The text analyses identities within virtual on-screen environments. Investigating regions in Second Life, it explores topical issues of the body in virtual space, nature and mythology in virtual environments, and the key arguments surrounding normative and subversive representations of gender, sexuality and subversion in screen-based environments.
This groundbreaking book argues that the fundamental issues around how victim-survivors of digital gender-sexual violations (DGSVs) are abused can be understood in terms of gender and sexual dynamics, constructions, positioning and logics. The book builds upon Hall and Hearn's previous work, Revenge Pornography, but has been substantially reworked to examine other forms of DGSV such as upskirting and sexual deepfakes, as well as the latest research and debates in the field. Facilitated by developments in internet and mobile technologies, the non-consensual posting of real or fake sexually explicit images of others for revenge, entertainment, homosocial status or political leverage has become a global phenomenon. Using discourse and thematic analytical approaches, this text examines digital, survey and interview data on gendered sexual violences, abuses, and violations. The words of both the perpetrators and victim-survivors are presented, showing the impact on victim-survivors and the complex ways in which phallocentric power relations and existing hegemonic masculinities are reinforced and invoked by perpetrators to position girls and women as gendered and sexualised commodities to be traded, admired, violated or abused for the needs of individual men or groups of men. Hall, Hearn and Lewis explore their research in a broader social and political context, evaluating and suggesting changes to existing legislative frameworks, education, victim support, and practical and policy interventions against DGSV, along with wider political considerations. This is a unique resource for students, academics and researchers as well as professionals dealing with issues around digital gender-sexual violations.
“This book explores the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China. Taking an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, it asks how these men construct and experience ways of ‘sexual being’ – as gay, homosexual, tongzhi and/or in the scene – and what these mean for the ways of living they see as possible within a socio-cultural, political and material context characterised by pervasive heteronormativity. It explores what it means for gay men in Hainan to ‘come into the scene’, how internet and mobile technologies figure in their everyday processes of sexual categorisation and how these men negotiate orientations and disorientations towards the future in relation to dominant heterosexual life scripts of marriage and reproduction. This book offers vital insights into the production and restriction of non-heterosexual lives in diverse settings, while addressing universal questions of how certain ways of living are enabled and curtailed in living together with others through powerful conditions of uncertainty and precarity. This book will be of interest to scholars in LGBTQ studies, particularly those with a focus on same-sex intimacies and identities in China.”
This comprehensive and authorative sourcebook offers academics, researchers and students an introduction to and overview of current scholarship at the intersection of marketing and feminism. In the last five years there has been a resurrection of feminist voices in marketing and consumer research. This mirrors a wider public interest in feminism – particularly in the media as well as the academy - with younger women discovering that patriarchal structures and strictures still limit women’s development and life opportunities. The "F" word is back on the agenda – made high profile by campaigns such as #MeToo and #TimesUp. There is a noticeably renewed interest in feminist scholarship, especially amongst younger scholars, and significantly insightful interdisciplinary critiques of this new brand of feminism, including the identification of a neoliberal feminism that urges professional women to achieve a work/family balance on the back of other women’s exploitation. Consolidating existing scholarship while exploring emerging theories and ideas which will generate further feminist research, this volume will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in marketing and consumption studies, especially those studying or researching the complex inter-relationship of feminism and marketing.
Gender After Gender in Consumer Culture provides an updated discussion of how gender cuts across consumer culture, in light of increasing gender fragmentation and integration with other identity positions. Sex, the biological distinction male/female, and gender, which refers to a person’s sense of being male, female, or any other combinations of these, inform issues as varied as personal identity, social interactions, and market behaviours. First, contributions account for the increasing fluidity and/or fragmentation of gender positions, which reshape the interplay between consumers and marketers. Second, they provide a timely illustration of how consumption and markets concur in contrasting gender inequalities, taken both individually and jointly (e.g., at the intersection of ethnicity or positions of market marginalisation). Third, chapters question the role of gender in granting personal and societal well-being, as they reflect on the collective capacity of constantly undoing gender stereotypes. Focusing on gender, this book allows the reader to trace the links among cultural categories (e.g. masculinity, femininity, gender identity), social phenomena, and market (dis)functioning. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the journal Consumption Markets & Culture.
The text analyses identities within virtual on-screen environments. Investigating regions in Second Life, it explores topical issues of the body in virtual space, nature and mythology in virtual environments, and the key arguments surrounding normative and subversive representations of gender, sexuality and subversion in screen-based environments.
An analysis of wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death. Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. In this book, game studies scholar Melissa Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator—a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete—semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest. Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ritual of the Moon, 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault, Death Stranding, and The Last of Us Part II. Exploring the connotations of wandering within these different game worlds, she considers how ideologies of work, gender, colonialism, and death inflect the ways we wander through digital spaces. Overlapping and intersecting, each provides a multifaceted lens through which to understand what wandering does, lacks, implies, and offers. Kagen’s account will attune game designers, players, and scholars to the myriad possibilities of the wandering ludic body.
Facilitated by developments in technologies, the non-consensual posting of sexually explicit images of someone else for revenge, entertainment or political motive – so-called revenge porn – has become a global phenomenon. This groundbreaking book argues that fundamental and recurring issues about how victims are violated can be understood in terms of gender and sexual dynamics and constructions, binary gender and sexual positioning and logics, and the use of sexual meanings. Using a discourse analytical approach the authors examine revenge pornography through the words of the perpetrators themselves and study the complex ways in which they invoke, and deploy, gender- and sexuality-based discourses to blame the victim. They explore strategies to curb the phenomenon of revenge porn, and by placing their research in a broader social and political context, the authors are able to examine the effectiveness of current legislative frameworks, education and awareness raising, victim support and perpetrator re-education programmes, along with wider political considerations. This enhanced understanding of the perpetrator mindset provides important insights into the use of social media to facilitate gender violence, and holds the promise of more effective interventions in future. This is a unique resource for students, academics, researchers, and professionals interested in revenge pornography and related issues.
This book re-evaluates the role of performance in global politics in the face of populism and the digital mediatisation of political interactions. As political communications are increasingly conducted in online environments,‘post-truth’ performances become evermore central to democratic processes. It is therefore essential to reconsider the political potency of performance and theatricality in order to effectively reinvigorate democracy in the 21st century. Drawing on applied theatre practices, this book shows that performance is inherently concerned with cooperative and collaborative encounters across difference, and performance might therefore support effective responses to digital populism. The analysis addresses the performative aspects of populist political movements in the United States and United Kingdom. The chapters engage with aspects of performance and theatricality not commonly broached in IR scholarship, including interpersonal engagement, creative embodiment and interactive affect, making the case for the importance of these features to democratic engagement. This book resonates with recent debates regarding the relevance and treatment of Arts and Performance as IR subjects, methodologies and practices, and will be of interest to scholars and students of global politics, international relations, performance studies, radical democracy, and mass communication and culture.
"In her reading of cyberculture studies after the affective turn, the author argues for a new cyberculture studies that goes beyond dominant cultural narratives of the Internet as dystopian or utopian space, and pays attention to the ways in which online culture has become embedded in everyday lives. The book intervenes in narratives of virtual reality to propose that the Internet can be re-read as a space of fantasy.
