Gender Studies MA

Women and Digital Affective Labour This research focuses on interviews with women in which affective labour and kinship play a central role, particularly in the digital space of Social Networking Sites (SNS), in order to understand how some women may experience the Internet differently to others, and to create a greater understanding of the wider implications of women’s roles online. The identities and subjectivities that are created on the Internet were originally supposed to be free of gender, race and religion, but this utopian ideal was never actualised due to the Internet being an extension of the physical realm, dragging our gendered and raced bodies into it. There is extensive work on women and their experiences of online abuse, harassment and death threats is well documented, both in popular journalism and academic journals. Affective labour of women is likewise well documented, from child-caring roles to pink collar workers, women are often expected to t...

Kirsti K. Cole (2015) “It's Like She's Eager to be Verbally Abused”: Twitter, Trolls, and (En)Gendering Disciplinary Rhetoric, Feminist Media Studies, 15:2, 356-358 " violent anti-feminist engagement in social media functions as disciplinary rhetoric. I contend that the goal of this rhetoric is to silence the women participating in public as feminist." p.356 " The disciplinary rhetoric used by trolls individualizes the woman acting within the digi-feminist network by threatening her body with violence. She is an easily identifiable target because her larger network is clearly labeled in social media as feminist." p.356 " The online backlash to feminists is so highly visible in social media, and so prevalent, it is also amplified. If cultural logic is a way of reasoning common to groups, then the prevalence of rape threats against women participating in feminist activism online points to the acceptance of what is m...

Cyberfeminism 2.0, edited by Radhika Gajjala and Yeon Ju Oh, New York: Peter Lang 2012 "Cyberfeminism 2.0: Where have all the cyberfeminists gone?" by Radhika Gajjala and Yeon Ju Oh "social networking sites and blogs, located at the intersection of affective/reproductive labor and technology, are the venues for women to explore subjectivity formation and identity construction as they simultaneously face objectification and placement in hierarchies of race, gender, geography, and class." p.4

Helga Sadowski, Digital Intimacies: Doing Digital Media Differently . in Linköping Studies in Arts and Science No. 691 2016. "Affect is most often understood as a pre-personal, non-subjective, autonomous potentiality, intensity, or force." p.49 "In Ethics ([1677] 1996), Spinoza was concerned with how bodies are influenced, molded, and changed during encounters with other bodies and how the experienced intensities influence one's life-forces in different ways." p.50 "a body affects other bodies, or is affected by other bodies; it is this capacity for affecting and being affected that also defines a body in its individuality" (Deleuze 1988, 123) How can we bridge the gap between URL and IRL? How can we "transgress the on/offline boundary, illustrating that there is no rigid line between 'real life' and the Internet, but that there are only affective stories of affected people." p.96 "The Internet does question the Enlight...

"Postfeminism, Girls and Young Women, and Digital Media" in Amy Shields Dobson. Postfeminist Digital Cultures: Femininity, Social Media, and Self-Representation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. p.23-51 "cultural scholars have noted that in postfeminist mediascapes girls and young women are depicted and addressed as fun-loving, consumption focused, and more "empowered," active and bold, physically, socially, and psychologically. Such constructions of femininity can be seen as a response to feminist critique of earlier, weaker versions of femininity portrayed widely in media and cultural representations." p.23 "teenage girls and young women are the largest demographic of active users" of social networking sites p.43 "research indicates that girls and women use the Internet primarily for social interaction (Drotner, 2001; Tufte, 2003; Molyneux, O'Donnell, Gibson, and Singer, 2008), and that girls and young women are predominant pa...

Janet Carsten, "Kinship" in Catharine R. Stimpson and Gilbert Herdt (eds.). Critical Terms for the Study of Gender . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. What does kinship mean? Kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all human animals in all societies. Why is kinship important? The relationships that we form create support systems for us to thrive, whether that be through familial relationships, friendships, religious or political affiliation, or any other way in which you are connected to others. Historically, evolutionary theorists wanted to trace the historical evolution of family forms from primitive promiscuity to the patriarchal, monogamous family set in the wider context of a territorial state and the institution of private property. "Between the primitive and the civilized came a varying number and sequence of stages, including group marriage, exogamy, matriarchy, polyandry, and polygamy...