S. Blithe, Jessica M. F. Hughes, Rebecca Mercado Jones, Rachel E. Silverman, A. Wolfe
{"title":"Special Issue Forum: Navigating Privilege and Risk: Mothering and Professing During COVID-19","authors":"S. Blithe, Jessica M. F. Hughes, Rebecca Mercado Jones, Rachel E. Silverman, A. Wolfe","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2022.2041937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2022.2041937","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The novel coronavirus global pandemic—and the associated disease it causes (COVID-19)—swept the world in 2020, completely changing life as it once was. Academic mothers experienced COVID-19 as an unanticipated crash of simultaneous parenting responsibilities, remote teaching, and continued pressure to produce research. In this forum, four academic mothers present vignettes that represent their experiences navigating privilege and risk while parenting and professing during the COVID-19 pandemic.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48417106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Moms, Memes, and Mitigating Pandemic Stress: Exploring Themes and Implications in an Academic Mamas’ Facebook Group","authors":"Janell C. Bauer, Prisca Ngondo","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2022.2030607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2022.2030607","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article pairs autoethnography with a thematic analysis of memes in a private Facebook group made up of academic mothers during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis illustrates the challenges members faced during the pandemic related to their roles as mothers, academics, caregivers, and partners and how they used memes as a mechanism for virtual support in 2020 and 2021. Group members used memes to communicate about four primary themes: the stress and humor that arose from pandemic conditions, mothering during the pandemic, work–life tensions, and pressures for research productivity. Throughout the themes, humor offered a foundation for support and connection. The analysis provides insights into the potential for professional support networks online and how humor, shared via social media, can create space for vulnerability and connection among colleagues. The authors also consider the ambivalent dynamics that online social support offers. While it may reduce tension and provide emotional comfort, it also has the potential to uphold gendered expectations at home and at work.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41431961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Collective Rage: Unpacking the Constraints, Privilege, and Roles of Academic Mothers During a Global Pandemic","authors":"S. Blithe","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2022.2025532","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2022.2025532","url":null,"abstract":"I carefully placed my laptop on a box on my kitchen table and threw on a suit jacket over my pajama tank top. The kitchen is not the ideal place to work, but it has the best lighting, a nondistracting background, and the most reliable Wi-Fi in the house. Like many people in March 2020, I was working 100% from home due to the global shutdown during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. I felt relatively equipped to work from home; much of my work as an academic is often conducted remotely, and I had the technology I needed to do my job. As I readied my makeshift workspace for an important research interview, my son entered the kitchen.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42163860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When Everything Changes, Everything Stays the Same: The Queer Paradox of Quarantine Pods","authors":"M. Morrissey","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2021.2021774","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.2021774","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the practice of podding was encouraged in public discourse as a way to manage the isolation and stress many people experienced. While described as a creative mode of relationality that extended traditional nuclear family units, the public discourse about forming quarantine pods during the COVID-19 pandemic was a strategic bordering practice. Even though some community members (LGBTQIA+ and otherwise) celebrated the resilient ways in which queer experiences could model these nonnormative intimacies, public discourses about pandemic podding limited the potential to imagine new ways of being, often further entrenching normative ideals of citizenship and heteronormative family making. Although uncharted modes of relationality such as podding offer the promise of inclusive, radical, and generative futures, the reactive, bounded, and formalistic construction of pandemic pods never fully materialized that future.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44957209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema.","authors":"Cora Butcher-Spellman","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2022.2041966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2022.2041966","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49503194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Queer Intercultural Communication: The Intersectional Politics of Belonging In and Across Differences","authors":"Shuzhen Huang","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2022.2041967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2022.2041967","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46020317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Embracing Black Feminist Joy and Pleasure in Communication Studies","authors":"Christina N. Baker","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2021.1987813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1987813","url":null,"abstract":"“Blackness is an immense and defiant joy,” Imani Perry recently declared in The Atlantic. This embrace of Black life reflects the Black feminist praxis of understanding joy and pleasure as forms of resistance, self-care, and power. To be clear, Perry asserts that “exhilaration in black life is not to mute or minimize racism, but to shame racism, to damn it to hell... . Do not misunderstand. This [joy] is not an absence of grief or rage, or a distraction. It is insistence.” Unlike Black feminist praxis, mainstream media has largely ignored or distorted the immense and defiant joy to which Perry refers in its representations of Black life. Narratives of loss, sorrow, violence, and anger have overwhelmingly driven most media that centers blackness. As such, it is not surprising that the relationship between blackness and joy or pleasure has been underexplored within communication scholarship. This forum, “Embracing Black Feminist Joy and Pleasure in Communication Studies,” places Black feminist explorations of joy and pleasure—broadly defined as a feeling of happiness, enjoyment, or satisfaction—in conversation with the field. The insistence on embracing individual and collective pleasure that has long been integrated into Black feminism is illuminated in Audre Lorde’s influential 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Lorde argues that women have a particular capacity to experience a pleasurable sense of satisfaction in all areas of their lives when they are in touch with the internal sensation that she refers to as “the erotic.” Following Lorde’s work, contemporary Black feminists, such as Jennifer Nash, Joan Morgan, and adrienne maree brown, to name only a few, have similarly centered the role of pleasure in the lives of Black women. However, when Black feminist scholar bell hooks considered Black women’s relationship to media in her essay “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” she observed that, for many Black women, their “encounter with the screen hurt.” While hooks placed hope in Black women’s ability to “contest, resist, revision, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels” as critical spectators, she primarily emphasized that the “oppositional gaze” that Black women employ when engaging with media can support Black women in navigating the pain, rather than embracing the pleasure, in media. It is worth noting that communication scholarship has addressed the affective sensation of enjoyment or pleasure gained from media. And there is a glimmer in recent","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46362430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Black Feminist Pleasure on TikTok: An Ode to Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression”","authors":"C. Steele","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2021.1987822","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1987822","url":null,"abstract":"On every app, much like in every facet of their offline worlds, Black women deal with racism and sexism, both as embedded features in the design of apps (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018) and from individuals who make use of the affordances of platforms to harass and enact violence (Tynes, Lozada, Smith, & Stewart, 2018). TikTok does not escape this milieu. Black women on the app are simultaneously expected to perform and create content on demand while dealing with algorithms and individuals who exploit and enact violence upon them. Yet, amid this reality, Black women creators have used TikTok to form community and participate in the pleasure of producing and circulating their cultural artifacts in short video content. Folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1934/2000) explains, “The Negro’s universal mimicry is not so much a thing in itself as an evidence of something that permeates his entire self. And that thing is drama.” I contend that Black women’s use of TikTok, a site that invites and demands mimicry, provides us an opportunity to use a different Black feminist lens to interpret content: that of pleasure as made manifest in the drama. I examine Black women content creators on TikTok who use humor, sexuality, and dance to craft spaces of pleasure for themselves. Leaning into the drama, I locate content creation as part of a libidinal pleasure politic separate from a discussion of resistance or economic or social capital. To analyze their praxis, I return to an essay by Hurston, written in 1934, called “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” With Hurston’s words as a guide, I trace the content of Black women on TikTok as agentic feminist praxis that emphasizes their pleasure while utilizing platform-embedded affordances.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46233658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"If It’s Cool: Notes on Slow Jams, Black Masculinity, and the Possibilities of Black Pleasure in Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite","authors":"P. Johnson","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2021.1987817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1987817","url":null,"abstract":"April 2, 2021, marked the 25th anniversary of the release of R&B singer Maxwell’s debut album Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite. At the time of its release, the album, which chronicles the progression of a heterosexual romantic relationship, was heralded as a thoughtful alternative to the more gratuitously raunchy work produced by other Black male vocalists of the era. Furthermore, the album, along with D’Angelo’s 1995 album Brown Sugar and Erykah Badu’s 1997 album Baduizm, has been credited with ushering in the neo-soul movement within Black popular music during the midto late 1990s. R&B has often been much maligned as “rhythm and bullshit,” a vapid genre fueled by fantasy and escapism, offering little in the way of Black politics. The denigration of R&B became particularly pronounced as hip-hop emerged as a dominant cultural and musical phenomenon. Mark Anthony Neal (2003) observes, “As hip-hop music began to demand more airplay, generate more sales, and dominate the black social imagination, it was seen as a window into the travails of black America, whereas R&B was simply seen as a ‘bunch of love songs’” (p. 3). Robert Patterson (2019) makes a similar observation regarding how R&B is taken up in relationship to hip-hop. He writes:","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46468653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Repurposing Black Women’s Strength and Normalizing “Strong Sista Self-Care” on Social Media","authors":"K. Scott","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2021.1987823","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1987823","url":null,"abstract":"As I watched the opening ceremony of the 2020 Olympics—held in the summer of 2021, as we continued to wait for an end to the pandemic that shuttered life as we know it—I, like so many others, was anticipating the joy that would come from watching athletes give it their all to bring home the gold. And like many other Black women I know, I was excited to see Simone Biles, who has been dubbed the greatest of all time in women gymnastics—the GOAT!—a young woman who has continually outperformed herself, created new, gravity-defying movements, and given a face to what it means to be young, gifted, and Black. Biles’s victory in the summer of 2021 was to be unprecedented—and it still was, just not in a way that was expected. When Biles withdrew from various elements of Olympic competition, stating she was prioritizing her mental health, it was a victory for Black women who have rarely been allowed to take time for self-care when feeling unsure and facing danger. The mandate of Black women’s mythical strength demands we go on no matter what, right? To say, “No, I need to take care of me and my emotional health” is indeed a victory. Biles prioritizing her humanity underscored the words of another young, gifted, and Black Olympian: track phenom Sha’Carri Richardson, who blazed through the trials only to be disqualified days later when THC showed up in a postrace drug test. She admitted to using marijuana to ease her pain after learning from a reporter during an interview that her birth mother had recently died. And as many of us have no doubt done when devastated, without adequate time to process emotions she did what she needed to do to help her get through and do her “job.” Her words went viral on social media: “I am human.” For many Black women, that claim became the social media mantra of the summer as Facebook feeds and Instagram photos captured what it meant for a Black woman to admit that emotions are also who we are. As I write about Black women and self-care in late 2021, I find it impossible to not honor and acknowledge the young, gifted, and Black Olympians Simone Biles and Sha’Carri Richardson and tennis champion Naomi Osaka, who withdrew from the","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45741086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}