https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/5/110/206.full.pdf

The american psychological association.

Feminist Methods in Social Research.

Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life

Social media like Facebook and Twitter place the focus on the individual politician rather than the political party, thereby expanding the political arena for increased for personalized campaigning. The need to use social media to communicate a personal image as a politician and to post personalized messages online seems less obvious in a party-centred system such as the Norwegian. Within this framework, the personalized and dialogical aspects of social media may be contradicted by the political parties' structural communication strategies. The article uses data from interviews and status updates from two Norwegian election campaigns and asks for what purposes Norwegian politicians use social media as a tool for political communication. The findings show that politicians' report both marketing and dialogue with voters as motives for their social media use and their practices varied, too. Politicians' reported motive to use social media for marketing purposes was reflected in their actual use. The preferre...

Personalized campaigns in party-centred politics

Although stigma is prevalent in everyday life, consumer researchers’ interest on the topic remains scant and focuses mostly on stigma management. We move beyond individual coping strategies and examine the processes of stigmatization and destigmatization. Through an ethnographic study of fashion consumption practices of urban Turkish covered women, we explore how veiling, a deviant practice stigmatized in the secular and urban mind-set, first became an attractive choice for some middle-class women and then transformed into a fashionable and ordinary clothing practice for many. We map out the global multi-actored work that underlies the emergence of veiling as an attractive choice and explicate its gradual routinization and destigmatization. We discuss the findings in terms of their implications for understandings of choice and free will, the formative role of fashion in the evolution of a new habitus and social class, and the relationship between the market and religion.

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Veiling in Style: How Does a Stigmatized Practice Become Fashionable?

This article addresses girls' dress, which has become controversial, especially in contemporary multicultural Europe. Using the Dutch public debate about the headscarf, belly shirts, visible G-strings, and other forms of ‘porno-chic’, the authors show that these seemingly separate debates are held together by the regulation of female sexuality. Through their analysis of the headscarves and porno-chic debate, the authors argue that women's sexuality and girls' bodies in particular have become the metonymic location for many a contemporary social dilemma: of the multicultural society when it concerns the scarf, of feminism and public morality when it concerns porno-chic. They conclude that despite the widely different appearance of girls wearing headscarves or porno-chic, both groups of girls are submitted to the meta-narratives of dominant discourse: the state, school, public opinion, parents and other social institutions ‘resignify’ their everyday practices as inappropriate, and reprieve them from the pow...

Headscarves and Porno-Chic: Disciplining Girls' Bodies in the European Multicultural Society

Not since the feminist pornography debates of the 1980s has there been such an outburst of discussion, research and publications about sexualized images of women and girls. The debate is now carrie...

/pdf/coming-to-terms-with-sexualization-53shjr5t1h.pdf

Coming to terms with sexualization

/pdf/who-s-afraid-of-female-agency-4k1vite2hf.pdf

Who's Afraid of Female Agency?

Combining intertextual, audience and feminist perspectives, this article investigates how young girls make meaning from celebrities. Based on focus group interviews with Dutch girls aged 12—13, it argues that girls' talk about celebrities functions as an identity tool in the reflexive project of the self. Alternating three repertoires (identification, makeability and authenticity), the girls appropriated narratives of celebrities to themselves and others in their everyday lives. The article adds knowledge about the reception of celebrities in Dutch multicultural society, intervenes in feminist discussions about girls and their agency, and contributes empirically to the literature about audiences and celebrities, more specifically to the notions of reflexivity and identification.

Girls make sense: Girls, celebrities and identities

In 2004, the main contenders in the American presidential election, incumbent Republican president George Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry, appeared with their wives in two separate episodes of the Dr. Phil show. They talked with America's most popular television therapist about their families and how they combined family life and political career. Campaign and political issues were purposively kept out of the conversations. Analysis of the audience's responses to these two shows, posted on a website, shows that the political relevance of the private and family lives of the candidates was heavily contested. However, the family life and values of the discussants themselves were seen as a legitimate point of departure for their political positions. Thus, the Dr. Phil forum functioned both as a place of deliberation and dialogue, and as a site for articulating political viewpoints.

Linda Duits

Papers

Headscarves and Porno-Chic: Disciplining Girls' Bodies in the European Multicultural Society

Coming to terms with sexualization

Who's Afraid of Female Agency?

Girls make sense: Girls, celebrities and identities

Dr. Phil Meets the Candidates: How Family Life and Personal Experience Produce Political Discussions