Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism

Unique empirically grounded analysis of how audiences negotiate sexism and feminism across media, from popular television shows to dating apps.

Feminism can reflect the cultural moment, especially as media appropriate and use feminist messaging and agenda to various ends. Yet media can also push boundaries, exposing audiences to ideas they may not be familiar with and advancing public acceptance of concepts once considered taboo. Moreover, audiences are far from passive recipients, especially in the digital age. In Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism, Andrea L. Press and Francesca Tripodi focus on how audiences across platforms not only consume but also create meanings-sometimes quite transgressive meanings-in engaging with media content. If television shows such as Game of Thrones and Jersey Shore and dating apps such as Tinder are sites of persistent everyday sexism, then so, too, are they sites of what Press and Tripodi call "media-ready feminism." In developing a sociologically based conception of reception that encompasses media's progressive potential, as well as the processes of domestication through which audiences and users revert to more limited cultural schemas, Press and Tripodi make a vital contribution to gender and media studies, and help to illuminate the complexity of our current moment.

Andrea L. Press is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Media Studies and Sociology at the University of Virginia. Her books include The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism (coedited with Tasha Oren). Francesca Tripodi is Assistant Professor of Information and Library Science and Senior Researcher at the Center for Information Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.