BEYOND THE MARKED WOMAN: THE NEW SEX WORKER IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE, 2006-2016

This dissertation argues that between 2006 and 2016, in a context of rising tolerance for sex workers, economic shifts under neoliberal capitalism, and the normalization of transactional intimate labour, popular culture began to offer new and humanizing images of the sex worker as an entrepreneur and care worker. This new popular culture legitimatizes sex workers in a growing services industry and carries important de-stigmatizing messages about sex workers, who continue to be among the most stigmatized of women workers in the U.S. These new representations challenge stereotypical portrayals of sex workers – as immoral criminals or exploited victims – that support conservative and patriarchal ideologies. Drawing upon feminist theories of sex work, labour theory, and feminist media studies methodology for exploring the nexus of gender, sexuality, and popular culture, this dissertation examines feature films, TV series, and TV and online documentaries that depict five sex work occupations – erotic dancers, massage parlour workers, webcam models, call girls, and sex surrogates – to illustrate the new figure of the sex worker as entrepreneur and care worker under neoliberal capitalism. By emphasizing sex workers’ agency to choose their work, dignifying their skills, underscoring sex work as a means of economic mobility, and highlighting the positive contributions sex workers make to their clients’ lives, these popular culture representations challenge the anti-sex work position espoused by conservative patriarchal ideology and prohibitionist feminists. Some of these new representations, however, intertwine with a neoliberal post-feminist sensibility that frames empowerment as realizable through individualism and the market alone, rather than in collective ways, and pose few concrete solutions to the challenges faced by sex workers today, namely criminalization. Even so, this dissertation argues that these emerging twenty-first century representations of the sex worker as entrepreneur and care worker are progressive and mark a growing social tolerance for the idea that, for some women, sex work is legitimate work.

BEYOND THE MARKED WOMAN: THE NEW SEX WORKER IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE, 2006-2016

This dissertation argues that between 2006 and 2016, in a context of rising tolerance for sex workers, economic shifts under neoliberal capitalism, and the normalization of transactional intimate labour, popular culture began to offer new and humanizing images of the sex worker as an entrepreneur and care worker. This new popular culture legitimatizes sex workers in a growing services industry and carries important de-stigmatizing messages about sex workers, who continue to be among the most stigmatized of women workers in the U.S. These new representations challenge stereotypical portrayals of sex workers – as immoral criminals or exploited victims – that support conservative and patriarchal ideologies. Drawing upon feminist theories of sex work, labour theory, and feminist media studies methodology for exploring the nexus of gender, sexuality, and popular culture, this dissertation examines feature films, TV series, and TV and online documentaries that depict five sex work occupations – erotic dancers, massage parlour workers, webcam models, call girls, and sex surrogates – to illustrate the new figure of the sex worker as entrepreneur and care worker under neoliberal capitalism. By emphasizing sex workers’ agency to choose their work, dignifying their skills, underscoring sex work as a means of economic mobility, and highlighting the positive contributions sex workers make to their clients’ lives, these popular culture representations challenge the anti-sex work position espoused by conservative patriarchal ideology and prohibitionist feminists. Some of these new representations, however, intertwine with a neoliberal post-feminist sensibility that frames empowerment as realizable through individualism and the market alone, rather than in collective ways, and pose few concrete solutions to the challenges faced by sex workers today, namely criminalization. Even so, this dissertation argues that these emerging twenty-first century representations of the sex worker as entrepreneur and care worker are progressive and mark a growing social tolerance for the idea that, for some women, sex work is legitimate work.

Shameless dicks: On male privilege, dick pic scandals, and public exposure

Academic debates on shame and the involuntary networked circulation of naked pictures have largely focused on instances of hacked accounts of female celebrities, on revenge porn, and interconnected forms of slut-shaming. Meanwhile, dick pics have been predominantly examined as vehicles of sexual harassment within heterosexual contexts. Taking a somewhat different approach, this article examines leaked or otherwise involuntarily exposed dick pics of men of notable social privilege, asking what kinds of media events such leaked data assemble, how penises become sites of public interest and attention, and how these bodies may be able to escape circuits of public shaming. By focusing on high-profile incidents on an international scale during the past decade, this article moves from the leaked shots of male politicians as governance through shaming to body-shaming targeted at Harvey Weinstein, to Jeff Bezos’s refusal to be shamed through his hacked dick pic, and to an accidentally self-published shaft shot of Lars Ohly, a Swedish politician, we examine the agency afforded by social privilege to slide through shame rather than be stuck in it. By building on feminist media studies and affect inquiry, we attend to the specificities of these attempts to shame, their connections to and disconnections from slut-shaming, and the possibilities and spaces offered for laughter within this all.

“I Know I Can’t Wait to See My Name in Lights”

This essay explores the production, content, and reception of Nickelodeon’s sitcom Taina (2000–01). Created by Maria Perez-Brown, a Latina pioneer in cable television, Taina ran for two seasons and foregrounded a Puerto Rican teenage girl at a performing arts high school in New York City. Guided by an intersectional feminist media studies analysis, I argue that Taina presages the rise of girls’ tween and teen shows on cable television and paved the way for contemporary representations of Latina girlhood in mainstream broadcast, cable, and streaming television. Taina is rarely cited in the history of Latina/o television or children’s television. This essay re-centers Taina as a critical intervention into children’s television and as a leading forerunner in Latina television production. I also highlight the labor of fans in shedding light on Taina’s obscured history, creating new ways of engagement with television of the past, and demanding new representations of Latinas.

COUNTERING THE COUNTERPUBLIC? THE GERMAN #METOO NETWORK ON TWITTER

Certain varieties of feminism have become more popular, and so have anti-feminist reactions to it with both sides competing for visibility. However, the (gendered) interplay between feminist and anti-feminist counterpublics is still uncharted. At the same time, research in the field of feminist media studies is beginning to address questions of power inequalities $2 feminist publics on social media platforms. This study sheds light on the networked structure of the German-language #MeToo protest on Twitter in order to reveal who succeeded in becoming visible and influential in this digital protest and in order to show differences in networking practices among those involved. Analyzing the Twitter interaction network around #MeToo over a period of three month, we find that – as expected – this network consists of some highly connected hubs and a majority of nodes with only few connections. The most central nodes, only 1.1 percent of the Twitter users involved, account for 35 percent of interactions within the network. Applying qualitative and quantitative content analyses, this study shows that Twitter accounts of traditional news media play a central role in the #MeToo network from the very beginning, indicating that protest networks are less equal and horizontal than often assumed. At the same time, k-core decomposition reveals that most Twitter users in the network’s core published mostly racist and anti-feminist content, indicating that few but very loud and well-connected voices used the #MeToo protest to strategically mobilize against migration in Germany and Austria.