A special issue of Feminist Media Studies

Edited by Jessalynn Keller, Jo Littler and Alison Winch

Deadline to submit papers: February 15, 2015.

This special 15th anniversary issue of Feminist Media Studies will explore
the interconnections between different generations of women and girls in
the contemporary media landscape, building upon several successful
roundtables from when FMS convened around this topic in London in autumn 2014.

While feminism has become increasingly visible within western popular media
cultures over the past few years, little scholarly attention has been paid
to the ways in which age and generation shape mediated conversations about
feminist politics globally. This collection will address this oversight,
aiming to problematize dominant media representations of intergenerational
“catfights” and feminist “bickering,” while simultaneously interrogating
the ways in which mediated conflicts and connectivities shape the potential
to work together to enact feminist social change.

Key Questions: What kind of shared conversations do women have across age groups
and how do these circulate in media cultures? How can intergenerational
alliances be built while still remaining sensitive to differences of
experience? How are feminist connections being formed via digital media
technologies and platforms? How do new forms of mediated activism over
sexual violence, queerness, racism, and social reproduction relate to those
of their predecessors?  How is feminist conflict mediated and how might it
operate productively? How do particular issues such as “sexualisation”
become indicative of intergenerational conflict?

Considering these questions in relation to the growth of feminist media
studies over the past fifteen years, this issue will simultaneously
foreground how feminist media studies can contribute, and how it has
contributed, to an understanding of such intergenerationality. How do
different generations of feminist media scholars talk to each other? What
impediments arise in these conversations? How do geographical and cultural
locations impact these conversations? How do we theorize these generational
divides and dialogues? Does an effective intergenerational feminist media
studies exist, or do we need to invent or extend it?

Possible paper themes might include, but are not restricted to:

• the mediation of age and ageing
• feminist alliances within austerity and neoliberalism
• feminist ‘waves’ in transnational contexts
• intergenerational activism challenging global power inequalities
• the mediation of feminist conflict and crisis
• intersections of ‘race’, class, sexuality and generation
• generational politics within digital media cultures and practices
• queering feminist media studies
• the legacies of feminist anti-racism
• boys and men as feminist allies
• feminist girls

*Please send 300-500 word abstracts and a 50-word bio by 15th February 2015
to Jessalynn Keller, Alison Winch, and Jo Littler. *

Final papers will be no more than 8,000 words and will be due 1st September
2015.

Information about Feminist Media Studies can be found here