Old Jokes, New Media – Online Sexism and Constructions of Gender in Internet Memes

The Internet is a space where the harassment of women and marginalised groups online has attracted the attention of both academic and popular press. Feminist research has found that instances of online sexism and harassment are often reframed as “acceptable” by constructing them as a form of humour. Following this earlier research, this present paper explores a uniquely technologically-bound type of humour by adopting a feminist, social-constructionist approach to examine the content of popular Internet memes. Using thematic analysis on a sample of 240 image macro Internet memes (those featuring an image with a text caption overlaid), we identified two broad, overarching themes – Technological Privilege and Others. Within the analysis presented here, complex and troubling constructions of gendered identity in online humour are explored, illustrating the potential for the othering and exclusion of women through humour in technological spaces. We argue that this new iteration of heteronormative, hegemonic masculinity in online sexism, couched in “irony” and “joking”, serves to police, regulate and create rightful occupants and owners of such spaces

Apocalyptic public health: exploring discourses of fatness in childhood ‘obesity’ policy

Recent‘ obesity’ preventions focus heavily on children, widely regarded as the future of society. The National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) is a flagship government programme in England that annually measures the Body Mass Index (BMI) of children in Reception (aged 4–5) and Year 6 (aged 10 –11) in order to identify ‘at risk’ children and offer advice to parents. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis this study explore show discourses within the programme construct fatness. The NCMP materials contain three key interrelated themes (concerning the hidden threat of ‘obesity’, the burden of ‘obesity’, and bodies that pose a greater risk) that combine to construct a ‘grotesque discourse’ of apocalyptic public health. ‘Obesity’ is constructed as a social and economic catastrophe where certain bodies pose a greater threat than others. We argue that this discourse has the potential to change health service policy in markedly regressive ways that will disproportionately impact working-class, Black, Asian, and mixed race families

‘Fish wives’ and ‘Working-Class heroes’ in UK Parliament: Discursive intersections of (dis)respectability, class and gender in newspaper representations of Angela Rayner

This research develops an intersectional understanding of the portrayal of White, working-class origin women politicians in UK newspaper coverage via a single case analysis of the reporting of Angela Rayner and her supposed attempt to ‘distract’ the UK Prime Minister. A Dual process feminist-influenced discourse analysis was conducted on data sampled across a 4-week period and comprising 74 UK newspaper articles (47,000 words). Two overarching discourses were identified - ‘fish wives’ and ‘working-class heroes’ – which functioned to both confer and revoke respectability. Despite celebratory potential, these discourses reproduced the ‘elite male as norm’ and classed the gendered double bind to potentially restrict working-class women’s ability to adopt, reject, or demolish elite, masculine idealised standards. They also served to caution against working-class women politicians - framed as inherently dangerous (e.g., ‘inner fishwife’) and disrespectable (e.g. uncouth and hypersexualised) compared to White middle-class feminised standards. Therefore, classed and gendered boundaries were re-asserted via a presentation of working-class women politicians as unworthy and potentially dangerous. This technology of governance has implications for voting decisions, our shared understanding of the overall appropriateness of working-class women in positions of power as well as our treatment towards them, while sustaining elite (White) masculinised power and privilege

Beyond the academic imposter syndrome. A Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis of accounts of (un)belonging from UK working class women academic

Previous research utilised discourse analysis to explore institutional ideal worker discourse to find that it shapes (un)belonging and shores up an unequal and stratified academy via intersecting classed and gendered discourse. This paper develops this work by utilising Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis (FRDA) on interview data from twelve, one-to-one semi-structured interviews with working-class women academics employed in UK Higher Education institutions. This analysis, first, identified a dominant discourse; ‘being a fish out of water’ that drew on a contemporary iteration of the ‘psy complex’ construction of the ‘imposter syndrome’ to obscure systems of power underpinned by gendered and classed portrayals of who embodies the ideal academic. Second, the analysis produced I Poems which uncovered hidden accounts of how this dominant discourse silences via a coupling with sufficient/deficient academic discourse to individualise – and make private – shameful and painful emotional experiences of unbelonging. Conversely, simultaneously voiced accounts attempted to resist and rally against individualised deficient constructions. This study evidences the utility of FRDA to uncover the unheard and silenced voiced accounts that are intimately connected to discursive systems of gendered and classed power, while illuminating counter-narratives that challenge individualised discourse of inequalities to claim rightful citizenship in the UK Academy

Social-cognitive determinants of hoist usage among health care workers.

Injuries caused by unsafe manual handling of patients are a major source of ill health in health care workers. The present study evaluated the ability of 4 classes of variable to predict use of a hoist when moving a heavily dependent patient. Variables examined were occupational role characteristics, such as hours of work and type of shift worked; biographics, including age and height; aspects of occupational context, such as number of hoists available and number of patients; and motivational variables specified by the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1985) and protection motivation theory (Rogers, 1983). Regression analyses showed that background and social-cognitive variables were able to account for 59% of variance in intention to use a hoist and 41% of variance in use of the hoist assessed 6 weeks later. Height, hoist availability, coworker injunctive norm, perceived behavioral control, response cost, response benefits, and social and physical costs of not using the hoist each explained independent variance in motivation to use a hoist at work. Copyright 2006 by the American Psychological Association