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Permanent URI for this communityhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/294

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Representation (Philosophy)

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    Rethinking female representation in superhero(ine) media through audiences’ digital engagement : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Media Studies at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2024-09) de Meneses, Bruna Maria
    In recent years, debates about gender and feminism have become more easily accessible due to digital platforms such as social media. These debates often intertwine with films and television series that attempt to present characters and stories in consonance with claims for better representation. Superhero(ine) live action films and television are one example of this, with the representation of gender in this media becoming a topic of online discussion. But how are audiences engaging with these representations and this online discussion? In this study I undertook qualitative research with two groups of fans of the superhero genre from Brazil and New Zealand, using a combination of methods: digital diaries, interviews, and focus groups. Through this research, I sought to understand more about their experiences with such texts, and how they interpret them. I argue that the participants’ engagement with superhero(ine) media and related online discussion leads to questioning, critiquing, and learning about gender representation and feminism. This starts with superhero(ine) media, but exceeds it, reaching participants’ own life experiences. In this sense, the online culture surrounding superhero(ine) media acts as a form of digital feminism, providing a platform for consciousness-raising. This digital feminism has a transnational dimension, whilst also being inflected slightly differently by the national contexts in which the participants are situated, including their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Simultaneously, any consciousness-raising comes with the caveat that the participants cannot completely escape the neoliberal logics and postfeminist sensibility underpinning the production and promotion of superhero(ine) media.
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    Colonial discourses of deviance and desire and the bodies of wāhine Māori : a thesis presented in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Arts at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2024) Allen, Elizabeth Anne
    This research traces how colonial ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality contributed to nineteenth and early twentieth-century representations of wāhine Māori and questions how these repetitive inscriptions might continue to have a negative impact on perceptions of wāhine Māori and kōtiro Māori in contemporary culture. As a Mana Wahine study, I demonstrate that fundamental codes of the developing colonial state were affirmed by how Pākehā guarded sexuality, ordered gender, and surveilled race. As a wahine Māori centred project, it examines the colonial dimensions of “domesticity,” the “civilising mission,” and the ‘paternalism of liberalism’ in Aotearoa/New Zealand, specifically, on the assumption that differentiations of race and colonial power were essentially ordered in terms of Western notions of gender. Of particular concern is the management of wāhine Māori sexuality, procreation, child-rearing, and marriage as a mechanism of colonial control of their bodies. Focusing on spaces of perceived proximity and desire as a source from which we can search for newly recognisable forms of social perceptions in relating, it offers an engagement with myriad forms of art across multidisciplinary fields to provide a unique window into a colonial exercise of the imperial project that had a direct impact on the bodies of wāhine Māori. A critical examination of the colonial metaphors around desire and degeneration, of the intimate and affect, attempts to decolonise its representative paradigms by addressing the consequential structural and material histories that, for wāhine Māori, resulted in meting out differential futures based on ‘fabulated’ divisions of worth, prompting the central questions of the dissertation, how are bodies similar or not? How are bodies available or not? How are bodies knowable or not? And to whom?