Critically analyzes the discursive relationship between cultural value and popular feminism in American television. While American television has long relied on a strategic foregrounding of feminist politics to promote certain programming's cultural value, Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television is the first sustained critical analysis of the twenty-first-century resurgence of this tradition. In Woman Up, Julia Havas's central argument is that postmillennial "feminist quality television" springs from a rhetorical subversion of the (much-debated) masculine-coded "quality television"culture on the one hand and the dominance of postfeminist popular culture on the other. Postmillennial quality television culture promotes the idea of aesthetic-generic hierarchies among different types of scripted programming. Its development has facilitated evaluative academic analyses of television texts based on aesthetic merit, producing a corpus of scholarship devoted to pinpointing where value resides in shows considered worthy of discussion. Other strands of television scholarship have criticized this approach for sidestepping the gendered and classed processes of canonization informing the phenomenon. Woman Up intervenes in this debate by reevaluating such approaches and insisting that rather than further fostering or critiquing already prominent processes of canonization, there is a need to interrogate the cultural forces underlying them. Via detailed analyses of four TV programs emerging in the early period of the "feminist quality TV" trend-30 Rock (2006-13), Parks and Recreation (2009-15), The Good Wife (2009-16), and Orange Is the New Black (2013-19)-Woman Up demonstrates that such series mediate their cultural significance by combining formal aesthetic exceptionalism and a politicized rhetoric around a "problematic" postfeminism, thus linking ideals of political and aesthetic value. Woman Up will most appeal to students and scholars of cinema and media studies, feminist media studies, television studies, and cultural studies.

What is milk? Who is it for, and what work does it do? This collection of articles bring together an exciting group of the world's leading scholars from different disciplines to provide commentaries on multiple facets of the production, consumption, understanding and impact of milk on society. The book frames the emerging global discussion around philosophical and critical theoretical engagements with milk. In so doing, various chapters bring into consideration an awareness of animals, an aspect which has not yet been incorporated in these debates within these disciplines so far. This brand new research from scholars includes writing from an array of perspectives, including jurisprudence, food law, history, geography, art theory, and gender studies. It will be of use to professionals and researchers in such disciplines as anthropology, visual culture, cultural studies, development studies, food studies, environment studies, critical animal studies, and gender studies.

Examines the role that parenting, as a theme and practice, plays in film and media cultures. Mothers of Invention: Film, Media, and Caregiving Labor constructs a feminist genealogy that foregrounds the relationship between acts of production on the one hand and reproduction on the other. In this interdisciplinary collection, editors So Mayer and Corinn Columpar bring together film and media studies with parenting studies to stake out a field, or at least a conversation, that is thick with historical and theoretical dimension and invested in cultural and methodological plurality. In four sections and sixteen contributions, the manuscript reflects on how caregiving shapes the work of filmmakers, how parenting is portrayed on screen, and how media contributes to radical new forms of care and expansive definitions of mothering. Featuring an exciting array of approaches-including textual analysis, industry studies, ethnographic research, production histories, and personal reflection-Mothers of Invention is a multifaceted collection of feminist work that draws on the methods of both the humanities and the social sciences, as well as the insights borne of both scholarship and lived experience. Grounding this inquiry is analysis of a broad range of texts with global reach-from the films Bashu, The Little Stranger (Bahram Beyzai, 1989), Prevenge (Alice Lowe, 2016), and A Deal with the Universe (Jason Barker, 2018) to the television series Top of the Lake(2013-2017) and Jane the Virgin (2014-2019), among others-as well as discussion of the creative practices, be they related to production, pedagogy, curation, or critique, employed by a wide variety of film and media artists and/or scholars. Mothers of Invention demonstrates how the discourse of parenting and caregiving allows the discipline to expand its discursive frameworks to address, and redress, current theoretical, political, and social debates about the interlinked futures of work and the world. This collection belongs on the bookshelves of students and scholars of cinema and media studies, feminist and queer media studies, labor studies, filmmaking and production, and cultural studies.

Gender, Communication, and the Leadership Gap is the sixth volume in the Women and Leadership: Research, Theory, and Practice series. This cross-disciplinary series, from the International Leadership Association, enhances leadership knowledge and improves leadership development of women around the world. The purpose of this volume is to highlight connections between the fields of communication and leadership to help address the problem of underrepresentation of women in leadership. Readers will profit from the accessible writing style as they encounter cutting-edge scholarship on gender and leadership. Chapters of note cover microaggressions, authentic leadership, courageous leadership, inclusive leadership, implicit bias, career barriers and levers, impression management, and the visual rhetoric of famous women leaders. Because women in leadership positions occupy a contested landscape, one goal of this collection is to clarify the contradictory communication dynamics that occur in everyday interactions, in national and international contexts, and when leadership is digital. Another goal is to illuminate the complexities of leadership identity, intersectionality, and perceptions that become obstacles on the path to leadership. The renowned thinkers and scholars in this volume hail from both Leadership and Communication disciplines. The book begins with Sally Helgesen and Brenda J. Allen. Helgesen, co-author of The Female Vision: Women's Real Power at Work, discusses the two-fold challenge women face as they struggle to articulate their visions. Her chapter offers six practices women can use to relieve this struggle. Allen, author of the groundbreaking book, Difference Matters: Communicating Social Identity, discusses the implications of how inclusive leadership matters to women and what it means to think about women as people who embody both dominant and non-dominant social identity categories. She then offers practical communication strategies and an intersectional ethic to the six signature traits of highly inclusive leaders. Each chapter includes practical solutions from a communication and leadership perspective that all readers can employ to advance the work of equality. Some solutions will be of use in organizational contexts, such as leadership development and training initiatives, or tools to change organizational culture. Some solutions will be of use to individuals, such as how to identify and respond productively to micro-aggressions or how to be cautious rather than optimistic about practicing authentic leadership. The writing in this volume also reflects a range of styles, from in-depth scholarship that produces new knowledge to shorter forums that feature interesting ideas worth considering.

Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame by Sarah Keller explores the career of experimental filmmaker and visual artist Barbara Hammer. Hammer first garnered attention in the early 1970s for a series of films representing lesbian subjects and subjectivity. Over the five decades that followed, she made almost a hundred films and solidified her position as a pioneer of queer experimental cinema and art. In the first chapter, Keller covers Hammer's late 1960s-1970s work and explores the tensions between the representation of women's bodies and contemporary feminist theory. In the second chapter, Keller charts the filmmaker's physical move from the Bay Area to New York City, resulting in shifts in her artistic mode. The third chapter turns to Hammer's primarily documentary work of the 1990s and how it engages with the places she travels, the people she meets, and the histories she explores. In the fourth chapter, Keller then considers Hammer's legacy, both through the final films of her career-which combine the methods and ideas of the earlier decades-and her efforts to solidify and shape the ways in which the work would be remembered. In the final chapter, excerpts from the author's interviews with Hammer during the last three years of her life offer intimate perspectives and reflections on her work from the filmmaker herself. Hammer's full body of work as a case study allows readers to see why a much broader notion of feminist production and artistic process is necessary to understand art made by women in the past half century. Hammer's work-classically queer and politically feminist-presses at the edges of each of those notions, pushing beyond the frames that would not contain her dynamic artistic endeavors. Keller's survey of Hammer's work is a vital text for students and scholars of film, queer studies, and art history.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft's passionate work supporting women's rights, is considered to be among the very first examples of feminist philosophy. When it appeared in 1792, Wollstonecraft's treatise sets out a range of what were at the time radical beliefs; she thought all women should have a formal education, so that they may raise their children to be keener in mind as well as prove able conversationalists with their husbands. Wollestonecraft by no means unreservedly supports marriage: she states that women should not be thought of merely as items to be bandied about and wed, but as human beings capable of great intellect. Wollstonecraft also lambastes the prevailing social picture of women; that they have a number of fixed, narrow and often domestic duties. She also singles out how women are expected to behave, criticizing in particular the notion that the highest aspiration of a woman is to be a sentimental heroine in a popular romance novel.

Cosmetic surgeries are at an all-time high, Ozempic is bringing back 'heroin chic' and TikTok trad-wives are on the rise - after four waves of feminism, what went wrong?

Despite decades of progress, the gains of the feminist movement feel more fragile than ever. But as Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert points out, this is not a unique moment. Feminism felt just as fragmented in the early 2000s, when the momentum of third-wave feminists and riot grrrls was squashed by lad culture and the commodification of Girl Power.

Casting her eye across pop culture of the past thirty years - from Madonna, the Spice Girls and the Kardashians, to MySpace, #GirlBoss and Real Housewives - Sophie Gilbert reveals a toxic pattern of progress and misogynistic backlash. Girl on Girl shows how every form of media, heavily influenced by the rise of porn, has shaped and warped women's relationships with themselves and other women.

We cannot move forward without fully reckoning with the ways pop culture has defined us - this book shows us how.

Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man traces efforts within contemporary American feminist utopias to imagine healthier conceptions of manhood. As this analysis illuminates, feminist works envisioning the improved society and its attending masculinities make up an overlooked site for mining new masculinities. During the years in which such utopias moved from the margins to the mainstream, the early 1970s to the mid-2010s, these novels grew more complex, challenging essentialist conceptions of masculinity and female experience. As this analysis demonstrates, these texts vary in their focus, but are united by an interest in transforming patriarchal masculinities and replacing them with an alternative informed by second wave and intersectional feminism. This book analyzes the centrality of such alternative masculinities to these ideal societies and the ways feminist writers present in their fiction new conceptions of manhood pivotal to discussions surrounding the ongoing crisis of American masculinity.

Women and Empire, 1750-1939: Primary Sources on Gender and Anglo-Imperialism functions to extend significantly the range of the History of Feminism series (co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse), bringing together the histories of British and American women's emancipation, represented in earlier sets, into juxtaposition with histories produced by different kinds of imperial and colonial governments. The alignment of writings from a range of Anglo-imperial contexts reveals the overlapping histories and problems, while foregrounding cultural specificities and contextual inflections of imperialism. The volumes focus on countries, regions, or continents formerly colonized (in part) by Britain: Volume I: Australia Volume II: New Zealand Volume III: Africa Volume IV: India Volume V: Canada Perhaps the most novel aspect of this collection is its capacity to highlight the common aspects of the functions of empire in their impact on women and their production of gender, and conversely, to demonstrate the actual specificity of particular regional manifestations. Concerning questions of power, gender, class and race, this new Routledge-Edition Synapse Major Work will be of particular interest to scholars and students of imperialism, colonization, women's history, and women's writing.

Since the 1980s the number of women regularly directing films has increased significantly in most Western countries: in France, Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat have joined Agnes Varda in gaining international renown, while British directors Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold have forged award-winning careers in feature film. This new volume in the Thinking Cinema series draws on feminist theorists and critics from Simone de Beauvoir on to offer readings of a range of the most important and memorable of these films from the 1990s and 2000s, focusing as it does so on how the films convey women's lives and identities.Mainstream entertainment cinema traditionally distorts the representation of women, objectifying their bodies, minimizing their agency,and avoiding the most important questions about how cinema can 'do justice' to female subjectivity: Kate Ince suggests that the films of independent women directors are progressively redressing the balance, and thereby reinvigorating both the narratives and the formal ambitions of European cinema. Ince uses feminist philosophers to cast a new veil over such films as Sex Is Comedy, Morvern Callar, White Material, and Fish Tank; and includes a timeline ofdevelopments in women's film-making and feminist film theory from 1970 to 2011.