Amy Shields Dobson
My research focuses on gender and sexuality in digital cultures and social media. Before starting at Curtin in 2017, I was a University of Queensland Postdoctoral Fellow. I have also previously lectured in Sociology and Gender at Monash University. Current and recent research projects focus on young people’s social media use and digital self-representation, sexting and cybersafety education in schools, and female genital cosmetic surgery in Australia.
For a full list of publications, please see:
http://cccs.uq.edu.au/dobson
Research Interests:
Digital cultures and social media
Youth and girlhood studies
Femininity, postfeminist subjectivities
Sexualisation and raunch culture
Sexting
I welcome applications from prospective PhD students working in any of the above areas.
For a full list of publications, please see:
http://cccs.uq.edu.au/dobson
Research Interests:
Digital cultures and social media
Youth and girlhood studies
Femininity, postfeminist subjectivities
Sexualisation and raunch culture
Sexting
I welcome applications from prospective PhD students working in any of the above areas.
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postfeminist media cultures
Get Krack!n: Miranda Tapsell and Nakkiah Lui decolonise breakfast television
Steven Universe
Gaga Feminism
cyborgs and goddesess; Haraway
positivity, entrepreneurialism, a continued faith in (budget-conscious)
consumption and investment in the home and the family. This article considers the US comedy Broad City as an articulation of how young women are critically grappling with such shifts in gendered social relations and labour markets in the cosmopolitan setting of New York City. We suggest, in the depiction of the central female friendship between Abbi Abrams (Abbi Jacobson) and Ilana Wexler (Ilana Glazer) in Broad City, the show foregrounds the necessity of young women’s“high energy striving” but produces an alternative configuration of the normative relation between femininity and labour. In the show, contra the “retreatism” Negra and Tasker document idealising women’s work in the home as a means of combatting an austere future, the thrifty fun, care, support, and love Abbi and Ilana strive to create together spills across public spaces, spanning the streets of
the city, outdoors in parks and on stoops. Abbi and Ilana are continually depicted labouring in some way, though such labour does not generally result in financial or career-based reward, but rather, produces psychic and emotional sustenance for the women’s friendship and a means of affectively investing in each other. Thus, in Broad City’s acknowledgement of the high energy striving required to survive, the show critically questions the relation of such feminine striving to the promise of career, financial success, and the idealised direction of such striving towards the domestic and hetero-patriarchal family. Instead, the show emphasises the material
importance of such striving in relation to the bonds of women’s friendship in conditions of material and social hardship, suggesting a different orientation to women’s work and its place in recessional culture.
OR,
The violence of Dot-point Tip Sheets About Offshore Teaching.
Amy Shields Dobson, unpublished draft, posted 15/02/19
With deep gratitude to Baden Offord and Shaka McGlotten for their comments, kind words, and support.
on data from a research project that examines the interplay between promotion, drinking culture, and social media. In this
project, informants documented flows of images between their social media accounts and a nightlife precinct. We show how
the human capacity to use bodies to affect other bodies, and to make critical judgments about bodies, is vital to algorithmic
media platforms that aim to profit from calculative judgements about the affective dimensions of human life. We propose
an expanded register of “body heat” on social media as both the symbolic labor of producing, maintaining, and digitally
mediating a body that conforms to heterosexy visual codes and the affective labor of using a hot body to affect other bodies
through movement, touch, and excessive consumption. The escalating capacity of social media platforms to calibrate flows of
attention depends on the “hot” bodies of users and user’s work in curating “hot” body images to upload. Hot female bodies
are critical to nightlife promotion via social media, in attracting viewer attention. Hot female bodies are also key to moments of
nightlife reconnaissance: they are registered in the databases and sorted by the algorithms of social media platforms, enabling
viewers to make judgments about the desirability of locations in the nightlife precinct.
Methods: Eight social science, medical, and communication databases and Google Scholar were searched for peer-reviewed papers published in English. Results from all papers were analysed to identify recurring and unique themes.
Results: Five papers met inclusion criteria. Three of the papers reported investigations of website content of FGCS providers, a fourth compared motivations for labiaplasty publicised on provider websites with those disclosed by women in online communities, and the fifth analysed visual depictions of female genitalia in online pornography. Analysis yielded five significant and interrelated patterns of representation, each functioning to promote and normalise the practice of FGCS: pathologisation of genital diversity; female genital appearance as important to wellbeing; characteristics of women’s genitals are important for sex life; female body as degenerative and improvable through surgery; and FGCS as safe, easy, and effective. A significant gap was identified in the literature: the ways in which user-generated content might function to perpetuate, challenge, or subvert the normative discourses prevalent in online pornography and surgical websites.
Conclusions: Further research is needed to contribute to knowledge of the role played by the internet in the promotion and normalisation of female genital cosmetic surgery.
of two cyber-safety campaign films: Tagged from Australia and Exposed from the UK. The films tell alarming stories about the ways in which teenage girls’ digital interactions and representations can be misused by their peers. We explore the
normative construction of schools as sites for policing sex and gender norms in the films. We then investigate how young people take up, manage and sometimes question
these gendered logics in their own digitally networked peer groups through an analysis of data from several school-based qualitative research projects on young people’s digital sexual cultures and their responses to sexting in cyber-safety films in London, UK and Victoria, Australia. We critique the naturalisation of digital realms as extensions of the schoolyard in the films and for young people themselves, and suggest
that such assumptions need questioning in future forms of sext education.
postfeminist media cultures
Get Krack!n: Miranda Tapsell and Nakkiah Lui decolonise breakfast television
Steven Universe
Gaga Feminism
cyborgs and goddesess; Haraway
positivity, entrepreneurialism, a continued faith in (budget-conscious)
consumption and investment in the home and the family. This article considers the US comedy Broad City as an articulation of how young women are critically grappling with such shifts in gendered social relations and labour markets in the cosmopolitan setting of New York City. We suggest, in the depiction of the central female friendship between Abbi Abrams (Abbi Jacobson) and Ilana Wexler (Ilana Glazer) in Broad City, the show foregrounds the necessity of young women’s“high energy striving” but produces an alternative configuration of the normative relation between femininity and labour. In the show, contra the “retreatism” Negra and Tasker document idealising women’s work in the home as a means of combatting an austere future, the thrifty fun, care, support, and love Abbi and Ilana strive to create together spills across public spaces, spanning the streets of
the city, outdoors in parks and on stoops. Abbi and Ilana are continually depicted labouring in some way, though such labour does not generally result in financial or career-based reward, but rather, produces psychic and emotional sustenance for the women’s friendship and a means of affectively investing in each other. Thus, in Broad City’s acknowledgement of the high energy striving required to survive, the show critically questions the relation of such feminine striving to the promise of career, financial success, and the idealised direction of such striving towards the domestic and hetero-patriarchal family. Instead, the show emphasises the material
importance of such striving in relation to the bonds of women’s friendship in conditions of material and social hardship, suggesting a different orientation to women’s work and its place in recessional culture.
OR,
The violence of Dot-point Tip Sheets About Offshore Teaching.
Amy Shields Dobson, unpublished draft, posted 15/02/19
With deep gratitude to Baden Offord and Shaka McGlotten for their comments, kind words, and support.
on data from a research project that examines the interplay between promotion, drinking culture, and social media. In this
project, informants documented flows of images between their social media accounts and a nightlife precinct. We show how
the human capacity to use bodies to affect other bodies, and to make critical judgments about bodies, is vital to algorithmic
media platforms that aim to profit from calculative judgements about the affective dimensions of human life. We propose
an expanded register of “body heat” on social media as both the symbolic labor of producing, maintaining, and digitally
mediating a body that conforms to heterosexy visual codes and the affective labor of using a hot body to affect other bodies
through movement, touch, and excessive consumption. The escalating capacity of social media platforms to calibrate flows of
attention depends on the “hot” bodies of users and user’s work in curating “hot” body images to upload. Hot female bodies
are critical to nightlife promotion via social media, in attracting viewer attention. Hot female bodies are also key to moments of
nightlife reconnaissance: they are registered in the databases and sorted by the algorithms of social media platforms, enabling
viewers to make judgments about the desirability of locations in the nightlife precinct.
Methods: Eight social science, medical, and communication databases and Google Scholar were searched for peer-reviewed papers published in English. Results from all papers were analysed to identify recurring and unique themes.
Results: Five papers met inclusion criteria. Three of the papers reported investigations of website content of FGCS providers, a fourth compared motivations for labiaplasty publicised on provider websites with those disclosed by women in online communities, and the fifth analysed visual depictions of female genitalia in online pornography. Analysis yielded five significant and interrelated patterns of representation, each functioning to promote and normalise the practice of FGCS: pathologisation of genital diversity; female genital appearance as important to wellbeing; characteristics of women’s genitals are important for sex life; female body as degenerative and improvable through surgery; and FGCS as safe, easy, and effective. A significant gap was identified in the literature: the ways in which user-generated content might function to perpetuate, challenge, or subvert the normative discourses prevalent in online pornography and surgical websites.
Conclusions: Further research is needed to contribute to knowledge of the role played by the internet in the promotion and normalisation of female genital cosmetic surgery.
of two cyber-safety campaign films: Tagged from Australia and Exposed from the UK. The films tell alarming stories about the ways in which teenage girls’ digital interactions and representations can be misused by their peers. We explore the
normative construction of schools as sites for policing sex and gender norms in the films. We then investigate how young people take up, manage and sometimes question
these gendered logics in their own digitally networked peer groups through an analysis of data from several school-based qualitative research projects on young people’s digital sexual cultures and their responses to sexting in cyber-safety films in London, UK and Victoria, Australia. We critique the naturalisation of digital realms as extensions of the schoolyard in the films and for young people themselves, and suggest
that such assumptions need questioning in future forms of sext education.