Playing YouTube: How the Nancy YouTuber doll and app position children as aspiring YouTube influencers

This article analyzes Nancy YouTuber, a popular doll and companion app that is part of a growing trend of children's toys modeled on YouTube influencers. Nancy YouTuber's app is one of the first to provide a fictitious YouTube channel, introducing children to YouTube's affordances. We investigate how the doll and app socialize YouTuber practices, and to what extent the combination of both deepens the commodification of childhood. We use the walkthrough method to analyze the app, and a semiotic approach to study the doll, its accessories and surrounding materials to map the manufacturer's intended use through these discourses. Our research uncovers how children are encouraged to recreate product reviews and internalize commercial digital identity performances. We use Spain, where the doll originates, to contextualize these findings. The article considers how influencer-aspirant toys position children as promotional intermediaries and normalize children's YouTuber aspirations.

Teens on screens: Girls’ negotiations of representations of texting in teen film

Teen film is a space where stories about young people’s engagement with technology are told and where relationships and communication are represented. How do girls engage with such stories? This article draws on material from two focus groups held with girls at high schools located in the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand in November 2019 and places this in the context of other representations of image sharing and texting in teen films over the past 25 years. Participants were shown a scene from Netflix teen film Sierra Burgess Is a Loser (2018), in which Sierra receives a shirtless selfie from Jamey and contemplates how to respond, before finally replying with a picture of a seated elephant. The participants’ discussion illustrates some of the ways girls navigate technology use in their lives and relationships and the complex ways they negotiate popular culture representations of intimacy in teen film.

More than a makeover: Discourses of masculinity, hyposexuality, and marriage in Queer Eye: We’re in Japan!

This article examines Anglo-American portrayals of sexual inactivity in Japan, a media narrative that has been critically overlooked, yet offers much insight into how the regulation of sexuality and masculinity is tied to global power relations and nationalist ideologies. Global fascination with the rise of sexual inactivity in Japan has mostly been confined to news media; however, the topic has also begun to appear in popular media texts such as Netflix's makeover show Queer Eye: We’re in Japan!, presenting a valuable opportunity to expand our understanding of this narrative and the questions it raises about sexual normativity. Drawing from a comparative textual analysis, I argue that while both news coverage and Queer Eye consistently frame Japan as a site of dysfunctional sexuality and masculinity, differences in aesthetic, narrative, and industrial conventions lead these texts to create divergent common-sense understandings about sex, masculinity and Japaneseness that formulate their Orientalist narrative.

Convivial reflexivity in the changing city – a tale of hospitality or hostility?

The article interrogates whether citizens’ (embodied) encounters with migrant populations (newcomers and settled) enable or hinder convivial reflexivity in a multicultural city of compounded crises. Convivial reflexivity refers to the embodied process of identity-making that is rooted in the context of everyday life and emerges at the juncture of embodied encounters with the Other and the intense mediation of migration that shapes citizens’ perceptions and practices. The article draws on a four-month intense ethnographic study in an Athenian neighbourhood and reveals how, even in a very tense environment of crises and intensified racism, everyday encounters in the city could mediate class solidarities and support the emergence of networked commons against national and racial hierarchies. The article aims to move beyond claims of conviviality as a natural outcome of urban encounters, and instead to reveal a convivial reflexivity that understands urban encounters as an assemblage of cognition, affect and embodiment.

Poetic resistance: Karen long-distance nationalism, rap music, and YouTube

This article investigates a concern among encamped elder Karen refugees (an ethnic minority from Myanmar) living along the Thai–Myanmar border that the youth are disconnected politically and culturally. I argue that Karen youth are creative, active participants, reimagining and revitalising Karen politics and culture in their image. I explore how displaced youths have found a voice in Karen rap and how they express this voice in the digitally mediated lived space of YouTube. I consider YouTube as a lived space where citizenship is reimagined and long-distance nationalism is articulated. Finally, I contend that YouTube is transforming Karen youths’ political experiences and mobility and that they are actively political – just not in the way the elders expect.

Mermaids as market creators: Cultural entrepreneurship in an emerging practice

With the example of the emergence of professional mermaids, this article shows how primarily young, female enterprising performers developed a new aesthetic category, generated employment from it, and in that way created a market for their services and products. To conceptualize this development, the article employs the Callonian program in market studies into research on cultural entrepreneurship, highlighting that markets are constantly in-the-making and innovation processes cannot be ascribed to the activities of singular “hero figures.” This adds to the existing literature on cultural entrepreneurship by calling attention to collective entrepreneurial practices taking place on the fringes of the cultural sector.

Everyday data cultures and USB portable flash drives

In this article, we present a deeper understanding of everyday data cultures in regards to personal information management practices. We draw on a study involving 14 in-depth interviews with users of portable hard drives and USB portable flash drives in Melbourne, Australia, to examine participants’ reflections on their management of personal information on USB portable devices. In examining participant use of these devices, we consider how they kept (stored) and organized (arranged) information on these devices. We also examined device and data sharing. We conclude by thinking about their increased use within cross-tool information management, including the nexus of portable hard drive/USB use and cloud storage. The argument of this article is that portable hard drives and USBs, due to their miniaturization, ease of portability, affordability and storage capacity, add considerable complexity to established understandings of personal information management practices.

Creating a patchwork of unruliness: The grumpy old woman as affect alien

Narratives on ageing are deeply entangled with discourses on happiness. This article draws on Sara Ahmed’s critique on the disciplinary dynamics of the promise of happiness to explore how happiness scripts make certain ‘happy objects’ such as beauty aspirations, sexual desires, and life choices seen as ‘right’ for older women and others as ‘wrong’. My aim is to contribute to new feminist theorisations of women’s ageing by exploring the unhappy archives of older women and looking for ways in which normative happiness scripts are challenged, destabilised and rewritten. Articulations of resistance are found through interpretative engagement with representations of older women who feel alienated by the ‘right’ happy objects, deliberately make ‘wrong’ object choices or turn the ‘right’ happy objects into tools to dismantle ageist, sexist and heteronormative structures. These resistance strategies come together in my theorising of the grumpy old women as affect alien and a patchwork of unruliness.

Globalization from above and below: Rejecting superficial multiculturalism and igniting anti-Korean sentiment in Japan

Nike Japan’s distribution of a commercial included a message of superficial multiculturalism presented through the narratives of three Japanese girls – ethnic Japanese, “hafu,” and zainichi – who overcome bullying and discrimination through their shared love of football (soccer). The ad demonstrated a glocalized production to fit with the “You Can’t Stop Us” global ad campaign of Nike, a transnational shoe and athletic apparel company. Thus, the ad reflects globalization from above. In response, some Japanese viewers expressed their anger at the ad to voice their grassroots resistance, reflecting globalization from below. The resistance was not against Nike for its transnational exploitation but for its alleged hypocrisy. Most substantially, the resistance was directed against generalized Koreans. Thus, the article argues that globalization from below is not necessarily, or perhaps not even usually counter-hegemonic or anti-transnational capitalism. Instead, grassroots activism takes advantage of moments to process and produce existing ideological meanings.