‘Just be confident girls!’: Confidence Chic as Neoliberal Governmentality

In our injurious patriarchal cultures, unconfidence is almost inescapable when inhabiting womanhood. However, recently the promotion of self-confidence has surfaced as the site for expanded, heightened and more insidious modes of regulation, often spearheaded by those very institutions invested in women’s insecurities. This notably includes consumer women’s magazines. Contemporary publications are marked by an intensified preoccupation with taking readers ‘from crisis to confidence’, offering even dedicated sections (e.g. ‘confidence revolution’ and ‘Bye-bye body hang-ups’ in Cosmopolitan UK) and issues—see, for example, Elle UK’s January 2015 ‘Confidence Issue: A Smart Woman’s Guide to Self-Belief’. Clearly, this sector is a fundamental player in the confidence movement-market, bringing together a range of interested parties, not least ‘love your body’ (LYB) advertisers like Dove (see Gill and Elias 2014), and enjoying an extensive audience reach, both in terms of numbers and geography—a reach increased to unprecedented degrees by online versions

Postfeminist sexpertise on the “porn and men issue”: A transnational perspective

Focusing on women’s online magazines produced between 2012 and 2014 in the UK and in Spain, this chapter examines peer responses to women feeling distressed about their male partners’ consumption of pornographies, in addition to editorial content around the subject. Moving beyond ‘for and against’ positions, and driven by a social justice agenda, the chapter utilises this commentary about hetero-male- oriented pornographies as a point of analytical entry into the kinds of gendered and sexual pleasures, bodies, subjectivities and intimate relational possibilities contemporary (new) media and public sex and relationship advice bring into being and render (un)intelligible. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to feminist interrogations of the politics of mediated intimacy and pornification under neoliberalism and postfeminism, incorporating a much-needed transnational perspective

Mediating intimacy online: authenticity, magazines and chasing the clicks

This paper offers a production-based study of online consumer magazines for – and largely by – millennial women, with a particular focus on sex and relationship content. Adopting a feminist discourse analytic approach and a solidary-critical position, I examine 62 interviews conducted with producers, mainly writers and editors, from 12 publications based in the UK and Spain. The analysis maps how notions of intimacy penetrate different dimensions of the magazine, along with networks of influence for the development of content about sex and relationships, marked by a perceived shift from ‘experts’ to ‘real life’. The ways in which producers describe the particularities of woman’s magazine online journalism and dis/articulate a range of critiques are also explored. The paper highlights the increasing importance of ideas about authenticity for these media, making connections to online cultures, a reinvigorated interest in feminism, and contemporary branding strategies. Ultimately, I argue that journalists at women’s magazines simultaneously (re)produce, suffer and contest sexist media, deserving further feminist scholarly attention, and our solidarity as well as critique

Los Estudios Críticos de Internet: conceptos, debates y retos

Este artículo ofrece una revisión de la literatura en los Estudios de Internet desde su comienzo hasta la actualidad, prestando particular atención a conceptos y debates centrales, además de cuestiones sobre la interactividad del usuario. Un objetivo principal es elaborar una exposición de los Estudios Críticos de Internet, dado su reconocido interés y su sorprendente ausencia general en la literatura científica en español. Asimismo, el artículo pretende resaltar la importancia de incorporar una mirada feminista en el trabajo teórico así como empírico sobre Internet. En primer lugar se examina una etapa inicial caracterizada por un contraste entre los pronósticos distópicos y las celebraciones optimistas acerca del potencial transformador de Internet. El artículo continúa esbozando los principales interrogantes y conclusiones surgidos en la segunda etapa de los Estudios de Internet, con su más serio compromiso hacia la evidencia empírica y su interés especial en documentar el uso efectivo. La siguiente sección se centra en los términos ‘convergencia mediática’ y ‘cultura participativa’. Por último, se introducen una serie de conceptos clave – donde destaca especialmente el de ‘trabajo digital’ – para un área de estudio con un abordaje alternativo sobre la interactividad en los contextos online e Internet en general. También se presenta brevemente un caso de estudio como muestra de tal enfoque, así como de la necesidad de una mayor integración del análisis de género en los Estudios Críticos de Internet

Comment on: Reply to comment on `Perfect imaging without negative refraction'

Whether or not perfect imaging is obtained in the mirrored version of Maxwell's fisheye lens is debated in the comment/reply sequence [Blaikie-2010njp, Leonhardt-2010njp] discussing Leonhardt's original paper [Leonhardt-2009njp]. Here we show that causal solutions can be obtained without the need for an "active localized drain", contrary to the claims in [Leonhardt-2010njp].Comment: v2 (added MEEP ctl file), v3 (publisher statement

Melhoramento genético de microrganismos para produção de biocombustíveis e químicos renováveis: integração de abordagens de biologia molecular, biologia sistêmica, biologia sintética e engenharia metabólica.

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