Akane Kanai

This book explores the practices and the politics of relatable femininity in intimate digital social spaces. Examining a GIF-based digital culture on Tumblr, the author considers how young women produce relatability through humorous, generalisable representations of embarrassment, frustration, and resilience in everyday situations. Relatability is examined as an affective relation that offers the feeling of sameness and female friendship amongst young women. However, this relation is based on young women’s ability to competently negotiate the ‘feeling rules’ that govern youthful femininity. Such classed and racialised feeling rules require young women to perfect the performance of normalcy: they must mix self-deprecation with positivity; they must be relatably flawed but not actual ‘failures’. Situated in debates about postfeminism, self-representation and digital identity, this book connects understandings of digital visual culture to gender, race, and class, and neoliberal imperatives to perform the ‘right feelings’. Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, and media studies.

Managing Affect, Intimacy and Value

Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture

Nancy S. Niemi

Rosalind Gill

Julia Coffey

Penny Jane Burke

Marie-Pierre Moreau

What does it mean to be pedagogical in a post-truth landscape? How might feminist thought and action work to intervene in this environment? Gender in an Era of Post-truth Populism draws together leading feminist scholars of gender and education to explore the current significance of the rise of populist policies and discourses and the challenges it poses to the hard-won battles regarding the rights of women, immigrants, and minorities. Offering the first detailed feminist intervention in this space, the collection explores the significance of populism for feminist pedagogies and practices in relation to gender and education. This exploration has significance for broader and urgent questions of our times regarding knowledge, authority, truth, power and harm and considers the potential for feminist interventions in relation to pedagogies and activisms to speak back and disrupt populist agendas.

Pedagogies, Challenges and Strategies

Gender in an Era of Post-truth Populism

Akane Kanai

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