Making Feminist Media provides new ways of thinking about the vibrant media and craft cultures generated by Riot Grrrl and feminism’s third wave. It focuses on a cluster of feminist publications—including BUST, Bitch, HUES, Venus Zine, and Rockrgrl—that began as zines in the 1990s. By tracking their successes and failures, this book provides insight into the politics of feminism’s recent past. Making Feminist Media brings together interviews with magazine editors, research from zine archives, and analysis of the advertising, articles, editorials, and letters to the editor found in third-wave feminist magazines. It situates these publications within the long history of feminist publishing in the United States and Canada and argues that third-wave feminist magazines share important continuities and breaks with their historical forerunners. These publishing lineages challenge the still-dominant—and hotly contested— wave metaphor categorization of feminist culture. The stories, struggles, and strategies of these magazines not only represent contemporary feminism, they create and shape feminist cultures. The publications provide a feminist counter-public sphere in which the competing interests of editors, writers, readers, and advertisers can interact. Making Feminist Media argues that reading feminist magazines is far more than the consumption of information or entertainment: it is a profoundly intimate and political activity that shapes how readers understand themselves and each other as feminist thinkers.

Feminist Media Studies is a cutting-edge introduction to the core and emerging theories, methods, and approaches in a field that has blossomed over the past twenty-five years. Adopting an intersectional approach – a framework concerning the interconnected character of oppression based on gender, race, class, and other constructed identities – Alison Harvey takes a global view of gendered practices in and around the media. She provides an accessible overview of classical and contemporary issues in media culture by exploring the past, present, and future of feminist media studies, accounting for changes in the media landscape, from digital technologies and globalized media systems to emergent inequalities, discourses, and practices. By engaging with research from a diverse body of scholarship, this book situates feminist media studies as vital to researching and analysing a range of significant issues. The go-to textbook for a new generation of students, as well as an important resource for scholars, Feminist Media Studies is both an exciting invitation to the field and a passionate call to arms.

"Questions of gender are scarce in the mass communication literature and feminist media studies remain marginalized. Here is a strong effort to remedy the situation, an overview that initiates the newcomer and offers topics and methods for the previously initiated. . . . All levels." --Choice Feminists have long recognized the significance of the media as a forum for the expression of--or challenges to--the existing constructions of gender. In this broad-ranging analysis, Liesbet van Zoonen explores how feminist theory and research contribute to a fuller understanding of the media's multiple roles in the construction of gender in contemporary societies.

While feminists have long recognised the importance of self-managed, alternative media to transport their messages, to challenge the status quo, and to spin novel social processes, this topic has been an under-researched area. Hence, this book explores the processes of women's and feminist media production in the context of participatory spaces, technology, and cultural citizenship. The collection is composed of theoretical analyses and critical case studies. It highlights contemporary alternative feminist media in general as well as blogs, zines, culture jamming, and street art.

In Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Rox Samer explores how 1970s feminists took up the figure of the lesbian in broad attempts to reimagine gender and sexuality. Samer turns to feminist film, video, and science fiction literature, offering a historiographical concept called “lesbian potentiality”—a way of thinking beyond what the lesbian was, in favor of how the lesbian signified what could have come to be. Samer shows how the labor of feminist media workers and fans put lesbian potentiality into movement. They see lesbian potentiality in feminist prison documentaries that theorize the prison industrial complex’s racialized and gendered violence and give image to Black feminist love politics and freedom dreaming. Lesbian potentiality also circulates through the alternative spaces created by feminist science fiction and fantasy fanzines like The Witch and the Chameleon and Janus. It was here that author James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon felt free to do gender differently and inspired many others to do so in turn. Throughout, Samer embraces the perpetual reimagination of “lesbian” and the lesbian’s former futures for the sake of continued, radical world-building.

Highlighting the contributions of feminist media history to media studies and related disciplines, this book focuses on feminist periodicals emerging from or reacting to the Edwardian suffrage campaign and situates them in the context of current debates about the public sphere, social movements, and media history.

Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research tackles the breadth and depth of feminist perspectives in the field of media studies through essays and research that reflect on the present and future of feminist research and theory at the intersections of women, gender, media, activism, and academia. The volume includes original chapters on diverse topics illustrating where theorization and research currently stand with regard to the politics of gender and media, what work is being done in feminist theory, and how feminist scholarship can contribute to our understanding of gender as a mediated experience with implications for our contemporary global society. It opens for discussion how the research, theory, and interventions challenge concepts of gender in mediated discourses and practices and how these fit into the evolving state of contemporary feminisms. Contributors engage with discussions about contemporary feminisms as they are understood in media theory and research, particularly in a field that has changed rapidly in the last decades with digital communication tools and through cross-disciplinary work. Overall, the book illustrates how the politics of gender operate within the current media landscapes and how feminist theorizing shapes academic inquiry of these landscapes.

Featuring Females analyzes the portrayals of women in a variety of outlets including reality television shows, films, print and electronic news programming, magazines, video games, and commercial advertising. And how aging, race/ethnicity, body image, gender roles, sexual orientation and relationships, and violence are treated in the media.

When Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli began making sexploitation films together in 1956, they provoked audiences by featuring explicit nudity that would increasingly become more audacious, constantly challenging contemporary norms. Their Argentine films developed a large and international fan base. Analyzing the couple's films and their subsequent censorship, Violated Frames develops a new, roughly constructed, and "bad" archive of relocated materials to debate questions of performance, authorship, stardom, sexuality, and circulation. Victoria Ruétalo situates Bó and Sarli’s films amidst the popular culture and sexual norms in post-1955 Argentina, and explores these films through the lens of bodies engaged in labor and leisure in a context of growing censorship. Under Perón, manual labor produced an affect that fixed a specific type of body to the populist movement of Peronism: a type of body that was young, lower-classed, and highly gendered. The excesses of leisure in exhibition, enjoyment, and ecstasy in Bó and Sarli's films interrupted the already fragmented film narratives of the day and created alternative sexual possibilities.

A rich account that combines media-industry history and cultural studies, Their Own Best Creations looks at women writers' contributions to some of the most popular genres of postwar TV: comedy-variety, family sitcom, daytime soap, and suspense anthology. During the 1950s, when the commercial medium of television was still being defined, women writers navigated pressures at work, constructed public personas that reconciled traditional and progressive femininity, and asserted that a woman's point of view was essential to television as an art form. The shows they authored allegorize these professional and personal pressures and articulate a nascent second-wave feminist consciousness. Annie Berke brings to light the long-forgotten and under-studied stories of these women writers and crucially places them in the historical and contemporary record.