[csaa-forum] SAM Seminar: Tues March 20: Emma Jane

[Chris Danta]

School of the Arts and Media, UNSW, present

Dr Emma Jane, UNSW

Flip Skirt Fatales: On Cheerleading, Fetish and Hate

Tues March 20, 4-5.30pm in Robert Webster 327

Cheerleading – an activity with origins in the elite, male-dominated domain of the late 19th century American university campus – is now a highly popular feminised sport which is both fetishised and loathed by a range of ostensibly disparate social groups. That a relatively unremarkable feminine athletic endeavour provokes such intense cultural anxiety and sexual obsession makes cheerleading a singularly revealing object of study. My research in this area: interrogates the relevance of traditional media studies models such as moral panic theory; problematises orthodox understandings of the progressive/transgressive politics involved in active audienceship and self-publishing; explicates some of the dangers of celebratory rhetoric framing new media ecosystems; and probes the usefulness of new approaches to explicating power flows in media environments.

Emma Jane is a Senior Lecturer in Media at the University of New South Wales, an award winning journalist and broadcaster, and the author of six books including a novel, Deadset, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Asia and the South Pacific for Best First Novel in 1997. Her current research interests include hate speech on the internet, the characteristics of mob formation and behaviour online, and the intersections between fetish theory and media studies.
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