China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
From corporate discourse to menstrual equity?
Published in Lester D. Friedman, Therese Jones, Routledge Handbook of Health and Media, 2022
This general overview of menstruation films shows the ways in which competing discourses have participated in the construction of menarche, menstruation, and female sexual health over the past 70 years. While the connection between menstruation and hygiene (or menstruation as hygienic crisis as Brumberg notes) persists, recent decades have shown an expansion of discussion – particularly in independently produced films – of the taboos of secrecy, embarrassment, and indirection as well as engagement with the myriad issues that menstruators face (beyond a world of consumer choices) as women address body shaming and naming, pharmaceutical technologies and malpractices, economic realities of product use and consumer advocacy, environmentalism, and so on. From more dated conceptions of good grooming and menstrual disguise in the postwar period, it is clear that North American culture is slowing moving into Bobel’s “critical menstrual discourse” framework where the menstrual script has expanded, however small those steps might be.
Alternative Approaches
Published in Robert M. Veatch, Laura K. Guidry-Grimes, The Basics of Bioethics, 2019
Robert M. Veatch, Laura K. Guidry-Grimes
A feminist approach to Jasmine’s case would raise a series of questions along these lines: Does Jasmine feel undue pressure from her parents or aunt to receive this surgery? How have her relationships affected her perception of her body and her health? Have the experiences of body-shaming and sexist bullying led Jasmine to believe that she will only be worthwhile as a person if she looks a certain way? Would a similarly situated 16-year-old male face these choices differently? Is there a link between enculturated female feelings of insignificance that are associated with thinness and Jasmine’s desire for the surgery?
Visualising illness
Published in Chinmay Murali, Sathyaraj Venkatesan, Infertility Comics and Graphic Medicine, 2021
Chinmay Murali, Sathyaraj Venkatesan
Inspired by the legacy of the underground comix tradition, many female artists today utilise the potential of graphic medicine not only to concretise their personal experience of illness and suffering but also to foreground the deeply gendered nature of such experiences. There is a growing body of feminist personal articulations on conditions such as breast cancer, eating disorders, and infertility, among others. Graphic memoirs on breast cancer such as Tucky Fussell’s Mammoir: A Pictorial Odyssey of the Adventures of a Fourth Grade Teacher with Breast Cancer (2005), Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen: A True Story (2006), Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me A Shallower Person: A Memoir (2006), Rachel Ball’s The Inflatable Woman (2015), Jennifer Hayden’s The Story of My Tits (2015), and Teva Harrison’s In-Between Days (2016) illustrate how women’s experience of breast cancer is invariably mediated by cultural norms regarding feminine beauty and embodiment. These narratives also explore issues surrounding the medical experience of breast cancer, including body shaming and objectification that cause severe harm to the patients. In a similar vein, women’s graphic auto/pathographies such as Nadia Shivack’s Inside Out: Portrait of an Eating Disorder (2007), Carol Lay’s The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude (2008), Lesley Fairfield’s Tyranny (2009), Ludovic Debeurme’s Lucille (2011), Karrie Fransman’s The House that Groaned (2012), Katie Green’s Lighter than My Shadow (2013), and Lacy J. Davis and Jim Kettner’s Ink in Water: An Illustrated Memoir (Or, How I Kicked Anorexia’s Ass and Embraced Body Positivity) (2016) portray how the mainstream culture’s idealised imaginings of thin female bodies contribute to women’s disordered eating. Evidently, graphic medicine is offering a visual forum for female artists to vocalise their intimate yet gendered and silenced experiences of illness with force and urgency.
A thematic analysis of Instagram’s gendered memes on COVID-19
Published in Journal of Visual Communication in Medicine, 2021
Ahmed Al-Rawi, Maliha Siddiqi, Xiaosu Li, Nimisha Vandan, Karen Grepin
In general, gender remains a point of high contention in memes, popularly used as the foundation of jokes and political satire. The conduit of humour finds its ways in many memetic studies like that by Gbadegesin (2019) wherein nineteen ‘Correct bro’ and ‘correct bae’ memes from Facebook were qualitatively analysed. The results presented humour to be a very over-utilised tool to target gender groups on the internet. While men were seen to be comparatively more patriarchal, both men and women use humorous memes to create an identity and represent an ideology. However, women often use the memetic platform to fight hegemonic masculinity (Gbadegesin, 2019). Harlow et al. (2020), for instance, critically examined the online participatory culture through a feminist lens. The author investigated the use of sexist and feminist humour of political memes against the Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis, who was incarcerated for refusing to issue gay marriage licences. The results showed that users greatly emphasised Davis’ appearance as compared to the issue at hand. Body shaming was prevalent in the memes that catered to heteronormative standards of femininity and beauty.