Audiences across platforms consume and create meanings about media in transgressive ways
Feminism can reflect the cultural moment, especially as media appropriate and use feminist messaging and agenda to various ends. Yet media can also push boundaries, exposing audiences to ideas they may not be familiar with and advancing public acceptance of concepts once considered taboo. Moreover, audiences are far from passive recipients, especially in the digital age. In Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism, Andrea L. Press and Francesca Tripodi focus on how audiences across platforms not only consume but also create meanings—sometimes quite transgressive meanings—in engaging with media content. If television shows such as Game of Thrones and Jersey Shore and dating apps such as Tinder are sites of persistent everyday sexism, then so, too, are they sites of what Press and Tripodi call "media-ready feminism." In developing a sociologically based conception of reception that encompasses media's progressive potential, as well as the processes of domestication through which audiences and users revert to more limited cultural schemas, Press and Tripodi make a vital contribution to gender and media studies, and help to illuminate the complexity of our current moment.
The conservative populism of President Trump has created the environment that birthed the #MeToo Movement and Fourth Wave Feminism
Misogyny and Media in the Age of Trump argues that misogyny has increased in the United States under President Trump and that although women’s experiences under misogyny are by no means universal, patriarchal social and institutional systems facilitate gender-based hostility. Systemic misogyny and power inequities are at the root of male-on-female bullying, the bullying and harassment of non-hegemonic males and other minorities as well as sexual harassment, rape, and even murder. Given the prevalence of misogyny, and its deep rootedness in religion, it is argued that the social contract needs to be rewritten in order to have a just, gender- and race-equitable society. Misogyny creates a clash of cultures between men and women, hegemonic and non-hegemonic males, feminists and INCELS, the powerful and the oppressed, natives and marginalized minorities, the conservative and the liberal/progressive.