Created for and originally posted at Bitch Magazine’s Mad World Virtual Symposium

Huffington Post regularly uses women’s bodies as an internet marketing strategy to entice viewers and generate ad revenue.

Linkbait (n.): sensationalized and unrelated images and headlines used to draw viewers into other content on a website, it is often used to generate ad revenue

Related Links and Articles:

• Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s study on Huffington Post’s inclusion of women as featured bloggers – Huffington Post Mutes Women’s Voices
• Here are some great articles from women around the blogosphere criticing Huffinton’s Posts marketing strategy: The Sexist’s Huffington Post: Liberal Politics, Sexist Entertainment and Jezebel’s Does The Huffington Post Use Sexism To Drive Liberal Page Views?
• Jessica Valenti’s article about The Fake Feminism of Sarah Palin
• Similarly, racism is prevalent among the liberal left, here is Tim Wise’s recent article – With Friends Like These, Who Needs Glenn Beck? Racism and White Privilege on the Liberal-Left

  
  

For full video transcript click here >>

             

Filed under: Advertising
Tags: Huffington Post, Internet Marketing, Liberal News, Linkbait, Progressive, Sexism
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I organized “Remixing Popular Culture: Subverting Gender and Sexuality with Remix Video” at California State University, Northridge in March 2010 to explore how remix video can subvert gender and sexuality. I was joined by Jonathan McIntosh, Alexis Lothian, and Julie Levin Russo to talk about Political Remix Video and Vidding.

Here is the two part video of the event.  Part one discusses Vidding with Russo and Lothian presenting a brief history and a series of vids back to back.  Part two discusses Political Remix Video with McIntosh demonstrating how each video subverts the original source material.

http://www.vimeo.com/13021751 http://www.vimeo.com/13058679

Click here for links to original videos

             

Filed under: Event
Tags: Battlestar Galactica, Buffy, Gender, Political Remix Video, Remix, Sexuality, Vidding
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I have recently published a lecture series featured on Critical Commons.  This collection of video clips and commentaries analyze the gender politics of TV shows ranging from Roseanne, to Gossip Girl, Veronica Mars, Fringe, Glee and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Critical Commons is a great site that utilizes fair use to support the use of media for scholarship, research and teaching, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators. Thanks to the Center for Social Media for the shout out in this month’s newsletter!

Launch Project >>

             

Filed under: Other
Tags: Critical Commons, Fair Use, Fringe, Gender, Glee, Gossip Girl, Patriarchy, Roseanne, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Terminator, Veronica Mars
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Created for and originally posted at Bitch Magazine’s Mad World Virtual Symposium

Every time I go to download files from a BitTorrent tracker site I am constantly bombarded with ads for sex/dating sites or straight up pornography and I’m sick of it.  Women and people of colour are engaging in online technologies as well and we are repetitively told that we don’t belong.

BitTorrent (n.): a file sharing protocol used to distribute large files
BitTorrent tracker site (n.): is a server that assists in the communication between peers using the BitTorrent protocol

Related Links and Articles:

• Video lecture by Mark Pesce Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV (bittorrent download is available on the bottom of the page)
• This blog post is where I got my stats: Dreadfully Few Women are Open Source Developers
• For readings on pornography check out Gail Dines’ latest book Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality or Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity
• Geek Feminism is a great blog that supports, encourages, and discusses issues facing women in geek communities
• Of Geeks and Girls is a study exploring how traditional male geek spaces affect women’s interest and participation in computer science.
• For more about bittorrent check out wikipedia, or this article.

For full video transcript click here >>

             

Filed under: Advertising
Tags: Advertising, bittorrent, File Sharing, Pornography, Techno-Geek, Technology
This post currently has 15 comments

Earlier this year, Melanie Klein of Feminist Fatale invited me to speak to her Women and Popular Culture class at Santa Monica College in California.  I spent the hour talking about how powerful Political Remix Video and Vidding are for critiquing media messages and fostering a talk back culture.  We also discussed the legal ramifications surrounding the use of copyrighted material and what the Fair Use doctrine is.

One of Melanie’s students, Jessica O’Keefe of O’Keefe Films, filmed and edited together this three part video of my talk.

http://www.vimeo.com/13216801 http://www.vimeo.com/13216819 http://www.vimeo.com/13216842

Click here for links to original videos and some resources >>

             

Filed under: Event
Tags: Fair Use, Political Remix Video, Vidding
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After many months (and years of watching TV) I have finally completed my thesis, bringing to a close my master’s degree.  The submitted document is available for download in PDF format for those who are interested in reading it.

Download PDF (756KB)

Heroic women in science fiction and fantasy television shows have done much to represent strong, successful women in leadership positions. However, these female roles that are viewed as strong and empowered embody many masculine identified traits, maintaining a patriarchal division of gender roles. This paper analyzes strong female characters within nine television shows by deconstructing their stereotypically “masculine” and “feminine” gender specific attributes and cross referencing how they play within and against traditional archetypes.

Employing texts from cultural criticism and feminist theory, I explore how representations of groups in popular culture and mass media messaging uphold structures of power by giving higher value to masculine attributes as observed in patriarchal discourse. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of why it is critical to foster television media that supports feminist ideals and breaks out of traditional oppressive gender binaries in order to promote, encourage and envision a just future society.

             

Filed under: Writing
Tags: Archetypes, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy, Dollhouse, Firefly, Gender, Homophobia, Joss Whedon, Lost, Patriarchy, Racism, science fiction, Star Trek, SyFy, Terminator, Tropes, TV
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Recently I sat down with Jennifer Berger, the executive director of About Face, a media literacy organization, helping girls and women resist harmful media messages. They currently have a campaign against American Apparel’s advertising.

Related Links and Articles:

• About Face and visit American Apparel in their Gallery of Offenders.
• Views photos from an action About Face did in San Francisco targeting American Apparel owner Dov Charney
• American Apparel Just Keeps Getting Pornier at Bitch Magazine
• American Apparel Displays its Sexism at Womanist Musings

For full video transcript click here >>

             

Filed under: Interview
Tags: About Face, Advertising, American Apparel, Bitch Magazine, Sexism
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Liquor ads capitalize on some of the worst (socialized) masculine traits, glamorize them, and sell these behaviours back to us – encouraging and promoting sexism.

Related Links and Articles:

• Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel by Jean Kilbourne
• Collection of posts from Sociological Images about alcohol advertising.
• Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks (as mentioned in the video)
• To learn about control mythologies and how to change the narrative read Re:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements and Change the World by By Doyle Canning and Patrick Reinsborough

This video has English subtitles on YouTube and is available to be translated at DotSub into many different language. Please help reach global audiences by translating!

For full video transcript click here >>

             

Filed under: Advertising
Tags: Alcohol, Bitch Magazine, Liquor, Sexism
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The widely popular video game Bayonetta has had an advertising campaign that matches the on screen sexism of the game itself.  In Tokyo a large billboard in the subway invited passersby to literally strip off  flyers to reveal Bayonetta naked underneath.  The campaign perpetuates and encourages sexual and physical harassment against women, an epidemic in Japan (and many other countries, including the United States).

Related Links and Articles:

• High Rates of Street Harassment in Korea and Japan and Video Game Allows Subway Groping and Worse from the blog Stop Street Harassment
• Harassment on Public Transportation is No Joke from Gender Across Borders
• In Anonymous Packed Train Lurk Gropers from The Japan Times

Links to Bayonetta Billboard Images:

• Ads with flyer on body: Ad 1 and Ad 2 (it appears to be a mock up of the ad campaign)
• Ads with the flyers removed and images of the cards
• Example of screen cast of Bayonetta naked

This video has English subtitles on YouTube and is available to be translated at DotSub into many different language.  Please help reach global audiences by translating!

For full video transcript click here >>

             

Filed under: Advertising
Tags: Advertising, Bayonetta, Bitch Magazine, Harassment, Playstation 3, Public Transportation, Sexism, Street Harassment, Video Games, xbox 360
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Yesterday may have been the first Canadian Video Game Awards but I doubt they are the first instance of overt sexism in the Canadian video game industry. Last night I attended the first Canadian video game awards and minus the bad dialogue, the sexist jokes and the glorified “booth babes” as stage candy it wasn’t half bad. I rather enjoyed Video Games Live. They are a live orchestra doing renditions of popular video game music set to visuals of the games. The awards would not have been the same without them and the performance made the event worth attending.  They performed songs from Space Invaders, Mass Effect 2 and Tron among others. They also featured Martin Leung who definitely stole the show with his incredible piano talents. He is best known for playing the Super Mario Brothers theme blind folded and my jaw nearly dropped listening to the speed of his playing, it was amazing.   (more…)

             

Filed under: Event
Tags: Allan G Johnson, Canadian Video Game Awards, Gender Knot, Jokes, Racism, Resistance, Sexism, Video Games
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