“Gendered space”: A study of newspaper opinion journalism as emergent and oppositional to the dominant culture in journalism
Article
This paper reviews the literature in academic journals and books and asserts the importance of studying opinion journalism as a genre of emergent and oppositional journalism and a form of public engagement. Using Raymond Williams’s Marxist cultural theory of base and superstructure, this writer takes the perspective that newspaper columns are a genre that contributes to residual and emergent forms of alternative and oppositional culture which counters the texts and values in the dominant culture of journalism. Exercising traditional public scholarship, op-ed writers utilize columns, essays, and other forms of creative nonfiction to address issues that concern women, the working class, and other vulnerable groups that are kept at the periphery of public discourse.
The Embodiment of the New Woman: Advertisements’ Mobilization of Women’s Bodies Through Co-Optation of Feminist Ideologies
Article
This paper stands on an important feminist notion of “embodiment” which considers the body not just as part of a body-mind dualism but as an essential site for political and personal emancipation. It then proceeds to critique the concept of embodiment of the New Woman as a co-opted notion in twenty (20) beauty product advertisements aired on Philippine free TV from 2010 to 2014. Co-optation in representations is a process of borrowing only surface elements of a progressive philosophy/theory such as feminism while ignoring its other, more important, ideas. New Woman, on the other hand, is a social construction of the modern woman who is supposedly making wise and empowered choices in life. The analysis focuses on how feminism has been co-opted in what the author labels as a “depoliticization project” in these beauty product advertisements.
