Graduation Year
2013
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.A.
Degree Granting Department
Communication
Major Professor
Rachel E. Dubrofsky
Keywords
gender, post-feminism, race, social media, Twitter
Abstract
This thesis is a textual analysis of stories in online celebrity news articles about celebrity women and their use of Twitter. It adds to the burgeoning discussion about gendered and racialized bodies online using scholarship from critical feminist, surveillance, and digital media studies. Throughout, my work attends to notions of authenticity and surveillance, examining how what I term a "call to authenticity"--the use of technologies of self-surveillance to verify "authentic" displays of the self--serves to animate contradictory post-feminist paradigms of femininity which function together to discipline and subjugate femininity. I ask: How do post-feminist questions of empowerment and responsibility become articulated when individuals operate the technologies that functionally surveil them? What are the particular implications of surveillance for gendered and racialized bodies when thought about in the context of a post-feminist culture? What might a focus on the relationship between surveillance and post-feminist logic uncover?
Scholar Commons Citation
Wood, Megan M., "When Celebrity Women Tweet: Examining Authenticity, Empowerment, and Responsibility in the Surveillance of Celebrity Twitter" (2013). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/4855
