A Qualitative Exploration of Social Media Consumption and Use Among Everyday Women Who Participate in CrossFit

Introduction: Social media allows a user to be a content creator and consumer. This paper focuses on the social media engagement of everyday women who participate in CrossFit, exploring differences in how they consume and use social media content. CrossFit women are celebrated for their strength, power, and fitness in the social media community, which is not consistent for all women. Methods: This study used semi-structured focus groups with 47 participants between the ages of 18-54 who were everyday women who participate in CrossFit. The participants self-identified their level of CrossFit as recreational, semi-competitive, competitive, or high-level competitors. Results: Findings reveal two major themes: consuming corporate messaging and using social media for their own benefit, included the subthemes of social support and shifting perceptions. The findings, including supportive quotations from the participants, reveal that these women are critical consumers of social media who express disapproval of traditional media portrayals of women’s bodies. Conclusions: Women’s experiences with CrossFit seem to offer some protection from the negative outcomes associated with consumption of traditional media messaging about women’s bodies.

Photoromance, she read: Fandom and the politics of Italian media

This article examines Italian non-fiction media productions of the late 1950s and 1960s that represent the photoromance industry and its female fans. I argue that state-controlled and/or privately owned media outlets and their contributors (among them, Cesare Zavattini and Mario Soldati) scapegoated photoromances in defence of moral, social and cultural respectability, but also on the basis of anxieties towards the increasing role played by female audiences in the making of culture. Furthermore, I show that politically engaged documentaries similarly chastised the photoromance industry without necessarily serving the cause of women’s emancipation. Blaming photoromances for the degeneration of Catholic values, for the debasement of working-class culture and for the degradation of consumerist society, all films serve the same purpose of maintaining a patriarchal society’s status quo, of diverging attention from ‘higher’ cultural products and their exploitation of women’s bodies and of minimizing the important role that female fans played in the success of a global market.

Livy’s Cato and Commodities at Centre and Periphery

This paper is part of a larger project on how Livy represents the Elder Cato, from his entrance into the text in Book 29 to his last witticism preserved in the summary of Book 50, the longest biographical arc in this first third of Livy’s text. It views Cato through the lens of his relationship with objects, and with Livy’s narrative as an object as well. This paper focuses on one episode in the life of Livy’s Cato, the debate over the repeal of the Lex Oppia, and builds on previous scholars’ work to unite three arguments: 1) Livy weaves together textual space and Roman topography so as to emphasise the simultaneous marginality and centrality of this debate; 2) Livy’s Cato and Valerius fill Rome’s urban topography with images of things so as to draw attention via women’s bodies to the relationship between luxury and Rome’s imperium; 3) Livy uses this episode to make an argument about his own historical writing and its active relationship to the expansion of empire. This project focusing on Livy’s Cato is itself part of an even larger reexamination of how we read, and might read, Livy.

Kerentanan Perempuan dalam Surveillance Capitalism

Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk menganalisa kerentanan perempuan terhadap Kekerasan Gender Berbasis Online (KGBO) di dalam ruang digital. Studi ini menggunakan konsep kapitalisme pengawasan/surveillance capitalism dan symbolic violence sebagai dasar untuk memahami logika ekonomi dan juga kekerasan yang berlangsung dalam ruang digital. Ruang digital sebagai alat ekonomi tidak hanya menghasilkan “behavioral surplus” sebagai material baru tetapi juga menjadi ruang bagi terbentuknya “dominant habitus” tentang siapa itu perempuan dan bagaimana seharusnya perempuan merepresentasikan dirinya. Dominant habitus yang senantiasa direproduksi mampu menciptakan kebutuhan ekonomi bagi perempuan melalui komodifikasi dan bahkan eksploitasi terhadap tubuh perempuan yang terepresentasi dalam teks gambar, dan video di dalam platform digital. Melalui proses-proses ini, perempuan mengalami kekerasan simbolik yang terus-menerus direproduksi dalam dominant habitus. Dengan demikian, bekerjanya surveillance capitalism dan menguatnya dominant habitus di dalamnya menjadi kondisi yang membuka ruang bagi berlangsungya KGBO terhadap perempuan. Dengan menggunakan perspektif kritis dalam memandang KGBO tulisan ini hendak mendalami proses-proses yang mengkondisikan kerentanan perempuan di dalam ranah digital. Pemahaman akan hal-hal tersebut menjadi basis penting untuk memikirkan secara tepat posisi perempuan di dalam ruang digital yang saat ini secara luas diterima sebagai condition sine qua non yang di dalamnya berbagai bentuk relasi berlangsung. Dengan demikian, tulisan ini memberikan pijakan dasar untuk mendorong dan merumuskan beberapa agenda perubahan. === This paper aims to analyze women's vulnerability to Online-Based Gender Violence (KGBO) in the digital platform. This study uses the concept of surveillance capitalism and symbolic violence as a basis for understanding the economic logic and violence that takes place in today's digital platform. Digital platform as an economic tool not only produces a "behavioral surplus" as a new material, but also becomes a space for the formation of a "dominant habitus"; who is women are and how women should represent themselves. Dominant habitus which is always reproduced is able to create economic needs for women through commodification and even exploitation of women's bodies which are represented in text, images and videos on digital platforms. Throughout these processes, mostly women suffer from symbolic violence which persistently reproduced by the dominant habitus. It obviously reflects the vulnerability of woman as the victim of KGBO. By using a critical perspective in looking at KGBO, this paper intends to explore the process that put women’s vulnerability in the digital arena. Understanding of these matters becomes an important basis for thinking about the exact position of women in the digital space which is currently widely accepted as a condition sine qua non in which various forms of relations take place. Thus, this paper provides a basic basis for encouraging and formulating several agendas for change.

Controlling The Monster: Exploring Constructions Of Women And Their Bodies In Endometriosis Apps

<p>People globally increasingly use digital applications (apps) to manage their health and health conditions. In particular, women commonly use apps to understand and manage female reproductive issues. Some apps target women with endometriosis, a common but poorly understood condition primarily affecting women. The aim of the current research was to explore how endometriosis apps constructed endometriosis and people with endometriosis, how people with endometriosis were positioned, and the potential implications of this positioning for app users. Multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) was used to systematically examine dominant meanings produced by visual and linguistic features (i.e. colour, imagery, text and interactive app functionality) of five endometriosis apps from the USA, New Zealand and Singapore. Results demonstrated that apps drew on biomedical and biological discourses to construct endometriosis as a complex and confusing disease of the female reproductive body. This positioned biomedical and natural health professionals as knowledgeable experts about endometriosis while minimising women’s experiential knowledge of their bodies. Apps drew on intersecting postfeminist, neoliberal and healthist discourses to construct women with endometriosis as responsible for self-tracking many physical, emotional and behavioural experiences. Self-tracking was constructed as generating data that was meaningfully interpreted by app algorithms and experts to help women understand and manage their endometriosis. Dominant management recommendations (i.e. biomedical interventions; lifestyle changes) aligned with hegemonic ideals of traditional and neoliberal femininity. These findings align with previous feminist research findings that mainstream endometriosis discourse reflects androcentric biases in medical knowledge and that health apps targeting women often reinforce neoliberal and postfeminist ideals. Therefore, dominant discourses about endometriosis and female biology that pathologise women’s bodies and behaviours limit the potential for apps to offer women empowered and agentic subject positions.</p>

Controlling The Monster: Exploring Constructions Of Women And Their Bodies In Endometriosis Apps

<p>People globally increasingly use digital applications (apps) to manage their health and health conditions. In particular, women commonly use apps to understand and manage female reproductive issues. Some apps target women with endometriosis, a common but poorly understood condition primarily affecting women. The aim of the current research was to explore how endometriosis apps constructed endometriosis and people with endometriosis, how people with endometriosis were positioned, and the potential implications of this positioning for app users. Multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) was used to systematically examine dominant meanings produced by visual and linguistic features (i.e. colour, imagery, text and interactive app functionality) of five endometriosis apps from the USA, New Zealand and Singapore. Results demonstrated that apps drew on biomedical and biological discourses to construct endometriosis as a complex and confusing disease of the female reproductive body. This positioned biomedical and natural health professionals as knowledgeable experts about endometriosis while minimising women’s experiential knowledge of their bodies. Apps drew on intersecting postfeminist, neoliberal and healthist discourses to construct women with endometriosis as responsible for self-tracking many physical, emotional and behavioural experiences. Self-tracking was constructed as generating data that was meaningfully interpreted by app algorithms and experts to help women understand and manage their endometriosis. Dominant management recommendations (i.e. biomedical interventions; lifestyle changes) aligned with hegemonic ideals of traditional and neoliberal femininity. These findings align with previous feminist research findings that mainstream endometriosis discourse reflects androcentric biases in medical knowledge and that health apps targeting women often reinforce neoliberal and postfeminist ideals. Therefore, dominant discourses about endometriosis and female biology that pathologise women’s bodies and behaviours limit the potential for apps to offer women empowered and agentic subject positions.</p>

Women’s Bodies and the Evolution of Anti-rape Technologies: From the Hoop Skirt to the Smart Frock

In this article, we explore smart deterrents and their historical precedents marketed to women and girls for the purpose of preventing harassment, sexual abuse and violence. Rape deterrents, as we define them, encompass customs, architectures, fashions, surveillant infrastructures, apps and devices conceived to manage and protect the body. Online searches reveal an array of technologies, and we engage with their prevention narratives and cultural construction discourses of the gendered body. Our critical analysis places recent rape deterrents in conversation with earlier technologies to untangle the persistent logics. These are articulated with reference to the ways that proto-digital technologies have been imported into the realm of ubiquitous computing and networks. Our conceptual framework offers novel pathways for discussing feminine bodies and their messy navigation of everyday life that include both threats to corporeal safety and collective imaginings of empowerment.

Reproductive Racism in Danielle Evans’s “Harvest:” Black, Chicana, and White Motherhoods in the Context of Reproductive Rights Discourses

The paper explores the short story “Harvest” (2010) by African American writer Danielle Evans and traces the figurations of the racialized aspects of gender in “Harvest” within the theoretical frameworks of Black and Chicana feminisms, motherhood studies, and intersectionality. After situating the Black and Chicana characters’ anxieties around egg donation in the historical context of reproductive rights, economics, and the politicization of Black and Chicana women’s bodies, I discuss how the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and class impact the racialized gender identity of especially the Black protagonist and to a smaller extent that of her Chicana and white friends as well. I argue that the current practices of egg donation depicted in the story are imbricated in the wider system of racial capitalism that values women’s childbearing capacities differentially in terms of their race.