Sex and the City-State: A Study of Sexual Discourse in Singaporean Women's Magazines

Singapore's print media now presents frank and open discussions of sexuality, signalling what appears to be a liberating overhaul of the strict moral codes that have restricted media content for decades. The intensely competitive magazine market is leading the charge. This paper examines how magazines such as The Singapore Women's Weekly reframe discourses on sexuality to allow them to operate within Singapore's tightly controlled media system. Drawing from a Foucauldian approach to discourse and censorship, and broader themes of global capitalism and state rule, this paper contends that despite immense pressures to allow the print media and its wealth-generating advertisers a high degree of autonomy in terms of content, Singapore's sexual revolution operates within parameters set by a government keen to strike a balance between maintaining ‘traditional’ moral values and a more pragmatic approach toward sexuality centred, in part, on attempts to promote ‘civic nationalism’ and to arrest the declining birth-rate.     

Sex as an Intergroup Arena: How Women and Gender Minorities Conceptualize Sex,Sexuality, and Sexual Health

We present a qualitative analysis of 186 women and gender minorities’ definitions of sex, sexuality, and sexual health, as well as their accounts of how those concepts changed for them over time. Participants describe these phenomena as communicative, layered, and related to identity. Definitions of sex produced themes of intimacy, consent, and who is involved; definitions of sexuality involved sexual orientation, sexual expression, and personal identity; definitions of sexual health included communication skills, an emphasis on physical and emotional health, and prevention and maintenance. Using the Communication Theory of Identity as a lens to guide our analysis and discussion, we argue that sex, sexuality, and sexual health are intergroup arenas that require an acknowledgment of group membership.     

To Hope or to Know: Coping with Uncertainty and Ambivalence in Women's Magazine Breast Cancer Articles

Breast cancer is one of the most feared diseases in contemporary Western society. Popular women's magazines are important sources of information about and orientation to the disease. The current study applies problematic integration theory in an interpretive analysis of all breast cancer articles appearing in five top-circulating women's magazines between 1997 and 2002. In so doing, the study illuminates two major challenges (uncertainty and ambivalence) and several imperfect approaches to coping constructed in this discourse (simplification, information-seeking/provision, affect management, trusting intuition, sustaining hope, and metaphoric reframing). These results have several clear and important practical implications and highlight a major and largely untried direction for future research.     

Powerless Language in Health Media: The Influence of Biological Sex and Magazine Type on Health Language

Powerless language influences how media consumers perceive the believability and trustworthiness of news sources. Past studies have suggested females use more powerless language, which can negatively influence credibility. However, previous research also suggests powerless language may be preferred in certain contexts. To investigate powerless language use in written health media, a content analysis investigated health-related articles in issues of 12 magazines between October 2008 and September 2009. Analysis compared differences in powerless language frequencies relative to three variables: biological sex of the author, biological sex of the audience, and the magazine's overall topic focus. Female authors and health-focused magazines used more powerless language than male authors and generic-focused magazines, and powerless language was more often directed towards a female audience than a male audience.     

To Hope or to Know: Coping with Uncertainty and Ambivalence in Women's Magazine Breast Cancer Articles

Breast cancer is one of the most feared diseases in contemporary Western society. Popular women's magazines are important sources of information about and orientation to the disease. The current study applies problematic integration theory in an interpretive analysis of all breast cancer articles appearing in five top-circulating women's magazines between 1997 and 2002. In so doing, the study illuminates two major challenges (uncertainty and ambivalence) and several imperfect approaches to coping constructed in this discourse (simplification, information-seeking/provision, affect management, trusting intuition, sustaining hope, and metaphoric reframing). These results have several clear and important practical implications and highlight a major and largely untried direction for future research.     

Narrative Sensemaking and Time Lapse: Interviews with Low-income Women about Sex Education

Secondary-school students in the United States score notoriously low on tests of their reproductive and sexual knowledge despite attempts by educators and legislators to provide them with informative sex-education courses. In this paper, we build from narrative theory to explore how low-income women perceived their formal sex-education experiences and how they connected those experiences to their sexual-health knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors. Drawing from interviews with 30 low-income women, we identify and develop a typology of sex-education narratives: narratives of regret, narratives of satisfaction, and narratives of uncertainty. We also investigate existing theoretical claims that lapses in time between lived events and the narration of those events connect to sensemaking efforts. We find that younger women in the sample were more likely to tell narratives of uncertainty than were older women. These results have implications for the study of narrative theory, sexual-health communication, and the discourse of public sex education.     

Visual Framing,Stigmatization, Race,and Obesity: Examining Television News Presentation of Stories about Obesity and Stories about Health

This study conducted a content analysis to examine how weight and race/ethnicity impacted how people were portrayed in the imagery accompanying broadcast and cable television news stories about obesity compared to stories about health. Five hundred and seven people were analyzed in 135 stories. Results showed that people who were overweight were often shown as an isolated body part, but their portrayal was not entirely stigmatizing. Overweight people were often shown exercising, which combats weight stereotypes. Additionally, race/ethnicity did not make the portrayal more stigmatizing. The results of the content analysis are discussed with an emphasis on the larger implications of the findings.     

Primacy of Broadcast News: A Mediation Analysis of Recall,Attitudes, and Voting Intentions

This study examines how the order and proportion of scene valence within a television news story influence viewers' processing of political information. The results of the study, based on structural equation modeling and Sobel's mediation analysis, suggest that, in a news story about a political candidate, positive information on the candidate is recalled better if he or she is praised at the beginning of the story and then criticized at the end than if he or she is criticized first and praised later. In addition, there was a strong proportion effect. Stories with a high proportion of positive scenes were more likely to increase the participant's recall of positive information and induce his or her favorable attitudes and voting intentions than those with a low proportion of positive scenes.     

First Date Sexual Expectations: The Effects of Who Asked,Who Paid,Date Location,and Gender

This investigation examined the effects of who asked, who paid, date location, and gender on first date sexual expectations and related attitudes. Participants from a large southwestern university in the United States reported that men hold higher first date sexual expectations than women, particularly when men asked and paid for the date and the date occurred at an apartment versus the movies or restaurant. When women asked and paid for the date and the date occurred at her apartment, men hold higher rape myth acceptance beliefs than when the man asked and paid for the date or when either sex asked for the date and the partners “went dutch” on expenses. Additional sexual- and gender-related findings, discussion, and implications follow.     

Television Viewing,Racial Attitudes,and Policy Preferences: Exploring the Role of Social Identity and Intergroup Emotions in Influencing Support for Affirmative Action

This paper explores how White viewers' perceived portrayals of African-Americans and Latino-Americans on TV influence their real-world feelings and beliefs about these outgroups, which in turn affect their support for race-targeted policies. A computer-based survey (N=323) included measures relating to perceptions about racial/ethnic groups on television, real-world stereotypical beliefs, prejudicial feelings, and support for affirmative action policies. The affective-cognitive model of policy reasoning presented in this paper extends and improves upon prior research in several ways. It considers intergroup emotions as an important mediator by including prejudicial feelings toward racial/ethnic outgroups in the path analyses. Unlike past research that typically grouped all negative stereotypes into one global measure, this study explores how specific types of stereotypes such as criminality and laziness work independently and simultaneously to influence policy preferences. Finally, this integrated cognitive-affective model of policy reasoning is applied to both perceptions of African-Americans and of Latino-Americans, which provides greater confidence in the applicability of the model. Implications of the results and directions for future research are discussed.     

(De)stabilizing Sexual Violence Discourse: Masculinization of Victimhood,Organizational Blame,and Labile Imperialism

Following calls to center nation, we analyze sexual violence discourse in the US Peace Corps. The texts we consider deploy three typical dichotomies—public/private, self/other, and agent/victim—that, in this case, reveal inconsistencies at the intersections of race and gender. We argue that these inconsistencies are evidence of lability, counterintuitive discursive shifts necessary to maintain white heteromasculine dominance. Instead of blaming individual victims of rape and assault, the masculinization of victimhood shifts culpability to the Peace Corps. This organizational blame maintains the moral position of the US and legitimates imperialism. By marking these instabilities, we trace the solidity and vulnerability of sexual violence discourse as it organizes global power.     

Suffering in Silence: The Resilience of Pakistan’s Female Journalists to Combat Sexual Harassment,Threats and Discrimination

ABSTRACT

Pakistan’s journalists confront severe safety risks across the country and impunity to crimes against them allows the perpetrators to go unpunished. Now the country is recognized as one of the deadliest places for working journalists in the world. Given this situation, the Pakistani female journalists are more vulnerable because they are not only prone to safety risks and sexual harassment, but also they face gender discrimination when it comes to their recruitment and equal pay-scale. In the past decade, there has been an alarming increase in attacks on female journalists and incidents of their sexual harassment in Pakistan. Notwithstanding the growing plague of sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the country, the resilience of female journalists to work within a threatening and prejudiced environment has not yet fully explored and analysed. Therefore, drawing on the postcolonial feminist theory, this study aims to investigate the Pakistani female journalists’ lived experiences of sexual harassment, threats and discrimination. The study also analyses the impacts of sexual harassment, threats and gender discrimination on the country’s female journalists. To achieve the aforementioned aims, this study uses the qualitative methods of in-depth interviews and focus groups discussion, and offers a thematic analysis of qualitative data.     

On Communicating Pride,Crying in Movies,and Recruiting Innocent Bystanders: The Effect of Sex on Communication Schemas Activated with Gay and Heterosexual Targets

Invoking social identity theory as an interpretive frame, a previous content analysis of heterosexuals' representations of imagined conversations with gay men revealed a number of communication schemas for talk with the latter (e.g., homonegativity and offense avoidance). This study explores the role of participant sex in determining the prevalence of such schemas, comparatively incorporating representations of conversations with a heterosexual target. Two hundred American undergraduates imagined a conversation with a gay or heterosexual male target. Male participants' imagined conversations with a gay target were rated more negative, indicated less evidence of relational development, and included more gay stereotyping than did females' imagined dialogues.