Claudia Alvares

In an age of postmodern suspicion of master narratives, the egalitarianism and universality inherent in a normative system of rights defended by liberalism is countered by disbelief in the idealized conceptions of a ‘public subject’, divorced from the particularity of both individual and historical communal narratives, as well as an impartial collective good. Simultaneously, the excessive fragmentation of opposed and contradictory aspirations of counterpublics, privileged by a communitarian approach, runs the risk of giving priority to individual rights over social well-being. This article explores the liberal and communitarian approaches to rights, inquiring into whether freedom or equality offer the best criteria of judgement to preserve the space of cultural plurality within the public sphere. While Habermasian discourse ethics subordinates the particularistic to the general will, the communitarian perspective on justice, represented by Paul Piccone and Charles Taylor, argues that the law is not universal in scope and cannot be separated from particularistic conceptions of the ‘good life’. The article ultimately claims that freedom is the criterion that allows cultural pluralities to both stand on their own, resisting assimilation within any master discourse, and establish dialogue among themselves. In this perspective, the public sphere promotes complex modes of interaction, among modernity’s differentiated spheres. This view of the public sphere is in tune with Jencks’ description of postmodernism as preserving the ‘fragmental holism’ (1996: 478) of plural lifeworlds.

This article analyses the architecture of online environments as facilitating both the performance and the staging, within a Brazilian context, of a sexualised femininity that is stereotypically reductive to hegemonic definitions of body image and bodily practices. While online performances can be considered as postfeminist attempts at reclaiming agency through the reappropriation of traditional signifiers of femininity, this staging of femininity ultimately objectifies women by stabilising boundaries of gendered power relations, thus reinforcing a normative connection between gender and sexuality. By focusing on three recent cases of online harassment that occurred in Brazilian social media, I unravel the connection between misogyny and a neoliberal culture of hypersexualized performance of femininity, which commodifies the signifiers of gendered difference. Despite the differences involved in each of the case-studies analysed, they all demonstrate how digital intimacy articulates “a particular knowledge about the other,” ascribing value to certain bodies over others. Using discourse analysis of corpus data, I investigate how language is used to categorise and identify the female protagonists in these case-studies, so as to include and exclude particular forms of “femininity” from discourse. The article concludes that the subversive potential of social media is constituted, in the Brazilian context, not so much by the postfeminist capacity to playfully create a rupture with a prevalent culture of gendered normativity, but rather by the possibility of surveilling and disciplining the boundaries of femininity, with a punitive dimension of “public exposure” that violently reinforces gendered power relations.

Keywords: Misogyny, social media, gender violence, Brazil, women, digital intimacy

This essay seeks to analyse the al-Hayat Media Centre’s visual propaganda of the
so-called Islamic State (IS) so as to trace the visual and verbal recruitment strategies
designed to cater to an implied audience. The profile of this implied or intended audience
will be examined on the basis of a framing analysis of the key themes identified
in seven videos of al-Hayat IS propaganda, presupposing that the videos indicate how
recruiters try to impart their message to certain cohorts. The profoundly dichotomous
structure of ‘ingroup’ and ‘outgroup’ that provides the background for the framing of
certain key themes in the videos analysed, affords the justification for Jihad, or Holy
War, through the invocation of emotional and moral modes of address.

Resumo
Como parte de um processo ideológico, a emancipação das Ciências da Comunicação na Europa resultou também de uma tentativa de harmonização de perspetivas conflituantes, entre abordagens linguísticas histórico-discursivas (Wodak, 2001) e sociocognitivas (Van Dijk, 2009). Para além de entendimentos multidisciplinares, promoveu-se inclusivamente a multiculturalidade em sintonia com a emergência do próprio projeto europeu. Contudo, o descentramento de diferentes teorias surgidas na Europa do pós-guerra, decorrentes de especificidades nacionais e regionais, conduziu a um certo abrandamento no ímpeto da globalização e da internacionalização que marcavam o espírito promissor da emergência da investigação em Comunicação. Deste modo, as culturas académicas latino-americanas nesta área assumem um papel especialmente importante, na medida em que devem reforçar a necessidade de imprimir uma mais-valia concreta aos desafios colocados pela história de violência colonial, racial, social e de género, levando-nos a reconhecer a necessidade de se preservar espaços de crítica contra a iniquidade.

Palavras-chave: Ciências da Comunicação; Europa; investigação; cosmopolitismo

Resumo: Este artigo problematiza os pressupostos do pós-feminismo, à luz da constatação de que as crescentes oportunidades de participação promovidas pelas novas tecnologias nem sempre estão em consonância com a defesa de valores democráticos. A arquitectura das Redes, as quais proporcionam um determinado grau de anonimato, facilita a desinibição, ausência de civilidade e publicitação da intimidade, legitimando uma cultura de misoginia, a qual reencena estruturas sociais normativas, por vezes sob a capa de promoção de uma aparente emancipação.

Palavras-chave: Pós-feminismo, Política de entretenimento, Violência de género, Intimidade pública.

This chapter aims to compare the gender equality policies of public service media on the one hand and privately-owned media on the other hand, in a Portuguese context, with gendered professional practice, inquiring into the extent to which good practices are implemented within the remit of either model. By gendered practice, we mean both the hierarchical decision-making position of women within Portuguese media organisations as well as gender distribution by TV genre, with particular focus on female representation in fact-based and factual programmes. Gendered equality policies will be scrutinised through the lens of media practice, so as to unmask the contexts that condition the applicability of equal opportunity codes. Interviews with female journalists who specialise in factual content and who rank high in media hierarchy will be carried out so as to better comprehend the common experiences shared by women in the way they relate to their profession and to the characteristics of the organisation that they work for. The invisibility of gender in legal and deontological codes regulative of journalistic activity will be reflected on as part of the legacy of the 25 April Revolution, whose most cherished value, that of Freedom of Expression, often equates gender-specific regulation with censorship.

Abstract
This article seeks to historically contextualise the various cognitivist models used in communication studies, namely that of media effects, focusing on the external contingencies that have influenced the predominance of the information processing paradigm. Indeed, the heavy reliance on research methods in the field of communication pays tribute to the legacy of cognitivism, because most methods used in cross-cultural and comparative studies tend to confine cultural phenomena to static predefined categories. It is argued that cognitivist communication models cannot ultimately be separated from an ideological view of human agency as prone to passive reception and susceptible to persuasion and manipulation. Understanding these ideological underpinnings implies being attentive to Foucault’s interrogation of transcendental universalism through a Kantian-inspired exploration of the conditions for the possibility of experience and a Nietzschian-inspired genealogy that emphasises knowledge as produced and maintained by technologies of power.

Keywords
Archaeology, cognitivism, communication models, culture, Foucault, genealogy, ideological critique, research methods

Aiming to critically review key research on populism, extremism and media, this article examines some definition aspects of populism as a concept, its relation to ‘the people’ and points to future directions for research in mainstream – and social media – the terrain where so much of the political is played out. An individualisation of civic cultures has emerged in tandem with the growth of mediated populism through the use of new technologies, with a tendency towards personalisation in the public domain. While the new technological affordances exemplified by Web 2.0 may have contributed to intensified forms of popular engagement, they have been less successful in promoting democratic values, as shown by the results of the May 2014 European Parliamentary elections. Thus, the question as to the type of publics that are ‘possible and desirable in present circumstances’ (Nolan, 2008: 747) remains valid, for publics can espouse anti-democratic values while nevertheless remaining ‘publics’. The fact that the link between the new media and right-wing extremism has been comparatively explored at greater length than that of a religious bend indicates the need to invest in the latter, especially due to home-bred Islamic terrorism increasingly seen as threatening the multiculturalism of various European societies. Several avenues for research are presented to this effect, with a final reflection on the challenge posed by new media to the concept of media populism, both in terms of the Net’s market logics and the specificity of its architecture.

This article argues that modern discourse cannot be reduced to a totalising logic, but rather one of diremption between the universal and the particular. The postmodern emphasis on fragmentation camouflages the ambivalence within modernity, reducing the latter to totalisation based on an appropriation of the other within the same. By accusing modernity of perpetuating the binaries attributed to Hegelianism, Robert Young's White Mythologies attenuates the fissures within the Hegelian description of the consolidation of self-consciousness. These fissures are visible in Fichte's and Schelling's negotiations of Kantian dualisms. Hegelian idealism hovers between the Fichtean desire to affirm a transcendental, self-positing ego that assimilates the other within itself, and Schelling's aspiration to break with the Kantian dichotomy of sensible/intelligible realms, in the mode of a becoming that unites Spirit and Nature. Such fissures are patent in the contemporary postcolonial focus on a permanent mismatch between signifier and signified. By reproducing Hegelian ambivalence, Said, Bhabha and Spivak are heirs to the modern tradition. While Said transcends dichotomies by defending a dialectic of dependence and recognition where both sides participate as active agents in the prevalent state of affairs, Bhabha explores the concept of 'time-lag' so as to interrupt modern linear temporality. Spivak, in turn, posits a catachrestic deconstructive politics of reading that seeks to reinscribe existing narrative values in a novel context. The legacy of Enlightenment thought is to be found in postcolonial deconstruc-tion, which implies an agency capable of resisting Western humanism's totalis-ing impulse. As age of critique, Enlightenment represents the capacity of the individual to transcend contextual specificities by exercising independent judgement. Young's allegation that the critic is unable to abstract himself from a dominant cultural totality is ultimately insensitive to the fact that any critique relies on the subject's capacity to situate himself externally to his object of knowledge.

Este artigo consiste numa reflexão crítica sobre as metodologias utilizadas nos estudos de género, e a tensão constante que existe entre
a experiência individual e coletiva. Não obstante a génese do movimento feminista partir de uma experiência coletiva de opressão, é a
partir das narrativas etnográficas ou autobiográficas que se constrói uma memória coletiva, decorrente do entrelaçamento da memória
individual com as lembranças de cariz social do grupo. A investigação sustentada pela teoria feminista procura contextualizar as
narrativas parciais de género, no âmbito da memória coletiva, dum grupo mais vasto e agregador. Neste contexto, analisa-se o conceito
de "contra-esfera pública feminista" e a sua capacidade de se estender ao espaço discursivo. Os contra-discursos, bem como o contrapúblico,
fazem também parte do espaço público e contribuem para uma maior responsabilização das suas instituições. Esta temática é
fundamental para o estudo da visão feminista sobre os media, dado o seu papel essencial na projeção dos assuntos da vida quotidiana,
com as suas condicionantes, as suas limitações e eloquentes silenciamentos

Scientific advances in the area of biotechnology allow for an increasing dissociation between
the social and biological components of parentality, with medical discourse attempting, in
most cases, to frame the social in the context of the biological so as to not jeopardise consensual
definitions of parenting, particularly as regards the understanding of the concept of ‘maternity’.
This framing of the social within the biological is visible in the way assisted procreation techniques
are often described in the press as simulating a ‘natural’ biological process, a naturalness
that the pathology of infertility prevents from taking free course. This article analyses the different
and sometimes conflicting understandings of the concept of motherhood subjacent to news
coverage of Medically Assisted Procreation by the newspaper Público in the years 2008 and 2009.
The analytic corpus demonstrates that by favouring medical discourse in the hegemonic interpretation
of the risks and benefits of these reproduction techniques, Público maternity design
conveys which privileges the social detriment biological: the transmission of a genetic heritage is
regarded as the most important factor when it comes to the definition of motherhood, being that
overlaps the dimension of “ educate/raise a child”. Público articulates a conception of maternity
that clearly privileges the biological to the detriment of the social: the transmission of genetic
heritage is regarded as the most important factor when it comes to the definition of motherhood,
impinging upon the dimension of ‘educating/raising a child’.

Os progressos científicos na área das biotecnologias permitem uma crescente dissocia-
ção das componentes social e biológica da parentalidade, com o discurso médico a procurar
enquadrar, na maior parte das vezes, o social no âmbito do biológico por forma a não pôr em
causa definições consensuais de parentalidade, particularmente no que toca ao entendimento
do conceito de ‘maternidade’. Este enquadramento do social no seio do biológico é visível no
modo como as técnicas de procriação assistida são frequentemente descritas na imprensa como
simulando um processo biológico ‘natural’, naturalidade essa que a patologia da infertilidade
impede de tomar o seu livre curso. Este artigo pretende analisar os entendimentos diferenciados
e por vezes contraditórios do conceito de maternidade que ressaltam da cobertura noticiosa da
Procriação Medicamente Assistida por parte do Jornal Público nos anos 2008 e 2009. O corpus
analítico demonstra que ao privilegiar o discurso médico na interpretação hegemónica dos riscos
e benefícios dessas técnicas de reprodução, o Público veicula uma concepção da maternidade
que privilegia claramente o biológico em detrimento do social: a transmissão de um património
genético é tida como o factor mais importante no que toca à definição de maternidade, sendo
que se sobrepõe à dimensão de ‘educar/criar um filho’.

Tendo como meta a compreensão das estratégias discursivas empregues na
construção de uma identidade feminina normativa através da naturalização e refor-
ço de estereótipos relativos à alteridade, procurou-se, no presente artigo, aplicar a
Análise Crítica do Discurso a uma selecção de artigos que abordassem o tema do
exotismo, artigos esses retirados às revistas Cosmo e Máxima, durante o período
que se estende entre Março de 2008 e Março de 2009. Após a análise linguística
dos traços, características e qualidades associados ao exótico na tentativa de construção
de uma imagem de feminilidade que seja apelativa ao consumo, iremos
questionar-nos acerca do modo como o discurso de género articulado pelas revistas
em torno de práticas de consumo baseadas no exotismo se entrelaça com o
paradigma pós-feminista. De que forma é que o ênfase no bem-estar pessoal, como
resultado directo de uma responsabilidade individual e não colectiva, contribui para
propagar uma ideologia neo-liberal assente no individualismo e exaltação da liberdade
de escolha, indelevelmente associados à cultura de consumo capitalista?

Pretende-se aqui analisar a universalidade do espaço público habermasiano à
luz do conflito centrado na ética que tem vindo a polarizar o debate académico feminista.
Os feminismos liberal e comunitarista revelam entendimentos diferenciados
de “espaço público”, sendo que essa diferenciação está enraizada no modo distinto
como a ética é encarada por essas duas correntes. Enquanto a perspectiva do feminismo
liberal argumenta que o processo deliberativo que subjaz ao universalismo da
esfera pública permite assumir o ponto de vista do nosso interlocutor, a perspectiva
do comunitarismo feminista, representado pela corrente do feminismo radical, defende
que tal imparcialidade apenas pode redundar numa visão “descorporalizada”
e “desenraizada” de um “outro genérico” por oposição à de um indivíduo concreto.
A ética da justiça advogada pelo feminismo liberal é assim contrastada com a ética
do cuidado inerente ao feminismo comunitarista, incidindo esta última nos aspectos
mais contextuais e intersubjectivos da história individual de cada um, permitindo dar
voz ao indivíduo concreto em vez de ao “outro genérico”.

... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: Record Details. Record ID, 673319. Record Type, conference. Author, Sofie Van Bauwel [801001224580] - Ghent University Sofie.VanBauwel@UGent.be; Claudia Alvares. Title, Concluding Remarks Gender Section. ...