances were identified where dream experiencing was carried forward. The authors specified 6 patterns of interaction between the dreamer and the group member who was interacting at the moment when each of these 13 instances were observed. Furthermore, 4 observations were derived from the 6 patterns; these include refining the dream, extending and reconstituting the dream, the change in the dream context as a result of re-experiencing and crossing, and creation of the dream\u27s meaning by crossing the dream and reality

The whole blood transcriptional regulation landscape in 465 COVID-19 infected samples from Japan COVID-19 Task Force

「コロナ制圧タスクフォース」COVID-19患者由来の血液細胞における遺伝子発現の網羅的解析 --重症度に応じた遺伝子発現の変化には、ヒトゲノム配列の個人差が影響する--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-08-23.Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a recently-emerged infectious disease that has caused millions of deaths, where comprehensive understanding of disease mechanisms is still unestablished. In particular, studies of gene expression dynamics and regulation landscape in COVID-19 infected individuals are limited. Here, we report on a thorough analysis of whole blood RNA-seq data from 465 genotyped samples from the Japan COVID-19 Task Force, including 359 severe and 106 non-severe COVID-19 cases. We discover 1169 putative causal expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) including 34 possible colocalizations with biobank fine-mapping results of hematopoietic traits in a Japanese population, 1549 putative causal splice QTLs (sQTLs; e.g. two independent sQTLs at TOR1AIP1), as well as biologically interpretable trans-eQTL examples (e.g., REST and STING1), all fine-mapped at single variant resolution. We perform differential gene expression analysis to elucidate 198 genes with increased expression in severe COVID-19 cases and enriched for innate immune-related functions. Finally, we evaluate the limited but non-zero effect of COVID-19 phenotype on eQTL discovery, and highlight the presence of COVID-19 severity-interaction eQTLs (ieQTLs; e.g., CLEC4C and MYBL2). Our study provides a comprehensive catalog of whole blood regulatory variants in Japanese, as well as a reference for transcriptional landscapes in response to COVID-19 infection

DOCK2 is involved in the host genetics and biology of severe COVID-19

「コロナ制圧タスクフォース」COVID-19疾患感受性遺伝子DOCK2の重症化機序を解明 --アジア最大のバイオレポジトリーでCOVID-19の治療標的を発見--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-08-10.Identifying the host genetic factors underlying severe COVID-19 is an emerging challenge. Here we conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) involving 2, 393 cases of COVID-19 in a cohort of Japanese individuals collected during the initial waves of the pandemic, with 3, 289 unaffected controls. We identified a variant on chromosome 5 at 5q35 (rs60200309-A), close to the dedicator of cytokinesis 2 gene (DOCK2), which was associated with severe COVID-19 in patients less than 65 years of age. This risk allele was prevalent in East Asian individuals but rare in Europeans, highlighting the value of genome-wide association studies in non-European populations. RNA-sequencing analysis of 473 bulk peripheral blood samples identified decreased expression of DOCK2 associated with the risk allele in these younger patients. DOCK2 expression was suppressed in patients with severe cases of COVID-19. Single-cell RNA-sequencing analysis (n = 61 individuals) identified cell-type-specific downregulation of DOCK2 and a COVID-19-specific decreasing effect of the risk allele on DOCK2 expression in non-classical monocytes. Immunohistochemistry of lung specimens from patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia showed suppressed DOCK2 expression. Moreover, inhibition of DOCK2 function with CPYPP increased the severity of pneumonia in a Syrian hamster model of SARS-CoV-2 infection, characterized by weight loss, lung oedema, enhanced viral loads, impaired macrophage recruitment and dysregulated type I interferon responses. We conclude that DOCK2 has an important role in the host immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection and the development of severe COVID-19, and could be further explored as a potential biomarker and/or therapeutic target

Chapter III. Thinking beyond the Internet as a Tool: Girls’ Online Spaces as Postfeminist Structures of Surveillance

Introduction Mary Celeste Kearney argues that girls’ media studies scholarship, as part of its feminist underpinnings, understands girls to be “powerful agential beings.” Accordingly, it can be observed that within scholarship, internet technologies like social network sites (SNS) and blogs are optimistically constructed as a potential instrument by which girls control their identity or a kind of territory that girls can claim as their own. However, I suggest that this construction of “empowe..

Sociality and classification::Reading gender, race, and class in a humorous meme

This article is concerned with how the gendered, raced, and classed practices of readership of a humorous meme on Tumblr organize forms of sociality and belonging along these lines. Based on the anonymous Tumblr blog, WhatShouldWeCallMe, the meme narrates feelings and reactions related to youthful, feminine, Western “everyday” experience through the use of captions and Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images. Drawing on the feminist Cultural Studies tradition of text-reader analysis as well as New Literacy Studies approaches to literacy, I suggest the practices of readerly participation in the meme require a social rather than individual set of competencies and knowledges. I propose “spectatorial girlfriendship” as a term encompassing how the texts of the meme require the reader to operationalize gendered, classed, and raced classificatory knowledges and construct social forms of commonality on this basis. In the meme, the reader “gets” the joke by aligning an ostensibly incongruous GIF and caption, remixing and matching existing classifications of people, bodies, and objects. I demonstrate how spectatorial girlfriendship as a readerly lens arranges, transacts, and interacts gender, class, and race in multiple ways, indexing social inequalities without recognizing them as such. Bodies in the GIFs become “stock” images, used for selective resignification. Consequently, while offering pleasures of an understood readerly feminine commonality, participation in the meme is structured unequally, going beyond the reader’s ability to decipher the GIF and caption in the posts. The meme privileges an ideal reader constructed through postrace, postfeminist “theories” of the useability of gender, race, and class

‘I can live without you’: Self-branding as individuation in young Chinese women’s transnational mobilities

Peer reviewed: TrueIn recent years, significant numbers of young middle-class Chinese women have moved abroad to construct an individual ‘biography’ beyond the unequal gendered expectations of the post-reform context. This article reports on a 2019 qualitative study combining interviews and visual analysis of WeChat and Instagram posts to consider how young Chinese women temporarily living in Australia maintain relationships with upper middle class family who have supported their daughters’ overseas ventures. In the wake of sweeping privatization which has encouraged parents to invest in their only children as their ‘only hopes’, online media has allowed parents to be ‘pervasively present’ for distant daughters in these transnational movements. We document participants’ curated self-branding for family on WeChat as a means of managing and negotiating this sometimes interventionist presence. Our participants’ practices reveal a complex juggling act: managing individual desires to optimize the overseas experience but carefully modulating such experience for the parental audience. Post-pandemic follow-up interviews in 2022 also suggest complications in the use of transnational mobility to extend the possibilities of flourishing, with parental pressure to return to a more proximate zone of surveillance in China. Such practices indicate the gendered contradictions young women face: pushed but also desiring to succeed individually in an unequal marketplace, while being further tethered to the family unit