[Commlist] cfp: Gendered cultures in platform economies: entertainment, expertise and online selfhood

CALL FOR PAPERS

GENDERED CULTURES IN PLATFORM ECONOMIES: ENTERTAINMENT, EXPERTISE AND 
ONLINE SELFHOOD

20th  - 21st  November 2023

ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa Avenida das Forças Armadas, 
1649-026 Lisbon, Portugal



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:
•	Optimizing gender and sexuality
•	Optimizing womanhood and motherhood
•	Life coaches, self-help gurus and self-curating
•	Manosphere, pick up artists and new masculinities
•	Prank videos and sexism
•	Queer identities between entrepreneurialism and empowerment
•	‘How-to-Succeed’ guides and cultures
•	Growing plants and pets
•	The performance of gender in animal videos (cuteness/ strength)
•	Confidence culture and the psy-industries
•	Feel-good economy, therapeutic cultures and neo-spiritualism
•	The gendered self as a project and work of art
•	Fitness, beauty and the body
•	Discipline and self-restraint
•	Amateur and professional labour
•	Individualized gendered practices Vs. collective mobilisation



The Advisory Committee is composed by:
•	Tonny Krijnen (Erasmus University)
•	Joke Hermes (Inholland University)
•	Sander De Ridder (Ghent University)
•	Sofia Caldeira (Lusófona University)
•	Cila Willem (Universitat Rovira i Virgil)
•	Maria Helena Santos (CIS, ISCTE-Lisbon University Institute)
•	Carla Cerqueira (Lusófona University)


The Organising Committee is composed by:
•	Panos Kompatsiaris (IULM)
•	Claudia Alvares (CIES, ISCTE-Lisbon University Institute)
•	Andrea Miconi (IULM)
•	Sofie Van Bauwel (Ghent University)



TIMELINE


9 June 2023	Abstract submission deadline

14 July 2023	Acceptance/Rejection notification

8 September 2023	Registration to the conference

20-21 November 2023	Conference in Lisbon




To submit your abstract, please send an email to: (conference /at/ eumeplat.eu)


Further details and updated information are available here: 
https://www.eumeplat.eu/events/2023lisbonconference/



***
About the project


EUMEPLAT – European Media Platforms: assessing positive and negative 
externalities for European culture is a Research and Innovation project 
funded under the Horizon 2020 Programme, aiming at investigating the 
role of media platforms in fostering or dismantling European identity.
Drawing on the assumption that European dimension has rarely been 
dominant in media history and focusing on the “platformization” process 
and its positive and negative externalities, the main research question 
is whether or not the new platforms are making European culture more 
European.
Through a multidisciplinary approach and the analysis of relevant 
indicators related to the production and consumption of media contents 
and to the representation of sensitive issues
– namely gender and migration – the research team looks for similarities 
and specificities on a national, regional and European level. The data 
and results collected are also investigated to come out with 
recommendations addressed to the policy-makers on the evolution of the 
European media landscapes.
The project runs from 1st March 2021 to 29th February 2024 and is 
carried out by 12 partners from 10 countries: Libera Università di 
Lingue e Comunicazione (Italy) // coordinator; Leibniz- Institut für 
Medienforschung | Hans-Bredow Institut (Germany); New Bulgarian 
University (Bulgaria); UNIMED – Unione delle Università del Mediterraneo 
(Italy); Fundacio per a la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain); 
Universiteit Gent (Belgium); Bilkent Universitesi Vakif (Turkey); 
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece); Iscte – 
Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (Portugal); Università Ca’ Foscari 
Venezia (Italy); Foreningen IKED (Sweden); Univerzita Karlova (Czech 
Republic).
For more information, please visit the project website at 
https://www.eumeplat.eu/. The main publications produced in the 
framework of the project are available in the EUMEPLAT Community on 
Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/communities/eumeplat/

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