Here be monsters: a choreomaniac's companion to the danse macabre

Consider this a vade mecum: an invitation to “walk with me” through more or less uncanny terrains of worlds in the making in search, of(f) course, of monsters. The search will be delving into the areas of “creepypasta:” pieces of cursed prose and pictures that circulate online, waiting to contaminate and possess the next reader. Using a theoretical framework of posthuman and feminist theory, not least the work done by Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway, this vade mecum asks what it might mean to engage ethically with that which is not supposed to exist, but which haunts us nonetheless. In other words: what does it mean to move, live and engage with spectres in digital times?     

Campañas negativas en las elecciones 2000 y 2006 en México

This article explores the nature of negative campaigns that were held in both 2000 and 2006 Mexican presidential elections. The purpose is to establish that the generalized use of negative campaigning concurs with the development of two unusual electoral processes: the transition of the State party into an opposition party (2000), and its consolidation as government (2006). Based on the theoretical claims of Shiv (1997), Lau (1999), and Finkel (1998), the author describes the development of negative campaigns in those elections that represented the starting point and the presumed consummation of the use of this kind of campaigns. With journals’ documented records and the monitoring of tv spots of both elections it is established that the 2000 presidential election used negative campaigns based on decrying the official party, while the 2006 election resorted to negative tv spots.     

Escalon:

No abstract available for this article.     

Real and unreal masculinities: the celebrity image in anti-trafficking campaigns

Numerous scholars note the highly gendered nature of anti-trafficking responses. Much of the literature exploring anti-trafficking campaigns, however, focuses on the objectification of women and their placement as abject bodies, objects of violence, in pain and to be pitied. Nevertheless, few scholars explore how these campaigns portray men and shape masculinities. Using as example a highly publicised online anti-trafficking campaign, ‘Real Men Don't Buy Girls’, this article responds to this gap in the literature by exploring depictions of masculinities through this prominent anti-trafficking public service announcement. The article observes that this announcement serves not to reshape gender performance around trafficking, but instead further reproduces existing gender structures and power relations underpinning trafficking and child exploitation. It observes that the campaign re-instantiates hegemonic masculinities – framing men enacting this masculine form as ‘real men’ – while encouraging men to embody a virile, successful, consumerist, controlling, and patriarchal manliness. We observe that these characteristics are notably assigned to celebrity men. Meanwhile, it is noted that men who buy girls are set in binary opposition to these real men, being shaped as faceless, un-described, deviant, and ‘unreal’. The result is that the campaign not only patterns masculinities, but also objectifies the objectifier as well as women, recreating a gender ordering in which women and girls remain disempowered, and buyers of girls are ultimately denied subjecthood and thus the ability to change. This article, therefore, uses this one case study to call for anti-traffickers, researchers, and scholars to urgently consider, research, and reshape portrayals of masculinities in anti-trafficking literatures. It calls for greater diversity and fuller account for a broader spectrum of gender representations in the visual representations of those involved in, and responding to, human and child trafficking, in both our scholarly work and public action.     

All the labor problems fit to print: the New York Times and the cultural production of the U.S ‘labor problem’, 1870–1932

The period that spanned the Gilded Age to the onset of the Great Depression saw the rise and relative decline of the US labor movement. The salient events of labor movements over these years undoubtedly shaped public perception about labor issues, and some scholars have been attempting to unpack the mechanisms through which depictions and characterizations of the ‘labor problem’ were produced in authoritative venues that could have shaped the future of the movement. This study goes beyond the standard practice of explaining news report volume to feature the political valance of the reports on the labor problem over a 63-year time period. The aforementioned period also saw significant changes in news reporting practices, with the rise of objective informational writing and the embrace of journalism as a profession. The change within journalism itself could potentially shape the depiction of the labor problem, yet such change has been overlooked by existing literature pertaining to the topic. This research makes a theoretical case for integrating social processes central to the labor movement and journalism from 1870 to 1932 and explains patterns in the cultural production of the labor problem in the New York Times by analyzing these two tracks of history in conjunction using both qualitative and quantitative data.     

An Examination of the Relationship Between Media Exposure and Fear of Victimization: Implications of the Superpredator Narrative on Juvenile Justice Policies

The media allow crime to infiltrate the public’s consciousness in every conceivable way, thereby playing a major role in shaping the public’s opinion and attitude toward crime and crime issues (Barak, 1995; Fields & Jerin, 1996; Kappeler & Potter, 2005). Reporters constantly talk about crime, and crime related stories dominate the headlines of local and national newspaper outlets (Dowler, 2003; Pizarro et al, 2007). Some of the most highly rated television programs are based on crime plots and people across social, political, and racial demographics are constantly engaged in crime dialogue generated from local or national news stories. When the focus of these mediums is on youth they become even more profound and contentious. The images portrayed conjure up stereotypes that lead to fear and inflammatory remarks that become entrenched into the national lexicon. The current study uses data from the National Opinion Survey of Crime and Justice to test the relationship between crime-related media viewership and fear of victimization within a nationally representative adult sample. Approximately 42.67% of respondents reported regularly watching crime shows and about the same proportion (42.83%) believed their local media paid too much attention to violent crime. In addition to regular crime-show viewership, confidence in the police, gender, and recent contact with the police were associated with fear of victimization. This article adds to an existing body of research through a largely unexplored area in the administration of justice. It does so within the context of the U.S. juvenile justice system.     

Fact Checking and Information in the Age of Covid

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed and accelerated an information crisis as well as a health one. What we discover about Covid 19, how it spreads, to whom and why and how best to mitigate it—all depend on information. The essays in this special section, which this article introduces, explore the importance of information and the fundamental role of fact checkers in understanding how information flows, why mistakes are made, and how to counteract them. Fact checking as an idea and a practice emerged in the early twenty-first century, developed as a positive beacon to counteract a growing sense that information could no longer be trusted. Now, more than a decade after its creation, fact checking sits within a far more complex and chaotic media context, and its expertise and understanding has never been so important. We need to understand what fact checkers do because they are grappling with how to tether us to reality.     

Talent alone does not suffice: erotic capital,media visibility and global popularity among professional male and female tennis players

Following Catherine Hakim’s notion of the increasing significance of ‘erotic capital’ in contemporary society, this paper addresses the effects of erotic capital in the realm of professional sports. Erotic capital may be closely related to popularity and thus represents a key marketing asset, in particular for female athletes facing a predominantly male audience. These ideas are examined here through analysing the media visibility of top tennis players in the German print media, as well as their global popularity (measured by search engine queries). The results provide further evidence of gender discrimination in sport since they show that the popularity of female athletes depends on their physical attractiveness whereas such a relationship does not exist for male athletes. Given gender-discriminatory consumer and print media preferences, female athletes face strong incentives to adapt to a sexualized sports culture that reinforces hegemonic masculinity.     

The feminist frontier: on trans and feminism

Against a back-drop of ongoing hostility between sections of feminism towards trans communities, and particularly feminist antagonism towards trans women, this paper explores the relationship between feminism and transgender. Through the use of original case study material, gathered by virtual methods, the paper explores events that have occurred since the millennium that are used to highlight particular epistemological and political tensions between feminism and trans. Central themes running through the case studies include the constitution of ‘woman’, the policing of feminist identities and spaces, and questions of bodily autonomy. In conclusion, the paper stresses the importance of rejecting trans-exclusionary feminism and of foregrounding the links between feminism and transgender as a key social justice project of our time.     

Sensory speculations:Visual discourse and the vision of visuality

It is now commonplace within the discipline of art history and visual culture to speak to theories of vision and visuality. Recent questions concerning the subject of vision, sexed positionalities and discourses of viewing are indebted to theories of visuality, which now occupy a privileged place within the study of visual culture. Theories of visuality have revealed both the terms of cultural visibilities and significantly the how of what we see. And yet despite this engagement of the opacity and duplicity of the visual, recent work into visuality has been plagued by a re‐occurring myopia regarding the corporeal This oversight within the visibilites of visual discourse is the unchallenged idea of a ‘human vision’ within the social constructivist project. In this article I assess how this universal operates as the matter for theories of visuality and of the ramifications of this for the project of the critique of vision.