Feminist Research in Media and Popular Culture 2022

This week we discussed "I’m Beautiful the Way I Am: Empowerment, Beauty, and Aesthetic Labour" by Sarah Banet-Weiser. Here, we talked about how fashion vlogging and make-up videos have created an illusion of "oh this is something everyday people can do as well!" and these activities are showcased as something one does "just for fun". In the process, their aesthetic labor comes about to be invisibilized. All of this is usually done through creating and maintaining a celebrity persona which is now something ‘ordinary’ people who aren’t conventionally famous can now access. "The celebrity of beauty vloggers absolutely depends on not losing one’s ‘ordinariness’. It is precisely the ordinariness of beauty vloggers, or their authenticity, that makes them consumable as celebrities to their online fan base (page 276). And the labor that they do to perform this "authenticity" comes to be written as "pleasure" and as something that "on

TW: Marital Rape ---------- This week we read about the SlutWalk protests from the reading " SlutWalk: Feminism, Activism, and Media" by Kaitlynn Mendes. We discussed how one cannot directly hold the organizers of a movement/protest responsible for how it gets received or how it is perceived by the mainstream media. Since part of the meaning of the protest is created by its media coverage - how it gets shown by the media, how it gets reflected upon by different communities, etc. - you cannot predict all of that while planning a movement.   This reminded me of some of the attempts at making feminist films in Indian cinema (Bollywood specifically). The reactions of the censor board, and the audience, have not been exactly how the filmmakers had intended/anticipated. One movie, in particular, comes to mind - "Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016)".  This film presents us with portraits of four lower middle-class women from a small town in Bhopal who are connected through the