Pop Masculinities

Pop Masculinities investigates the performance and policing of masculinity in pop music as a starting point for grasping the broad complexity of gender and its politics in the early twenty-first century. Drawing together perspectives from critical musicology, gender studies, and adjacent scholarly fields, the book presents extended case studies of five well-known artists: Zayn, Lil Nas X, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, and Take That. By directing particular attention to the ambiguities and contradictions that arise from these artists’ representations of masculinity, author Kai Arne Hansen argues that pop performances tend to operate in ways that simultaneously reinforce and challenge gender norms and social inequalities. Providing a rich exploration of these murky waters, the author merges the interpretation of recorded song and music video with discourse analysis and media ethnography in order to engage with the full range of pop artists’ public identities as they emerge at the intersections between processes of performance, promotion, and reception. In so doing, he advances our understanding of the aesthetic and discursive underpinnings of gender politics in twenty-first century pop culture and encourages readers to contemplate the sociopolitical implications of their own musical engagements as audiences, critics, musicians, and scholars.

Situated Talk: A method for a reflexive encounter with #donorconceived on TikTok

There is a pressing need to facilitate sensitive conversations between people with differing or opposing views. On video-sharing app TikTok, the diverse experiences of donor-conceived people and recipient parents sit uneasily alongside each other, coalescing in hashtags like #donorconceived. This article describes a method ‘Situated Talk’ which uses TikToks to facilitate a reflexive encounter, drawing on three areas of scholarship: media ethnography and elicitation, researcher reflexivity and duoethnography/collaborative autoethnography. We describe how we, as a donor-conceived adult (Giselle) and a queer woman who would need donor sperm to have a child (Clare), employed TikToks from #donorconceived as prompts to facilitate a sensitive conversation and elicit situated insights. We explore three central insights from applying our method: (1) discomfort as a productive tension; (2) unresolved dilemmas; and (3) discovering parallels in experience. Using TikToks as stimuli, ‘Situated Talk’ contributes an innovative method for generating grounded social media insights.

Contesting digital leisure time: Parental struggles in relation to young children's play with tablets at home

Young children's practices with tablet computers has been a topic in parenting discourses for several years, drawing on earlier debates over technologies and media in children's lives. In this article, I analyse data from a video observation–based media ethnography of seven Danish children (aged 4–6) and engage with the research tradition attributed to parental mediation. The analysis suggests two major paths in the struggles that stand out from the discourses and in situ practices of parents and children in the empirical data. These paths encompass struggles in relation to supporting and directing children's play activities and setting boundaries in their use of tablets and content. The nuances and implications of both paths are analysed and discussed in terms of strategies that emerge to support children's agency and rapport with parents, as well as what this means for future research.

ANALISIS POSTINGAN DI TWITTER MENGENAI VAKSINASI COVID-19: PERILAKU SOSIAL TERHADAP VAKSINASI COVID-19 GUNA PENCEGAHAN PENULARAN COVID-19

Pandemi Covid-19 merupakan peristiwa baru yang dialami oleh seluruh masyarakat Indonesia dan juga dunia. Pandemi ini muncul dengan pola dan masalah baru yang memengaruhi perilaku sosial manusia sebagai individu dan masyarakat. Informasi merupakan hal penting yang harus diketahui oleh manusia untuk menghadapi perubahan pola dan masalah yang terjadi. Di era pandemi ini, manusia aktif berinteraksi di media sosial sebagai bentuk pelarian dari kebijakan pelarangan interaksi fisik untuk mengurangi penularan virus. Interaksi yang terjadi antarmanusia merupakan bentuk saling berbagi pengalaman dan pengetahuan yang dimiliki untuk kepentingan manusia itu sendiri. Bagaimana ini dijelaskan? interaksi sebagai perilaku sosial harus dimaknai lebih dalam sebagai proses manusia untuk mencari pengetahuan dan pengalaman yang memiliki maksud dan tujuan di dalamnya. Tujuan ini sebenarnya untuk memastikan bahwa manusia itu sendiri memiliki pengetahuan untuk menghadapi perubahan yang terjadi akibat munculnya pandemi Covid-19. Metode social media ethnography digunakan untuk melihat proses interaksi di media sosial secara terus menerus hingga akhirnya manusia dapat membuktikan bahwa dirinya memiliki kemampuan dan pengetahuan untuk memahami dan berperilaku di era pandemi Covid-19. Media sosial Twitter digunakan untuk melihat interaksi yang terjadi antarnetizen Indonesia terkait kejadian Covid-19, khususnya vaksinasi Covid-19 yang dilakukan di Indonesia. Interaksi berulang yang dilakukan membentuk bukti diri yang digunakan untuk mengonfirmasi dan mengamati peristiwa dengan lebih baik dengan pengetahuan sebelumnya. Pengetahuan ini merupakan bentuk acuan yang digunakan manusia untuk bertindak ketika menghadapi peristiwa tertentu, dalam hal ini menanggapi setiap peristiwa selama pandemi Covid-19.

How to Approach Hard Drives as Cultural Heritage

Computers and mobile phones are piling up in archives, libraries, and museums. What kind of objects are they, what can they tell us, and how can we approach them? The aim of this chapter is to exemplify what an investigation of a hard drive implicates, the methods needed to conduct it, and what kind of results we can get out of it. To focus the investigation, hard drives are approached as records of everyday media use. The chapter introduces a computer forensic method used as a media ethnographic tool. Computer forensics and media ethnography are rooted in different methodological traditions, but both take an interest in people’s routines and the way they do and organize things. The chapter argues that a hard drive represents a window into the history of new media: into time specific software, formats, and media use.

Casting for Change: Tracing Gender in Discussions of Casting through Feminist Media Ethnography

The moment of casting is a crucial one in any media production. Casting the ‘right’ person shapes the narrative as much as the way in which the final product might be received by critics and audiences. For this article, casting—as the moment in which gender is hypervisible in its complex intersectional entanglement with class, race and sexuality—will be our gateway to exploring the dynamics of discussion of gender conventions and how we, as feminist scholars, might manoeuvre. To do so, we will test and triangulate three different forms of ethnographically inspired inquiry: 1) ‘collaborative auto-ethnography,’ to discuss male-to-female gender-bending comedies from the 1980s and 1990s, 2) ‘netnography’ of online discussions about the (potential) recasting of gendered legacy roles from <em>Doctor Who</em> to <em>Mary Poppins</em>, and 3) textual media analysis of content focusing on the casting of cisgender actors for transgender roles. Exploring the affordances and challenges of these three methods underlines the duty of care that is essential to feminist audience research. Moving across personal and anonymous, ‘real’ and ‘virtual,’ popular and professional discussion highlights how gender has been used and continues to be instrumentalised in lived audience experience and in audience research.

Cinema and the mask of capital: Labour debates in the Malayalam film industry

Labour discourses in the film industry are often couched in the language of ‘welfare’ and an effort to maintain harmony among different filmmaking sectors. But such arrangements do not proffer equal participation or bargaining rights to everyone in the industry. Focusing on the Malayalam language film industry based in Kerala, this article examines how the film industry’s apprenticeship and unpaid labour arrangements affect below-the-line labour and less influential job profiles on a film set. In corollary, I also explore how labour and bargaining rights are conceptualized differently by film organizations based on their ideological positions. Using a mixed-methods approach, including media ethnography and interviews with members of different trade guilds who form part of Malayalam cinema’s professional, technical and service sectors, I demonstrate how structural inequalities in the film industry are overlooked while the cine-worker’s agency is co-opted by a neoliberal system that masquerades as welfare.

Grasping Terroir while Teaching Online: Resituating the “Field” in Pedagogies of the Global

Framing the global in U.S. undergraduate education has significantly entailed “field” experiences. How have such activities prepared students to understand the interaction of daily life with larger institutions, structures, and processes? How to incorporate attention to the contradictions and untenable translations of a locale and its global entanglements into pedagogical responses to a pandemic that has significantly halted physical mobility and personal contact? This article takes up questions of how a certain conceptualization of ethnography could inform efforts to design new pedagogies for global studies. Building off a recent discussion in anthropology, I argue that the concept of ethnographic “sensibility” provides a productive entry point to discovering and articulating insights into the forms and dynamics of a population and place as shaped by interactions with other populations and places in time and space. I draw from my own experiences with the pre-pandemic piloting of an online course in media ethnography. I highlight examples of student work that point in one direction for how to engage students of global studies in profound field experiences, perhaps even when accessed digitally. This article employs the articulation of entry points for global research for the crafting of entry points for pedagogy.

WEAPONIZATION OF LIVENESS: STREAMING DEATH AS A HYBRID MEDIA EVENT OF TERRORIST VIOLENCE

This paper offers a critical exploration of the notion of liveness and, in particular, the production of liveness in the context of hybrid media event of terrorist violence. With Christchurch mosque attacks of March, 2019, as the empirical context of study, the paper demonstrates i) how the perpetrator produced liveness through the live streaming of the massacre in digital media; ii) how this material circulated in diverse digital platforms; and iii) what kind of struggles emerged around visibility and erasure by way of removal as carried out by different platforms (e.g. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter). The empirical data collection and analysis is based on a method of digital media ethnography. We posit that live streaming of the Christchurch mosque attacks resulted in the weaponization of liveness (Callahan 2017), accelerating the experience of ‘real time’ witnessing of death on multiple levels. While a relatively small number of people watched the massacre take place in ‘real time’ (en direct), a much larger audience captured the ‘re-enactment’ of liveness through the active circulation and sharing of the video on different platforms. This, the paper argues, shapes the hybrid media events of terrorist violence of today not only as a phenomenon of intensified and accelerated death experienced online, but also as a phenomenon that amplifies the process of disgracing and dishonoring the dignity of human life as unique.