Votre recherche

First Person Encounters is a series of podcasts presented by Games Studies India, about our first experiences with Games while growing up in India. This our third podcast where we interview Xenia Zeiler, an associate professor of South Asian studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research is situated at the intersection of digital media, religion, and culture, with a focus on India and the worldwide Indian community.

First Person Encounters is a series of podcasts presented by Games Studies India, about our first experiences with Games while growing up in India. This our third podcast where we talk with Poornima Seetharaman. She is the first Indian to be inducted in the Women in Games (WIGJ) Hall of Fame and is also the lead game designer at Zynga. Hear as we talk about her foray in the world of gaming.

This article examines a terrain in which gender inclusion remains a challenge: competitive esports. In the male-dominated sphere of esports, the underrepresentation of women and nonbinary people often leaves these marginalized groups invisible, with a significant lack of women and nonbinary people competing in top-tier tournaments. We highlight the experience of Wang ‘BaiZe’ Xinyu, a Chinese Hearthstone player who became the first woman to compete in a Hearthstone Championship Tour event in the game’s 3-year history. The narrative surrounding BaiZe’s participation largely focused on her gender and ignored the achievements that led her to qualify for the event. We argue that BaiZe’s entrance to the championship scene was received negatively by both competitors and spectators, reinforcing barriers that exclude women and nonbinary people from entering this male-dominated space. The discrimination faced by these esports competitors reinforces sexism inherent not only in Hearthstone but also in esports in general.

Extant research on e-sports has focused on the growth and value of the phenomenon, fandom, and participant experiences. However, there is a paucity of e-sports scholarship detailing women’s experiences from marginalized communities living in various conservative Muslim countries. This shortage of literature remains despite different radical Islamic groups’ consistent demand for banning several online video games and the Muslim youth’s resistance to these calls. This study aimed to understand the motives and lived experiences of Muslim women e-sports participants from Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. The authors collected data via observations of online video games and in-depth interviews. The study participants revealed that they use e-sports as a vehicle for an oppositional agency and personal freedom from the patriarchal system. The findings also suggest that participants are facing systematic marginalization and grave intrusion of post-colonization. The study contributes to the limited scholarship concerning Indian subcontinent Muslim women’s e-sports participation.

This chapter analyzes the reflections of Turkey’s neoconservative and neoliberal politics of gender on daytime television. The focus is on Bridal House, a popular daytime TV show in Turkey which interpellates women as domestic subjects competing with other women to prove their domestic abilities, particularly the ability to navigate the etiquette of domestic consumption. Hierarchies are instigated among women through symbolic battles on “tasteful” consumption, and the marital household surfaces as a space of constant regulation where women strive to be ideal housewives. By analyzing Bridal House through a Bourdieusian framework, this chapter traces the representations of the “ideal female subject” along neoconservative and neoliberal lines, and demonstrates the ways in which symbolic violences are enacted on women in contemporary Turkey’s daytime TV culture.

This book examines the phenomenon of prime time soap operas on Indian television. An anthropological insight into social issues and practices of contemporary India through the television, this volume analyzes the production of soaps within India’s cultural fabric. It deconstructs themes and issues surrounding the "everyday" and the "middle class" through the fiction of the "popular". In its second edition, this still remains the only book to examine prime time soap operas on Indian television. Without in any way changing the central arguments of the first edition, it adds an essential introductory chapter tracking the tectonic shifts in the Indian "mediascape" over the past decade – including how the explosion of regional language channels and an era of multiple screens have changed soap viewing forever. Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, the book traces how prime time soaps in India still grab the maximum eyeballs and remain the biggest earners for TV channels. The book will be of interest to students of anthropology and sociology, media and cultural studies, visual culture studies, gender and family studies, and also Asian studies in general. It is also an important resource for media producers, both in content production and television channels, as well as for the general reader.

The marriage show was a popular reality show format that invited people to find their soulmate and marry on live television in Turkey. Based on ethnographic fieldwork which took place in the show’s studio between 2011 and 2012, this chapter explores female participants’ investment of their trust in the show. While being reluctant about finding a spouse on television, women take on registers of safety, familiarity, and secrecy to navigate the show as a safe venue. This endeavor also involved women’s safeguarding of themselves on their way to marriage. The fragility of trust in the show, therefore, indicates how women foresee risks and yet strive for securing happiness and safety in marriage in general. This affective tension, at a larger scale, is related to the increased sense of insecurity at a global scale, and the systematic failure of the family to provide the safe living environment it promises in the Turkish context.

This chapter explores the social and cultural factors that have contributed to the success of Turkish programs in the Arab world. Following the cancelation of Turkish serials on the Arab world’s largest networks in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, this chapter will explore how dedicated Arab fans are continuing to watch Turkish shows via alternative platforms after having seen them become such a large part of their daily lives and a permanent fixture on their screens in recent years. By using the Gulf State of Qatar as a departure point, it will examine why Turkish content resonates so closely with female Arab audiences, while also determining their viewing motivations and how Turkish serials have managed to fill a void among its viewers that Arab media has failed to satisfy. At the same time, this chapter will discuss why Turkish dramas have been widely perceived as a women’s genre despite being prime-time serials in Turkey.

This book provides a cultural history of queer representations in Chinese-language film and media, negotiated by locally produced knowledge, local cultural agency, and lived histories. Incorporating a wide range of materials in both English and Chinese, this interdisciplinary project investigates the processes through which Chinese tongzhi/queer imaginaries are articulated, focusing on four main themes: the Chinese familial system, Chinese opera, camp aesthetic, and documentary impulse. Chao's discursive analysis is rooted in and advances genealogical inquiries: a non-essentialist intervention into the "Chinese" idea of filial piety, a transcultural perspective on the contested genre of film melodrama, a historical investigation of the local articulations of mass camp and gay camp, and a transnational inquiry into the different formats of documentary. This book is a must for anyone exploring the cultural history of Chinese tongzhi/queer through the lens of transcultural media.

Police procedural has been historically perceived as a dominantly masculine genre for continually revolving around the investigations of male police officers. In accordance with the patriarchal norms that pervade Turkish society, local variations of the police procedural genre have conveniently appropriated this globally known convention and left little room for female detectives in their narratives. However, whenever they got a chance to be included in this male-dominated universe, female detectives have been frequently depicted as relatively independent women but also submitted to the traditional norms of womanhood in an ambivalent manner. This chapter examines this hesitant position of female police detectives in three contemporary Turkish police procedurals, Kanıt (The Evidence, 2010–2013), Cinayet (The Killing, 2014) and Sṃahsiyet (Personality, 2018), by building connections between the interest of police procedural genre in feminist debates in the global context and the influence of this interest on local variations.

In this contribution, I provide an in-depth rhetorical and textual analysis of a television debate program broadcast in 2015 on the mainstream television news channel, Habertürk TV in Turkey. The debate brought together women committed to varying political projects, including Kemalism, Islamism, leftist movements, Kurdish women’s movements, and feminism. I find this debate program unique because it took place at a crucial moment in Turkey’s recent history, preceding increasing restrictions on the media that eventually cost more than half of the program participants’ jobs and positions. In my analysis, I focus on how the program’s moderator and the women participants define “women’s issues” in an increasingly authoritarian and conflictual political climate where women are divided with regard to supporting or opposing the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP) political program. The results of my analysis show that “sisterhood” does not provide common ground for women in a politically polarized environment and women with more political power dominate the conservation.

This chapter unpacks the tension between secular, modern values and conservative, Islamic interpretations within the Indonesian middle class by taking the consumption of Turkish popular cultural products as a case. The chapter explicates the social responses towards the first Turkish television drama aired on terrestrial, private television in Indonesia: The Magnificent Century (Muhtesṃem Yüzyıl/Abad Kejayaan). This chapter understands the reproduction of secular and conservative Islamic values, while in contestation, as a response to broader global, market-capitalist developments. It finds that in response to audience criticism regarding the “un-Islamic” portrayal of the epoch in the drama—specifically the depiction of women as concubines—television stations enlisted the services of Muslim clerics to correct or justify the representation of historical facts. This reveals that market-driven self-censorship has opened up ways for Muslim clerics to influence television content. As such, the chapter argues that market-capitalist forces discursively use Islamic authority as a way to legitimise the halal consumption of Turkish drama among Indonesian Muslim audience at the expense of programme diversity.

"Surveying the latest Chinese TV shows centered on romantic relationships, this book joins the expanding body of literature on the ever-evolving structures of feelings while breaking new grounds in media studies. With its thorough investigation of a wide range of genres, narratives, and public discourses, the volume makes timely and significant contributions to the fields of media studies, China studies, and the cultural history of love and romance."--Hui Faye Xiao, University of Kansas, USA "What does romantic love mean for Chinese people today? How is love represented in popular Chinese television programs? Huike Wens fascinating and important book explores how romantic love promises young Chinese urbanites individual freedom, fulfillment, and purpose in life, yet also plays an ideological role in creating social cohesion and maintaining traditional patriarchal values in post-socialist China. An entertaining and thought-provoking insight into how love functions in contemporary Chinese society." --Hsu-Ming Teo, Macquarie University, Australia This book examines how representations of romantic love in Chinese television programs reflect the contradictions inherent to changing dominant values in post-socialist Chinese mainstream culture. These representations celebrate individual freedom, passion, and gender equality, and promise change based on individual diligence and talent, while simultaneously obstructing the fulfillment of these ideals. Huike Wen is an Associate Professor at Willamette University (Salem, Oregon). Her research focuses on the intersection of genders, emotions, media technology, and nations in transnational Chinese and East Asian media and culture.

This chapter discusses how Chinese television has been refashioned by the digital entertainment industry, and contends that new genres, identities, and representations have emerged in recognition of youths as the most valuable and desirable category of audience. It does so by way of three case studies. The first illustrates the symbiotic relationship between online literature and television drama production, and how the former contributes to the fantastical turn of Chinese television. The second seeks to understand the emergence of new cultural figures of “supreme heroine” and “sweet males” in the context of the rise of female fandom in contemporary Chinese popular culture. The third reveals how traditional television content, or in this case a political drama, may be recreated by online distributors and influencers so as to be aligned with the habits, attitudes, and preferences of the younger audiences. The chapter concludes that to understand contemporary Chinese television culture, the Internet and social media must become an integral component of inquiry because of their powerful remediating role in the public communication of any cultural text.

Avec Alex Wilson, Jeffrey McNeil, Teddy Syrette, May Ela and Ahmed Maswadeh.

This article offers a critical analysis of Matthew Baren’s 2018 film Extravaganza, a documentary about drag scenes in Shanghai. By focusing on some drag performers represented in this film, in tandem with an examination of the social and industry contexts of the film, as well as my interviews with the filmmaker and performers, I problematise the gender identity of the performers and the national identity of the film. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming’ and Song Hwee Lim’s discussion of ‘trans’, I propose to think about certain modes of transnational production with the critical concept of ‘becoming trans’. ‘Becoming trans’ offers a productive way of conceptualising new modes of ‘minor’ transnational cinematic connections in a globalised world without having to resort to identity politics.

"Queerness in Play examines the many ways queerness of all kinds - from queer as 'LGBT' to other, less well-covered aspects of the queer spectrum - intersects with games and the social contexts of play. The current unprecedented visibility of queer creators and content comes at a high tide of resistance to the inclusion of those outside a long-imagined cisgender, heterosexual, white male norm. By critically engaging the ways games - as a culture, an industry, and a medium - help reproduce limiting binary formations of gender and sexuality, Queerness in Play contributes to the growing body of scholarship promoting more inclusive understandings of identity, sexuality, and games."--Provided by publisher.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including where and how queerness is produced, the use of paratexts to expand and stop queer readings of films, and queers' non-reliance on mainstream media to produce queer stories.

Much has been written about Nina Simone’s song “Mississippi Goddam” because it lyrically achieves the political consciousness of the embattled community whose experiences and energy it intends to speak to, through, and for. With its curse words, impatient tone, and energetic rhythm, it could never be mistaken for the traditional, Christian-inflected civil rights dirge. “Alabama’s got me so upset,” the chorus complains. “Tennessee made me lose my rest, and,” as if its atrocities need not be spelled out, “every body knows about Mississippi, goddam!” The song was banned from radio airplay but still became part of the civil rights sound