Mediating modesty on Saudi YouTube: from postfeminist to posthuman performance
TL;DR: In 2015, pioneering Saudi vlogger Juju Sajer revealed her face on YouTube after three years of performing in relative invisibility, and used her beauty vlog for small family dramas as well as beaut...
Abstract: In 2015, pioneering Saudi vlogger Juju Sajer revealed her face on YouTube after three years of performing in relative invisibility. She used her beauty vlog for small family dramas as well as beaut...
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors have discussed network culture politics for the information age and how to get experiences and also thoughts from a book collection and the best book collections and completed collections.
Abstract: Downloading the book in this website lists can give you more advantages. It will show you the best book collections and completed collections. So many books can be found in this website. So, this is not only this network culture politics for the information age. However, this book is referred to read because it is an inspiring book to give you more chance to get experiences and also thoughts. This is simple, read the soft file of the book and you get it.
334 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: In this paper, Amelie Le Renard employed post-colonial analysis in conducting ethnographic fieldwork on Saudi women in the capital city of Riyadh to study women in Saudi Arabia.
Abstract: It is extremely challenging to study women in Muslim societies due to the manner in which forces of patriarchy and Orientalism often intersect, leading to the frequent portrayal of women as inherently obedient, docile, and oppressed. Undertaking such a study becomes even more insurmountable in the case of the country considered most radical in terms of its gender relations, namely Saudi Arabia. Yet in this book, the French sociologist Amelie Le Renard undertakes an excellent analysis of young urban women in Saudi society without falling into any such pitfalls. She does so by employing postcolonial analysis in conducting ethnographic fieldwork on Saudi women in the capital city of Riyadh. As such, Le Renard’s book is a most welcome addition to the slowly growing literature on critical sociological analyses of non-Western women. Le Renard’s combination of critical self-reflexivity with ethnographical fieldwork leads to a nuanced interpretation of the social location of young urban Saudi women in their own terms. Especially helpful in this context is the analytical concept of “archipelago of public spaces” that Le Renard coins to capture these women’s access to closed, securitized spaces that “involve unprecedented sociabilities with unknown women” (2). Unlike Western societies where the processes of modernity engendered throughout the world become visible through the public mixing of men and women, what takes place in Saudi Arabia is instead the emergence of public mixing of women with other women they do not know. And such a change is made possible by the reform project of King Abdullah, one that “shapes the possibilities, opportunities, and spaces accessible to Saudi women ... [and defines] young urban Saudi women as a central group in the reform project” (3, 4). As such, the king’s reforms have a similar impact on society to that of Western modernity in that both projects publicly highlight women, moving them to the forefront of change. The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 aptly analyzes how rapid Saudi economic development through the discovery of oil maps onto the boundaries between men and women, creating in the process a specific economy of Book Review 1
4 citations
TL;DR: The authors examined the sociocultural values underlying the self-branding practices of Turkish Muslim housewives from relatively underprivileged backgrounds who have recorded, performed, and monetized their cooking skills and arguably their values on YouTube.
Abstract: Studies examining the self-branding efforts of women producers of online content have proliferated in recent years. Typically focused on the production of content by young, white, and highly educated middle-class women in the West, such scholarship has predominantly conceptualized women’s online self-branding as a function of neo-liberal and postfeminist values centered around notions of “commodified femininity” and “mediated intimacy” along with consumerism and individualism. In contrast, this article examines the sociocultural values underlying the self-branding practices of Turkish Muslim “housewives” from relatively underprivileged backgrounds who have recorded, performed, and monetized their cooking skills and arguably their values on YouTube. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 12 leading Turkish women vloggers, combined with digital ethnographic research into their online profiles and content, my analysis reveals the importance for these vloggers of ensuring their online performances and personae comply with and embody the Islamic values of feminine piety and modesty. By highlighting the importance of social positionality in research on gendered self-branding, my findings problematize dominant conceptualizations of women’s online self-branding as a postfeminist undertaking. In reality, Islamic values are active online, embodied by Turkish Muslim women cooking on YouTube in a way that is empowering for them but also under negotiation through the participatory culture of the Internet.
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TL;DR: The ubiquitous puns on "matter" do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them, rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the extent to which matters of "fact" have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here).
Abstract: L anguage has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every “thing”—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. The ubiquitous puns on “matter” do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them. Rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the extent to which matters of “fact” (so to speak) have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here). Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter. What compels the belief that we have a direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things represented? How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter? Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is figured as passive and immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language and culture? How does one even go about inquiring after the material conditions that have led us to such a brute reversal of naturalist beliefs when materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility?
4,728 citations
"Mediating modesty on Saudi YouTube:..." refers background in this paper
...In theoretical terms, her onscreen persona reflected a new relational agency in the YouTube economy, enacted in “a causal relationship between the apparatuses of bodily production and the phenomena produced” (Barad 2003, 814)....
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...5 By contrast, a posthumanist reading of the entanglement between humans and digital systems (Barad 2003; McNeill 2012) can show how productions of self are enmeshed in particular media apparatuses, fashioning roles within and relation to them....
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10 Sep 2010
TL;DR: Ito et al. as discussed by the authors argue that publics can be reactors, re-makers and re-distributors, engaging in shared culture and knowledge through discourse and social exchange as well as through acts of media reception.
Abstract: Networked publics must be understood in terms of “publics,” a contested and
messy term with multiple meanings that is used across different disciplines to
signal different concepts. One approach is to construct “public” as a collection
of people who share “a common understanding of the world, a shared identity,
a claim to inclusiveness, a consensus regarding the collective interest” (Livingstone, 2005, p. 9). In this sense, a public may refer to a local collection of
people (e.g., one’s peers) or a much broader collection of people (e.g.,
members of a nation-state). Those invested in the civic functioning of publics
often concern themselves with the potential accessibility of spaces and
information to wide audiences-“the public”—and the creation of a shared
“public sphere” (Habermas, 1991). Yet, as Benedict Anderson (2006) argues,
the notion of a public is in many ways an “imagined community.” Some scholars contend that there is no single public, but many publics to which some
people are included and others excluded (Warner, 2002).
Cultural and media studies offer a different perspective on the notion of
what constitutes a public. In locating the term “public” as synonymous with
“audience,” Sonia Livingstone (2005) uses the term to refer to a group
bounded by a shared text, whether a worldview or a performance. The audience produced by media is often by its very nature a public, but not necessarily a passive one. For example, Michel de Certeau (2002) argues that
consumption and production of cultural objects are intimately connected, and
Henry Jenkins (2006) applies these ideas to the creation and dissemination of
media. Mizuko Ito extends this line of thinking to argue that “publics can bereactors, (re)makers and (re)distributors, engaging in shared culture and
knowledge through discourse and social exchange as well as through acts of
media reception” (Ito, 2008, p. 3).
It is precisely this use of public that upsets political theorists like Jurgen Habermas, who challenge the legitimacy of any depoliticized public preoccupied “with
consumption of culture” (Habermas, 1991, p. 177). Of course, not all political
scholars agree with Habermas’ objection to the cultural significance of publics.
Feminist scholar Nancy Fraser argues that publics are not only a site of discourse
and opinion but “arenas for the formation and enactment of social identities”
(Fraser, 1992), while Craig Calhoun argues that one of Habermas’ weaknesses is
his naive view that “identities and interests [are] settled within the private world
and then brought fully formed into the public sphere” (Calhoun, 1992, p. 35).
Networked publics exist against this backdrop. Mizuko Ito introduces the
notion of networked publics to “reference a linked set of social, cultural, and
technological developments that have accompanied the growing engagement
with digitally networked media” (Ito, 2008, p. 2). Ito emphasizes the networked media, but I believe we must also focus on the ways in which this
shapes publics-both in terms of space and collectives. In short, I contend that
networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies; they are simultaneously a space and a collection of people.
In bringing forth the notion of networked publics, I am not seeking to
resolve the different discursive threads around the notion of publics. My
approach accepts the messiness and, instead, focuses on the ways in which networked technologies extend and complicate publics in all of their forms. What
distinguishes networked publics from other types of publics is their underlying
structure. Networked technologies reorganize how information flows and how
people interact with information and each other. In essence, the architecture of
networked publics differentiates them from more traditional notions of publics.
1,276 citations
TL;DR: The authors presents a series of possible conceptual frames for engaging with what has come to be known as post-feminism, which is defined as an active process by which feminities change over time.
Abstract: This article presents a series of possible conceptual frames for engaging with what has come to be known as post‐feminism. It understands post‐feminism to refer to an active process by which femini...
988 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the phenomenon of the Instafamous phenomenon and its relationship to celebrity and tabloid culture, from Singaporean socialites showing off shoe collections to high school sophomores with ten thousand followers.
Abstract: The popular photo-sharing app Instagram has created a new breed of celebrities: the Instafamous. This essay examines the phenomenon—from Singaporean socialites showing off shoe collections to high school sophomores with ten thousand followers—and its relationship to celebrity and tabloid culture.
580 citations
"Mediating modesty on Saudi YouTube:..." refers background in this paper
...Her television persona was considerably more restrained than her YouTube one, echoing the mirroring process by which US digital celebrities replicated visual norms of broadcast media (Marwick 2015, 139)....
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TL;DR: The article addresses the skyrocketing popularity of mimicking in contemporary digital culture, linking it to economic, social and cultural logics of participation.
Abstract: Launched in 2005 as a video-sharing website, YouTube has become an emblem of participatory culture. A central feature of this website is the dazzling number of derivative videos, uploaded daily by many thousands. Using the ‘meme’ concept as an analytic tool, this article aims at uncovering the attributes common to ‘memetic videos’ – popular clips that generate extensive user engagement by way of creative derivatives. Drawing on YouTube popularity-measurements and on user-generated playlists, a corpus of 30 prominent memetic videos was assembled. A combined qualitative and quantitative analysis of these videos yielded six common features: focus on ordinary people, flawed masculinity, humor, simplicity, repetitiveness and whimsical content. Each of these attributes marks the video as incomplete or flawed, thereby invoking further creative dialogue. In its concluding section, the article addresses the skyrocketing popularity of mimicking in contemporary digital culture, linking it to economic, social and cul...
373 citations