Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media

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Women and Media in the Twenty-First Century

Abigail Keating and Jill Murphy

 

Abstract: In a 2015 article on “Tweeting to Empower”, Karen Hua of Forbes Magazine argued that “digital culture has had a huge influence on the push for global gender equality”. This idea has been taken up most recently in a series of articles that marked the tenth anniversary of Twitter’s inception; one such being Zeba Blay’s “21 Hashtags that Changed the Way We Talk About Feminism” in The Huffington Post, which recounts the mechanics of the platform beyond its social value and suggests it “has shaped conversations about women’s issues and [that] feminism has had an unprecedented impact”. In a specifically film and screen media context, one need only look to the “hashtivism” of campaigns such as #AskHerMore and #FavWomanFilmmaker to see not only how the topic of female representation in and across media is gaining increasing momentum within popular discourse, but also how the subject of female representation is, by virtue of the need for such activism, an inherently sociopolitical issue.

 

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