Casting for Change: Tracing Gender in Discussions of Casting through Feminist Media Ethnography

The moment of casting is a crucial one in any media production. Casting the ‘right’ person shapes the narrative as much as the way in which the final product might be received by critics and audiences. For this article, casting—as the moment in which gender is hypervisible in its complex intersectional entanglement with class, race and sexuality—will be our gateway to exploring the dynamics of discussion of gender conventions and how we, as feminist scholars, might manoeuvre. To do so, we will test and triangulate three different forms of ethnographically inspired inquiry: 1) ‘collaborative auto-ethnography,’ to discuss male-to-female gender-bending comedies from the 1980s and 1990s, 2) ‘netnography’ of online discussions about the (potential) recasting of gendered legacy roles from Doctor Who to Mary Poppins, and 3) textual media analysis of content focusing on the casting of cisgender actors for transgender roles. Exploring the affordances and challenges of these three methods underlines the duty of care that is essential to feminist audience research. Moving across personal and anonymous, ‘real’ and ‘virtual,’ popular and professional discussion highlights how gender has been used and continues to be instrumentalised in lived audience experience and in audience research

Media, Modernity and Gender

Translation of Culture and Culture of Translation, ベルギー, ルーヴァン・カトリック大学, 1998年10月12日-15

What is game studies anyway?

In this introduction, game studies is argued to be a force of innovation for cultural studies. While game studies, as it has developed over the last 10 years, fits well within cultural studies' methodology and theory, it does more than benefit from cultural studies as a 'mother discipline'. Game studies proves itself to be a strong force, especially in its productive use of political economy to analyse games and gaming as a (new) cultural form. Building on a descriptive taxonomy of games and gaming by both genre and 'platform', this is an introduction to games and gaming for those with a cultural studies background. While ideally, game studies will develop also as cultural critique, this is a far cry from dominant practice in the gamer community. Gamers tend to be 'hand-in-glove' with the industry. It is high time for game studies to turn a critical eye on itself

On the move: Twentieth anniversary editorial of the European Journal of Cultural Studies

Twenty years of the European Journal of Cultural Studies is a cause for celebration. We do so with a festive issue that comes together with our first free open access top articles in three areas that readers have sought us out for: postfeminism, television beyond textual analysis and cultural labour in the creative industries. The issue opens with freshly commissioned introductory essays to these three thematic areas by key authors in those fields. In addition, the issue offers new articles showcasing the range of the broad field of cultural studies today, including pieces on the politics of co-working, punk in China, Black British women on YouTube, trans-pedagogy and fantasy sports gameplay, featuring work by emerging as well as established scholars. Our editorial introduction to this celebratory issue offers reflections on how both the journal and the field of cultural studies have developed, and on our thoughts and ambitions for the future within the current conjuncture as we ‘move on’ as a new editorial team

Pleasure and meaningful discourse: an overview of research issues

The concept of pleasure has emerged as a multi-faceted social and cultural phenomenon in studies of media audiences since the 1980s. In these studies different forms of pleasure have been identified as explaining audience activity and commitment. In the diverse studies pleasure has emerged as a multi-faceted social and cultural concept that needs to be contextualized carefully. Genre and genre variations, class, gender, (sub-)cultural identity and generation all seem to be instrumental in determining the kind and variety of pleasures experienced in the act of viewing. This body of research has undoubtedly contributed to a better understanding of the complexity of audience activities, but it is exactly the diversity of the concept that is puzzling and poses a challenge to its further use. If pleasure is maintained as a key concept in audience analysis that holds much explanatory power, it needs a stronger theoretical foundation. The article maps the ways in which the concept of pleasure has been used by cultural theorists, who have paved the way for its application in reception analysis, and it goes on to explore the ways in which the concept has been used in empirical studies. Central to our discussion is the division between the ‘public knowledge’ and the ‘popular culture’ projects in reception analysis which, we argue, have major implications for the way in which pleasure has come to be understood as divorced from politics, power and ideology. Finally, we suggest ways of bridging the gap between these two projects in an effort to link pleasure to the concepts of hegemony and ideology

On Behalf of the Audience: A Critique of Janet Staiger's Notion of the Practice of Reception, on Staiger Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception

Janet Staiger _Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception_ New York and London: New York University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-8147-8139-X 242 pp