[Commlist] CFP: Media Identitopias

*Call for Papers - /Feminist Media Histories/ Special Issue*

*
*

*Media Identitopias:
The Long History of Pleasure and Injury in (Social) Media*

Guest Editors:  Rebecca Wanzo & Reem Hilu


In 2020, the news media reported that Facebook’s internal studies had 
revealed what numerous scholars had already argued—adolescent girls have 
experienced depression and other mental health challenges because of 
extensive exposure to Instagram and other social media. At the same 
time, other scholars have explored how social media has been a positive 
force in people’s lives as a means of finding community, identity 
formation, and building social movements (Moya Bailey, Jillian M. Baez, 
Catherine Steele, Raven Maragh-Lloyd, Laura Horak).


But social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are not 
the first examples of communities and identities organized around 
mediated texts and technologies. Young women connected over novel 
reading and the fantasies in their pages were considered “infectious” 
and dangerous, from Charlotte Temple to the rise of Harlequin and 
historical romance novels in the late twentieth-century (Cathy Davidson, 
Janice Radway). Psychiatrist Frederic Wertham fretted over the raced and 
gendered harms of comic books, even as the content and the communities 
that can form around comics often model new just worlds and offer a 
sense of belonging to the socially marginalized (Qiana Whitted, Ramzi 
Fawaz). The fan cultures from comics and other “geek cultures” like 
gaming and science fiction have notoriously been marked by misogyny, 
racism, and homophobia (Suzanne Scott, Rukmini Pande), even as the same 
groups marginalized by white supremacy and toxic masculinity have built 
their own affirming and pleasurable communities. How do we place the 
current conversation about social media in historical context to think 
about a longer history of social interaction through media? Can we learn 
from scholarship about the ways that prior communities organized through 
media interaction and consumption balanced or failed to balance 
affinities and difference amongst their members?


In other words, there is a long history of people negotiating what we 
might term /media identitopias/—the space of consumption and community 
that offers the promise of utopian community while dystopian harms 
threaten or overtake the pleasurable political possibilities of 
connections made between people through media. The popular always holds 
the ideal and suffering in the same place because of identity—people’s 
ideal worlds are shaped by ideas of belonging and exclusion. Political 
economy is also key to media identitopias because it naturalizes 
exclusions in the name of marketability, resource scarcity, and 
property. This special issue rejects approaches that are purely 
celebratory or completely censorious of (social) media, instead looking 
at the space between that shapes the quotidian negotiations that take 
place in the identitopias we inhabit.


This special issue of /Feminist Media Histories/ invites essays that 
look at the tendentious space of the media identitopia, exploring a 
longer history of media as social. It invites the work of scholars who 
work in psychology, feminist science studies, sociology, law, media 
history, communication studies, fan studies, game studies, and industry 
to facilitate conversations about fundamental concepts that drive 
analyses of (social) media writ large. What do the histories of cinema, 
comics, video games, television, radio, fandom, and social media tell us 
about the inescapable tension between the utopian and dystopian? Have 
the conflicting evaluations of media communities in the past played out 
along consistent disciplinary divisions? By looking at how different 
disciplines have interpreted or responded to mediated communities in the 
past, can we gain greater insight into how ideals about social 
connection and community are constructed? How have social support 
systems been forged in relation to and across (social) media and how 
might both regulation and new modes of habitus be encouraged that change 
the relationship girls, women, woman-identified, two-spirit, trans* and 
other populations constructed as “vulnerable,” “underrepresented,” or 
“disenfranchised” have to media more broadly? How does employing an 
intersectional lens highlight how race, gender, indigeneity, class, 
disability, and queerness are the grounds on which pleasure is defined 
as present or absent in media spaces? How might we explore how identity, 
platform, genre, and medium interact to forge utopian or dystopian 
experiences?


The disconnect between these interpretations of (social) media—a tension 
between causing harm and building life-sustaining community—opens up a 
rich space for interdisciplinary discussions that can transform our 
shared approaches to the urgent issues raised by popular media.


The co-editors, Rebecca Wanzo and Reem Hilu, invite abstracts of *300 
words by November 15, 2022* to ((mediaidentitopias /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(mediaidentitopias /at/ gmail.com)>) as well as a short bio. Scholars 
with accepted abstracts will be invited to a symposium at Washington 
University in St. Louis in April 2023 to present full drafts. All 
domestic travel will be covered and a small honorarium will be provided. 
Options for virtual participation in the symposium will be considered 
for those unable to attend in person. Final essays will be sent out for 
blind peer review by *May 15, 2023*.

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ commlist.org)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------