Gendered Cultures in Platform Economies: Entertainment, Expertise and Online Selfhood
Avenida das Forças Armadas, 1649-026
Lisbon, Portugal
20th-21st November 2023
There is a hopeful narrative running through the scholarship around media and communication studies, arguing that the internet and social media are means of enhancing political and civic participation. While to a certain extent this is the case, at least in the earlier internet days, the rise of gigantic, privately owned, digital platforms as major sites for regulating and disciplining contemporary production, consumption, work and play further gestures towards a global entertainification of online cultures. Looking, for instance, at the most popular influencers in Italian media platforms (Miconi, 2023), we can observe a contrast with recent trends in Internet studies arguing that social media play a key role in mobilizing people in civic and wider political terms (e.g., Vaccari & Valeriani 2021). Coaching advice, parodies, food, fashion and sports seem to be overwhelmingly capturing both the imaginary and the production and consumption cultures of the main media platforms at the expense for example, of news and political debate. As data infrastructures that capitalize on the user’s time, labour and attention (Poell, Nieborg, Duffy, 2022), platforms only care about keeping the user in their space; in this regard, the circulation of online entertainment is more appealing than civic debates.
This conference looks at the gendered dimensions of platform economies focusing specifically on how entertainment interweaves with expertise in the construction of contemporary femininities and masculinities. Platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook enable a seemingly democratization of expertise, as anyone could become an expert in any matter possible among niche communities, ranging from wine tasters, perfume specialists, life coaches, fitness trainers, dieticians and health consultants to sex therapists, pick up artists, mindfulness gurus, city guides and gastronomic bloggers. In this context, popular feminism intertwines with popular misogyny as online media give visibility to emancipatory discourses while simultaneously limit the effectiveness of collective action (Banet-Weiser, 2018).
The entertainification of expert knowledge in the 2000s begins with the proliferation of television talent shows, including song, fashion and cooking contests, that brought to the public realm the creative celebrity-expert as an arbiter of good taste. The occupation of cooking, to take one example, from being a behind the scenes, domestic, unpaid, free and feminine labour became, in the form of the celebrity chef, a creative, if not artistic, genius-male endeavor that can potentially lead to stardom. These chefs are presented as having their own unique artistic vision, cosmopolitan identities and cool instagrammable personas. To the abundance of visible professional experts, we can add the widespread micro-expertise of amateurs found online and offline on trivial or nontrivial matters, from how to raise a child to how to grow cactuses.
Aspirational labour and aspirational consumption in media platforms has a strong gendered dimension. Erin Duffy (2017) argues that the aspirational (unpaid) labour of creative entrepreneurs in media platforms is primarily performed by women while aspirational (curated) consumption creates particular fantasies of femininity, masculinity, queerness and other gender identities. At the same time, while platforms can offer visibility to progressive gender causes in public debate, they can instigate a relation of ‘cruel optimism’ vis-a-vis ideal gender constructions, to use Laurent Berlant’s term, as the latter becomes a desirable object which at the same time creates anxieties and frustration by being unrealizable (2012). The exposure of gendered and classed selves to expert entertainment content, from eating food of celebrity chefs to training with fitness gurus, perpetuates a feeling of self-inferiority against gender and class success.
This conference explores gender in the context of expert entertainment cultures in platform economics. We look for 250-word abstracts in the following themes:
The Advisory Committee is composed by:
The Organising Committee is composed by:
To submit your abstract, please send an email to: conference@eumeplat.eu
Download the Call for Papers in PDF.
Joke Hermes is Professor of Inclusion and the Creative Industries at the Creative Business research group of Inholland University of Applied Sciences since 2004. In addition to her appointment as professor, Hermes is affiliated with the Media Studies department of the University of Amsterdam and is also founding editor of the academic journal European Journal of Cultural Studies. Joke Hermes studied Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, where she also earned her PhD doctorate.
Through her research, she investigates how the creative industry can contribute to addressing social issues and problems. Other focusses of her research are diversity and the ever-changing dividing line between creators and users of creative products and services, how stakeholders can be involved and participative design (a method in which the end users of the design are involved in the design process). The results of Hermes’ research are published in trade journals and academic journals. Outside Inholland, Hermes maintains contacts with governmental and non-governmental organizations that deal with communication, media and young people. She currently works with Movisie, Diversity Media and Textgain.
Joke Hermes is also a member of EUMEPLAT Scientific Board.
Sander De Ridder is an assistant professor in the field of Media Studies at the University of Antwerp.
His research investigates the role of media and digital culture in society with a focus on intimacy, identity, and communication.
He published in leading journals and is co-editor (together with Lisa Parks and Julia Velkova) of Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations (forthcoming 2023, University of Illinois Press).
He is a member of the Antwerp Media in Society Centre (AMSoC) and fellow of the Young Academy, which is a part of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for the Sciences & the Arts.
Avenida das Forças Armadas, 1649-026
Lisbon, Portugal
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