The Department of Global Communications at the American University of Paris announces a call for chapters for the upcoming publication, "Women and the Media in Asia." Abstract deadline: December 30, 2009.
American University of Paris Call for Chapters
Call for Chapters
Women and the Media in Asia
To what extent do women have control over their lives? How do the media intersect with imagining different lives for women? This book is concerned with the changing lives of women; the troubling signs of female individualization as intersected with everyday media culture - a new arena of anxiety for women in contemporary Asia.
From the 1980s onward, women in Asia have gained higher levels of education and the commensurate expectations have become a driving motor in the women's aspirations for work, economic power, independence, freedom and self-fulfilment. However, women often experience gendered labour market inequity setting limits on patterns of participation, women's socio-economic position on the margins of work systems, and thus the illusion of the language of choice that the new capacities of education appear to promise. The enlargement of choice can be particularly illusory for women in contemporary Asia where gendered socio-economic and cultural conditions continue to persist and structure labour market outcomes and lifestyles.
Yet signs of female individualization have been proliferating as a defining feature of contemporary modes of identity, albeit untenable and ambivalent, within the discursive regime of self - embodied in regulatory practices in society where individualism is not placed at the heart of its culture. Arguably, the media are central to the signs of emergent cultures of female individualization producing the alternative social, cultural and symbolic relations women wish to live within and define the kind of self they wish to become. Seeming suggestions of individualization are encountered, mediated through popular media imaginaries that are present and often intentionally used as resources for reflexivity and self-imagining. This also provides a condition for an increased awareness of cultural differences and of women's own positions in relation to global Others, new symbolic objects of identification and contestation.
At a time of significant changes in women's lives entering a much larger but precarious world, this book explores such phenomena by critically incorporating the parameters of popular media culture into the overarching paradigm of gender relations, economics and politics of everyday life.
I invite contributions that explore everyday media culture and the issues of women as `consumers', women as `representations' and women as `creators', to offer an understanding of changing lives and frustrated desires, contradictions and dispersed sites of female individualization that are refracted into various degrees and forms.
Deadline: 30 December 2009. 300 word abstract, biographical note: please send electronic submissions to Professor Youna Kim, ykim@aup.fr
Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia (Routledge, 2008)
Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea: Journeys of Hope (Routledge, 2005/2009)
Department of Global Communications, American University of Paris
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