ABSTRACT
I begin this reflection on the history of feminist media studies by considering the issues raised for feminist scholarship by the recent suicide in the US of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The New York Times and other news coverage stressed the role of media technologies in causing this suicide. Stories portrayed Phoebe as a victim of “cyber-bullying.” Her suicide was treated as evidence of the increasingly harsh teen culture enabled by social networking. But as noted social networking expert Danah Boyd has commented,”[t]here are lots of kids hurting badly online … [a]nd guess what? They’re hurting badly offline, too. Because it’s more visible online, people are blaming technology rather than trying to solve the underlying problems of the kids that are hurting” (New York Times 2008, p. A28). David Buckingham made the same point when he noted that “[t]he debate about children and media … is really a debate about other things, many of which have very little to do with the media. It is a debate that invokes deep-seated moral and political convictions” (Buckingham 2001, pp. 75-76; quoted in Lawrence Grossberg, Ellen Wartella & D. Chuck Whitney 1998, p. 334). Similarly, an assessment of feminist media studies must necessarily address our anxieties about women and feminism, as well as those about media representations of and impact upon women, gender, and sexuality.
