Communicating Gender – serie

Michelle Obama: First Lady, American Rhetor is an edited anthology that explores the persona and speech-making of the country’s first African American first lady. The result of these thought-provoking essays is an interdisciplinary text that explores the First Lady from a rhetorical and cultural point of view. Authors analyze her Democratic National Convention speeches, her brand as First Lady, her communication from her latest trip to Africa, her agenda rhetoric in Let’s Move! and Reach Higher, and her coming out as a Black feminist intellectual when she spoke at Maya Angelou’s memorial service. Readers will recognize Michelle Obama as a rhetor of our times—a woman who influences America at the intersections of gender, race, and class and who is representative of what women are today.

This edited collection examines women’s roles in the academy. Statistics show that women outnumber men in most universities and that women’s pay still lags behind men’s, but the numbers only hint at the broader story. This edited collection fills that gap with the stories of twelve women—from part-time faculty to college presidents—who answer key questions such as why they pursued a career in the academy and how they handled childcare issues and sexism in the workplace. Advice, encouragement, and caution are offered to guide those considering a career in the academy and those already in academe who are wondering about their options. This book is recommended for burgeoning female scholars and for established scholars of any gender in women’s studies, gender studies, higher education, and communication studies.

Michelle Obama: First Lady, American Rhetor is an edited anthology that explores the persona and speech-making of the country’s first African American first lady. The result of these thought-provoking essays is an interdisciplinary text that explores the First Lady from a rhetorical and cultural point of view. Authors analyze her Democratic National Convention speeches, her brand as First Lady, her communication from her latest trip to Africa, her agenda rhetoric in Let’s Move! and Reach Higher, and her coming out as a Black feminist intellectual when she spoke at Maya Angelou’s memorial service. Readers will recognize Michelle Obama as a rhetor of our times—a woman who influences America at the intersections of gender, race, and class and who is representative of what women are today.

Communication and the Work-Life Balancing Act: Intersections across Identities, Genders, and Cultures offers scholarly research related to work-life balance in today’s environment, with a particular focus on the fields of communication and gender studies. The chapters examine the choices, challenges, and gendered experiences that women and men face as they navigate structures of work, domestic duties, and childcare in search of balance. Underpinning this text is the notion that work-life balance affects everyone but is experienced differently through the intersections of sex, age, gender, socioeconomic status, and race. Recommended for scholars of communication, gender studies, organizational communication, sociology, and family communication.

The romance industry has profited on the fantasies of women for centuries. However, as a new generation of women raised under the guidance of second-wave feminists take up the reins of romance production, romance novels and films have increasingly challenged tired stereotypes labeling romantic stories as formulaic fodder. This book examines how the romance genre serves women in multiple ways, from escapism to sexual education, from fantasy to fun, and most importantly, as a site of production for feminist texts.

The Global Status of Women and Girls: A Multidisciplinary Approach fosters inquiries into the complex and multifocal issues faced by women and girls around the world, both historically and today. It not only asks key questions related to public policy, but also it unearths the forces that created these current dilemmas. Through the multidisciplinary study of past and present, contributors take on policy conversations benefiting the global community. This book will appeal to any scholar interested in communication and gender studies.

The Rhetorical Arts of Women in Aviation, 1911–1970: Name It and Take It explores the rhetorical strategies employed by women involved in aviation between 1911 and 1970. It begins with Harriet Quimby, who began writing aviation-themed articles for Frank Leslie's Weekly in 1911, and ends with Jerrie Cobb, one of the women who underwent a series of rigorous tests in the hopes of becoming an astronaut. Although one chapter is devoted to the correspondence between German pilot Thea Rasche and aviatrix ally Glenn Buffington, the author largely examines how women in the United States have navigated a developing field that at first seemed to welcome their participation, but over time created discriminatory barriers to their advancement. The rhetorics of African American pilots Willa Beatrice Brown and Bessie Coleman are analyzed in terms of both women's use of the Chicago Defender as a means of publicizing their work in aviation. Topics woven throughout the rhetorical analyses are women's labor, women aviators and motherhood, and the ways in which women confronted both sexism and racism during aviation's golden age and beyond. Scholars of rhetoric, women’s studies, race studies, and history will find this book particularly useful.

Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration: US Teens' Use of Social Media to Negotiate Offline Struggles considers teens’ social media use as a lens through which to more clearly see American adolescence, girlhood, and marginality in the twenty-first century. Detailing a year-long ethnography following a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse group of female, rural, teenaged adolescents living in the Midwest region of the United States, this book investigates how young women creatively call upon social media in everyday attempts to address, mediate, and negotiate the struggles they face in their offline lives as minors, females, and ethnic and racial minorities. In tracing girls’ appreciation and use of social media to roots anchored well outside of the individual, this book finds American girls’ relationships with social media to be far more culturally nuanced than adults typically imagine. There are material reasons for US teens’ social media use explained by how we do girlhood, adolescence, family, class, race, and technology. And, as this book argues, an unpacking of these areas is essential to understanding adolescent girls’ social media use.

Empowering Women: Global Voices of Rhetorical Influence explores the topic of women’s empowerment, offers a theoretical foundation to understand empowerment, and addresses the value of applying a rhetorical analysis to understand women’s rights. In each chapter, Julia A. Spiker explores the rhetoric surrounding women’s empowerment by analyzing elite female political leaders from around the world, with each analysis incorporating a rhetorical empowerment framework to unveil key issues surrounding women’s empowerment. Spiker then links the rhetorical findings from each case to highlight similarities and differences in the challenges to women’s empowerment outlined by world leaders. The conclusion to Empowering Women synthesizes these findings to present an overarching, global picture of women’s empowerment. Scholars of gender studies, women’s studies, communication, rhetoric, international relations, and political science will find this volume especially useful.

Women of the 2016 Election is an examination of women who played prominent roles in the 2016 US presidential election. The collection focuses on women from different parties, races, religions, and immigrant statuses who fulfill roles as candidates, staffers, first families, journalists, and grassroots organizers. The contributors to this collection give a unique view into women’s influences on an unprecedented election. They examine the roles of feminism, morality, motherhood, expectations of voters, the press, masculinity, femininity, race, class, and agency in this interdisciplinary work, which spans the fields of political science, feminist theory, communication, and women’s and gender studies. This is the election that gave rise to the Trump presidency and the #MeToo movement, and the women considered here have left trails and revealed how far there is yet to go for women achieving power in the highest echelons of American politics, media, and society.

Technofeminist Storiographies: Women, Information Technology, and Cultural Representation analyzes both historical and contemporary accounts of women’s lived experiences of technology, from Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr to women working across the tech industry today, and juxtaposes them with larger cultural representations of women and technology. The book explores both the relationship between gender and technology and the cultural contexts that enable and constrain that relationship, questions that call for opportunities for women to share their lived experiences and to have such experiences represented across media genres. Despite the rich, complex stories and histories women have with technology—as programmers, inventors, and workers—media throughout history, including film, television, games, toys, children’s books, and biographies, often inadequately and inaccurately represent them. Throughout the book, Kristine Blair chronicles the portrayal of the relationship between women and information technology across these media genres. Inevitably, the societal conditions that surround technology use—including portrayal through popular media—impact the extent to which women and girls gain and maintain access within those cultural contexts. This book calls for a more visible history of women’s technological achievements in which their stories are heard for generations to come, rather than be forgotten and unknown.

Food Blogs, Postfeminism, and the Communication of Expertise: Digital Domestics examines how and why women use blogs to build successful digital brands in the arena of domestic food preparation, purchase, and consumption. Food blogging is big business, and cooking dinner has transformed from domestic drudgery into creative personal expression. What impact is all this discourse about food, cooking, and eating having on the women who create and consume these conversations? Alane L. Presswood examines how and why women use blogs to build successful digital brands in the arena of domestic food preparation, purchase, and consumption. The relationships between individual brands, reader communities, and sociocultural trends are clarified via a systematic exploration of the strategies employed to create bonded, affective relationships on social media platforms. These food bloggers and their audiences illustrate how the capabilities of networked digital platforms both enable and constrain women as public communicators in ways that were impossible in previous media forms and how women relate to domesticity in a postfeminist American media culture. Scholars of communication, media studies, gender studies, and food studies will find this book particularly useful.

Developing Women Leaders in the Academy through Enhanced Communication Strategies explores the experiences, strategies, and triumphs of women who have attained leadership roles within the academy as well as the shortfalls, disappointments, and battle scars many women leaders have experienced in their quest to lead. Clear direction, focused strategies, and enhanced communication are necessary to increase the ever-growing number of women in leadership positions in the academy. Contributions to this book discuss the ways in which these concepts have been employed to transcend the “academic ceiling” by creating mentoring networks for women, training programs, and other “ladders of ascension,” encouraging future leaders to be more assertive, self-assured, and strategic within the academic terrain. Scholars of communication, education, and women’s studies will find this volume particularly useful.

Feminist Mentoring in Academia offers a varied collection of autoethnographic and research-based accounts of support, struggle, and resilience from the ivory tower. Contributors write about the moments in-between, where feminist mentoring initiates, renews, thrives, and sometimes struggles. The work presented in this book highlights how feminist mentoring happens between professor and student; junior faculty and tenured; and occurs repeatedly. Featuring contributions from scholars at varying points in their academic careers, the chapters of this book propose best feminist mentorship practices, disclose personal narratives, and critique traditional forms of mentoring with visions for feminist mentorship futures. Scholars of communication, feminist studies, higher education, and sociology will find this book of particular interest.

Misogyny and Media in the Age of Trump argues that misogyny has increased in the United States under President Trump and that although women’s experiences under misogyny are by no means universal, patriarchal social and institutional systems facilitate gender-based hostility. Systemic misogyny and power inequities are at the root of male-on-female bullying, the bullying and harassment of non-hegemonic males and other minorities as well as sexual harassment, rape, and even murder. Given the prevalence of misogyny, and its deep rootedness in religion, it is argued that the social contract needs to be rewritten in order to have a just, gender- and race-equitable society. Misogyny creates a clash of cultures between men and women, hegemonic and non-hegemonic males, feminists and INCELS, the powerful and the oppressed, natives and marginalized minorities, the conservative and the liberal/progressive.This book explores misogyny across media ranging from political and editorial cartoons to news, sport, film, television, social media (especially Twitter), and journalistic organizations that address gender inequities. The authors argue that the current era of conservative populism ushered in by President Donald Trump and the Republicans constitute the social-cultural and political environment that have given rise to the #MeToo Movement and Fourth Wave Feminism.

Misogyny across Global Media argues that, although women’s experiences under misogyny are by no means universal, patriarchal social and institutional systems facilitate gender-based hostility across the globe. Contributors demonstrate how systemic misogyny and power inequities are at the root of women’s suffering at the hands of misogyny, with consequences ranging from sexual harassment to rape and even murder. This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of systemic misogyny worldwide, analyzing specific cases such as the controversial Child Marriage Act in Bangladesh, sexual harassment in India’s Bollywood culture, rape culture among military forces in Jammu and Kashmir, the murder of female students in Kenya, and femicide in Turkey. This collection discusses how misogyny creates a clash of cultures between men and women, the powerful and the oppressed, and the conservative and the liberal, and uncovers the evils that are perpetrated against women worldwide as a result of systemic misogyny. Scholars of gender studies, media studies, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

Misogyny across Global Media argues that, although women’s experiences under misogyny are by no means universal, patriarchal social and institutional systems facilitate gender-based hostility across the globe. Contributors demonstrate how systemic misogyny and power inequities are at the root of women’s suffering at the hands of misogyny, with consequences ranging from sexual harassment to rape and even murder. This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of systemic misogyny worldwide, analyzing specific cases such as the controversial Child Marriage Act in Bangladesh, sexual harassment in India’s Bollywood culture, rape culture among military forces in Jammu and Kashmir, the murder of female students in Kenya, and femicide in Turkey. This collection discusses how misogyny creates a clash of cultures between men and women, the powerful and the oppressed, and the conservative and the liberal, and uncovers the evils that are perpetrated against women worldwide as a result of systemic misogyny. Scholars of gender studies, media studies, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

Reimagining Black Masculinities: Race, Gender, and Public Space addresses how Black masculinities are created, negotiated, and contested in public spaces, focusing on how theory meets praxis when mobilizing for social change. Contributors disentangle complexities of the Black experience and reimagine the radical progressive work required for societal health and wellbeing, forming a mental picture of what the world has the potential to be without excluding current realities for Black boys and men, civic manhood, maleness, and the fluidity of masculinities. These realities are acknowledged and interrogated across private and public contexts, media, education, occupation, and theoretical perspectives. This book encourages readers to reenvision social identity as an ongoing phenomenon, asserting that collective vision informs action and collective action informs possibilities for peace and freedom in the world around us. Scholars of communication, gender studies, and race studies will find this book particularly interesting.

Reimagining Black Masculinities: Race, Gender, and Public Space addresses how Black masculinities are created, negotiated, and contested in public spaces, focusing on how theory meets praxis when mobilizing for social change. Contributors disentangle complexities of the Black experience and reimagine the radical progressive work required for societal health and wellbeing, forming a mental picture of what the world has the potential to be without excluding current realities for Black boys and men, civic manhood, maleness, and the fluidity of masculinities. These realities are acknowledged and interrogated across private and public contexts, media, education, occupation, and theoretical perspectives. This book encourages readers to reenvision social identity as an ongoing phenomenon, asserting that collective vision informs action and collective action informs possibilities for peace and freedom in the world around us. Scholars of communication, gender studies, and race studies will find this book particularly interesting.

The Intersectionality of Women's Lives and Resistance uses the tools of the arts, humanities, social sciences, and other fields to address challenges faced by women and girls around the world, both historically and in modern day, with an emphasis on intersectionality. Contributors offer interdisciplinary analyses of how gender intersects with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and other identity markers in complex ways, and how these are tied to the interconnected nature of systems of oppression, power, and privilege.

Electing Madam Vice President presents the presidential bids of the six women who ran for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 2020 and the historic, groundbreaking vice-presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris.When Vice President Kamala Harris and her family moved into Number One Observatory Circle, the official Vice Presidential residence of the United States, she claimed a title no other women in the United States ever had: Vice President. She is closer to the United States presidency than any woman in history. Yet, she has repeated often that she is standing on the shoulders of women who have come before her to try to break down barriers, including the United States Presidency. Often left off the history pages, and out of many Americans’ minds, are the bids of women who run for president. The 2020 Democratic primary included the most women ever to run in one election. This book demonstrates the progress women candidates have made as they have moved from symbolic to viable candidates and shines a light on the diminishing obstacles that face women candidates while taking readers on a journey through the victorious progress of a woman United States Vice President.

Electing Madam Vice President presents the presidential bids of the six women who ran for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 2020 and the historic, groundbreaking vice-presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris.When Vice President Kamala Harris and her family moved into Number One Observatory Circle, the official Vice Presidential residence of the United States, she claimed a title no other women in the United States ever had: Vice President. She is closer to the United States presidency than any woman in history. Yet, she has repeated often that she is standing on the shoulders of women who have come before her to try to break down barriers, including the United States Presidency. Often left off the history pages, and out of many Americans’ minds, are the bids of women who run for president. The 2020 Democratic primary included the most women ever to run in one election. This book demonstrates the progress women candidates have made as they have moved from symbolic to viable candidates and shines a light on the diminishing obstacles that face women candidates while taking readers on a journey through the victorious progress of a woman United States Vice President.

Communicating Intimate Health presents an edited collection of original, empirical research, personal essays, autoethnography, critical reviews, and theoretical work showcasing advances in intimate health research from the field of communication studies. Intimate health includes sexual and reproductive health, sexual activity, sexuality, gender, and reproductive justice. The contributors vulnerably engage subjects including: parent-child, partner, patient-provider, and larger societal discourse and communication about sexuality education, HIV, family planning, purity pledges, (in)fertility, breastfeeding, and Black maternal health, sexting, boundary setting, consent, border justice, trauma, contraception, and menstruation, among others. Featuring both new research and vulnerable reflections on the research process, Communicating Intimate Health showcases the potential of communication scholarship to engage intimately with intimate topics.

From podiums on international stages to mainstream media coverage, from crowds of youth marching in streets, to social media feeds, everywhere we look we can see girls rising in the climate justice movement. Carolyn M. Cunningham and Heather M. Crandall examine these climate activists from the intersection of gender studies, new media studies, and environmental activism. Chapters include cases about iconic climate girls such as Greta Thunberg, Mari Copeny, and Autumn Peltier (Wiikwemkoong First Nation) and lesser-known climate girl activists who design technologies, global non-profit organizations, and lawsuits against governments. Cunningham and Crandall reveal that climate girls are intersectional activists aware of how systems of oppression—including racism, heterosexism, and capitalism—impact the climate crisis. Individuals interested in women’s and gender studies, environmental studies, and communications studies will find this book of particular interest.

From podiums on international stages to mainstream media coverage, from crowds of youth marching in streets, to social media feeds, everywhere we look we can see girls rising in the climate justice movement. Carolyn M. Cunningham and Heather M. Crandall examine these climate activists from the intersection of gender studies, new media studies, and environmental activism. Chapters include cases about iconic climate girls such as Greta Thunberg, Mari Copeny, and Autumn Peltier (Wiikwemkoong First Nation) and lesser-known climate girl activists who design technologies, global non-profit organizations, and lawsuits against governments. Cunningham and Crandall reveal that climate girls are intersectional activists aware of how systems of oppression—including racism, heterosexism, and capitalism—impact the climate crisis. Individuals interested in women’s and gender studies, environmental studies, and communications studies will find this book of particular interest.