Research in diverse populations has often found that thin media images negatively affect women’s state body image, with many women reporting lower body satisfaction after exposure to pictures of thin models than before exposure. However, there is evidence that theistic affirmations might buffer against the negative effect of media on body image. Furthermore, based on cross-sectional and correlation analyses, religiosity and the Islamic body covering are discussed as protective factors against a negative trait body image. (...) However, there is no experimental research on veiled Muslim women’s state body image. Therefore, the current study experimentally investigated whether the body satisfaction of veiled Muslim women (n = 66) decreased after exposure to thin media images compared to pictures of furniture as a control condition. Christian women (n = 90) and atheist women (n = 74) were included as control groups, and participants were randomly assigned to the two conditions. Prior to the experimental session, participants’ trait body image was assessed using an online questionnaire comprising questions about body satisfaction, thin-ideal internalization, pressure to be thin, and physical appearance comparisons. The results showed that body satisfaction decreased in the experimental condition and not in the control condition, but no significant differences in pre-post changes were found between the three groups. However, in the experimental condition, veiled Muslim women reported a more positive state body image than did Christian women. Moreover, veiled Muslim women had a more positive trait body image than did Christian women and atheist women. Thus, veiled Muslim women reported lower levels of thin-ideal internalization, pressure to be thin, and physical appearance comparisons than did Christian women and atheist women. As the pre-post changes in body satisfaction did not differ between the three groups, veiling might not buffer against the negative effect of thin media images on state body image. Nevertheless, given the more positive trait body image of veiled Muslim women compared to Christian and atheist women, veiling might positively influence body image in the longer term. (shrink)

How do the organization and presentation of large-scale social media images recondition the process by which visual knowledge, value, and meaning are made in contemporary conditions? Analyzing fundamental elements in the changing syntax of existing visual software ontology—the ways current social media platforms and aggregators organize and categorize social media images—this article relates how visual materials created within social media platforms manifest distinct modes of knowledge production and acquisition. First, I analyze the structure of social (...) class='Hi'>media images within data streams as opposed to previous information organization in a structured database. While the database has no pre-defined notions of time and thus challenges traditional linear forms, the data stream re-emphasizes the linearity of a particular data sequence and activates a set of new relations to contemporary temporalities. Next, I show how these visual arrangements and temporal principles are manifested and discussed in three artworks: “Untitled” by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, The Clock by Christian Marclay, and Last Clock by Jussi Ängeslevä and Ross Cooper. By emphasizing the technical and poetic ways in which social media situate the present as a “thick” historical unit that embodies multiple and synchronous temporalities, this article illuminates some of the conditions, challenges, and tensions between former visual structures and current ones, and unfolds the cultural significations of contemporary big visual data. (shrink)

This article deploys Spinoza’s ethic of joy alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s exposition of micropolitics to expose how fascist desires and affects bloom and circulate through digital communications ecosystems that generally promote a diffusion or decentralisation of power. Beyond the steady barrage of alt-right content conscientiously documented by liberal journalists and progressive watchdogs, a more persistent and widespread fascist impulse permeates the very forms of some of our most banal digitally mediated acts and encounters. Rather than a sole looming authoritarian figurehead, (...) the network itself – particularly with the new image paradigms propelled by apps such as Instagram and TikTok – has become the rallying point for the circulation of fascistic affects, burnished through the art and ethos of following: of rules, routines, protocols, accounts. I contend that a joyful passion accompanies much of this everyday experience of keeping up with one’s feeds, engaging the platforms, participating in the spectacles. This is what Sontag, interrogating the appeal of the Third Reich, calls the ‘joy of followers’, a joy in fascist belonging, which is to suggest that fascist movements thrive not only on the circulation of negative affects like hatred and fear, but also on the profusion of pleasure and affiliation. Deleuze’s Spinoza, resolutely anti-fascist, helps us parse this situation as it plays out in the social media sphere. Spinoza offers a bipartite conceptualisation of joy that allows us to diagnose the pleasures particular to fascist belonging and network belonging alike as passive, partial and indirect. Ultimately, what we today share with historical fascisms is a ubiquitous aesthetic that merges art with life and bodies with information, and a corresponding ethos that cultivates conformism, barbarises critical thought and redirects joyful impulses into reactionary social forms. As fascistic power relations spread anew through digital cultures’ newly evolving modes of visuality, hapticity, vibration and expression, one can observe something of what Deleuze calls ‘sad joy’, a sort of joy rooted in conquest and domination. The aim of this article is to root out such sad joys, to appreciate their appeal, and ultimately to reject them in all their various forms. (shrink)

Art history on the edge : iconology, media, and visual culture -- Four fundamental concepts of image science -- Image science -- Image X text -- Realism and the digital image -- Migrating images : totemism, fetishism, idolatry -- The future of the image : Rancière's road not taken -- World pictures : globalization and visual culture -- Media aesthetics -- There are no visual media -- Back to the drawing board : (...) architecture, sculpture, and the digital image -- Foundational sites and occupied spaces -- Border wars : translation and convergence in politics and media -- Art X environment -- The historical uncanny : phantoms, doubles, and repetition in the war on terror -- The spectacle today : a response to retort -- Coda : for a sweet science of images. (shrink)

Images have always stirred ambivalent reactions. Yet whether eliciting fascinated gazes or iconoclastic repulsion from their beholders, they have hardly ever been seen as true sources of knowledge. They were long viewed as mere appearances, placeholders for the things themselves or deceptive illusions. Today, the traditional critique of the spectacle has given way to an unconditional embrace of the visual. However, we still lack a persuasive theoretical account of how images work. -/- Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes (...) toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy, developing a novel genealogy of both visual studies and the concept of the medium. Alloa reconstructs the earliest Western media theory—Aristotle’s concept of the diaphanous milieu of vision—and the significance of its subsequent erasure in the history of science. Ultimately, he argues for a historically informed phenomenology of images and visual media that explains why images are not simply referential depictions, windows onto the world. Instead, images constantly reactivate the power of appearing. As media of visualization, they allow things to appear that could not be visible except in and through these very material devices. (shrink)

The media are inextricable from controversy yet "controversy" is an under-theorized term in studies of the media, even though controversies over specific images, from "video nasties" to snapshots from Abu Ghraib, have structured our understanding of the media's power, seductiveness and dangers. This collection offers a series of case studies of recent media controversies and draws on new perspectives in cultural studies to consider a wide variety of types of image, including newspaper cartoons, advertising and (...) fashion photography, music videos, photojournalism, news media, art works, hardcore porn film, anime, horror and exploitation movies, video games, and YouTube reaction videos. In the current climate when images appear to be increasingly controversial, it is important that media controversies are not made the excuse for greater censorship and the demonization of "dangerous" images and the audiences that consume them. The case studies in this book suggest how we might achieve a more subtle understanding of controversial images and negotiate the difficult terrain of the new media landscape. (shrink)

Media. Mediality. Image. Media-Philosophical Investigation in the Image-Research. The concept of the media has been redefined many times; the medial interpretation of postmediality is only a critique of existing media-approaches and actuality. The concept of media is hardly going to disappear, its use has become increasingly popular, and the range of interpretation has become wider, the Media Studies brings together more and more sciences; it is not a limit science, but a cumulative (...) science. In W. J.T. Mitchell’s approach, the media is more than a medium, the media is a relation, there is no pure media, and all media are mixed. Breaking down the idea of the mixed media, we could make parallels/contrasts between the concept of total mediality and the concept of postmediality. Postmediality sees a way in the passing by overtaking of the concept of media (Manovich) in aesthetics, visual theory, art theory, media theory, but perhaps most of all the media concept should be sought as it is, just a different type of media use which has become commonplace in the digital-galaxy. Totalmediality is trying to point out the use of new media, and beyond this to the open media borders, overlappings, while the media is not just carrier material but also form. The study treats totalmediality as theoretical possibility for overcoming postmediality in Mitchell’s interpretation of media and emphasizing the dominance of visuality in the media-applications. (shrink)

Extensive social media usage causes psychological dependence and impacts people’s self-evaluations. It is vital to seek possible buffers to social media addiction’s detrimental effect on self-esteem and body image. Poland has one of the highest scores on problematic social media usage. Past studies pointed to narcissism and self-compassion as possible mediators of such effects. The present study aimed to explore Polish individuals’ (N=527) social media usage habits. We hypothesised gender differences and social media addiction (...) predictive effect on self-evaluations (self- esteem, body image), with narcissism and self-compassion as mediators of such relationships. The results revealed that only visual media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok) had a negative effect on self-evaluations and that women reported more social media addiction and decreased self-esteem, self-compassion and body image. Social media addiction was negatively predicting body image for both genders and self-esteem for women but not for men, with self-compassion and narcissism mediating such relationships. (shrink)

Introduction. Political propaganda is an integral part of the modern sphere of communication, within which political actors broadcast their interpretation of reality and influence the public masses. The image of the enemy explains in the most accessible way who “WE” are and what is important for a particular actor, as well as - who “THEY” are and what they are dangerous of. At the same time, there is no unity in interpreting the concept of “enemy” in political discourse. Representations (...) of it can be institutionalized or exist outside the institutional field and be broadcast by mass communication media (MCM). In this regard, it is reasonable to distinguish two major directions of propaganda: globalist and anti-globalist. The purpose of the study. In this article on the basis of discourse analysis and In this article the image of the enemy in the modern discourse of international political propaganda, its types and plot directions formed in the media space are investigated on the basis of discourse analysis and structural-functional analysis. Scientific novelty of the research. The article summarizes the propaganda characteristics of the enemy image in globalist and anti-globalist political discourse. Within the framework of globalist propaganda the propensity to construct the enemy image in the media space by giving subjectivity to inanimate phenomena and events after declaring them an enemy is revealed. In this case, along with the state, as the main subject of political propaganda, there are also non-governmental organizations and foundations that create and broadcast their image of the enemy, contributing to its subsequent institutionalization. Within the framework of antiglobalist propaganda, only the state is the subject that creates and institutionalizes the image of the enemy. All other actors only pick up or refute this discourse. Results. The article proposes an approach to analyzing the enemy image in globalist and antiglobalist propaganda discourse and the tools of its formation. Conclusions. The article considers globalist and anti-globalist directions of enemy image formation in mass-media propaganda discourse. The significance of the enemy image in political communication for adherents of any political views is revealed. A number of differences are fixed. Within the framework of the anti-globalist approach the discursive construct of the enemy image is institutionalized and broadcast at the level of the state. Supporters of the anti-globalist approach broadcast their discourse based on doctrines, strategies and laws fixed by the state. Within the framework of the globalist approach, the enemy image is formed on the basis of subjectification under the influence of public opinion with the subsequent institutionalization of the “new normal” mainly through mass culture and civil disobedience. (shrink)

Nursing has evolved, yet media representation has arguably failed to keep up. This work explores why representation has been slow in accurately depicting nurses' responsibilities, impacts on public perceptions and professional identity. A critical realist review was employed as this method enables in-depth exploration into why something exists. A multidisciplinary approach was adopted, drawing from feminist, psychological and sociological theories to provide insightful understanding and recommendations. One main feminist lens has been implemented, using Laura Mulvey’s ‘Male-Gaze’ framework for content (...) analysis of three nurse-related advertisements to explore how the profession's female status influences representation, public perception and how this might impact nursing. Nurse representation has important real-world consequences. It is essential to improve unnecessary negative portrayals and contest ingrained stereotypes as there are costs to public opinion and nursing's self-identity. Nursing's female status has an impact within a male-dominated media industry, with a leisurely approach adopted toward changing representation. Media images become societally ingrained, this reiterates the significance of accurate/positive depictions. Social media is an instant method of communication with the public to combat stereotypes and maintain engagement to provide better understanding of what nurses do. (shrink)

As gene editing technologies such as CRISPR have become increasingly prominent, so have media portrayals of them. With this in mind, the present study builds on theoretical accounts of framing effects, cultivation effects, and genre-specific viewing effects to examine how different forms of media use predict attitudes toward applications of gene editing. Specifically, the study tests how news use, overall television viewing, and science fiction viewing are related to such attitudes. The analyses draw on original data from two (...) surveys of the U.S. public, one conducted in 2020 and the other in 2021. The results from both surveys indicate that news use and overall television viewing predict support for uses of gene editing, whereas science fiction viewing is not significantly related to opinion. The findings suggest that media frames and images may carry implications for the trajectory of public opinion about gene editing technologies and, ultimately, the social context for their development and adoption. (shrink)

This study takes a systemic functional multimodal social semiotic approach to the analysis and discussion of image and text relations in two sets of data. First, patterns of contextualisation of images and text in the online magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah produced by the Islamic extremist organisation which refers to itself as Islamic State are examined. The second data set consists of a sample of texts from Western online news and blog sites which include recontextualisations of images found in the (...) first data set. A sample of examples of the use and re-use of images is discussed in order to identify patterns of similarity and difference when images and text are recontextualised. It is argued that the ISIS material tends to foreground the interpersonal metafunction in combination with the textual metafunction, while the other data set tends to foreground the ideational metafunction. These inferences indicate that further exploration of a larger data set is worth pursuing. Such studies would provide deeper insights helping to distinguish between online material which supports terrorism and that which opposes it, as well as facilitating the further development of multimodal social semiotic approaches to image and text relations. (shrink)

디지털 매체는 인간의 존재 방식, 사유 방식 그리고 소통방식에 변화를 가져왔다. 그뿐만 아니라, 문화예술에도 큰 변화를 가져왔다. 사실 매체와 예술은 분리 불가능하다. 예술은 무엇인가를 외부로 표현해야만 존재할 수 있고, 표현하기 위해서는 ‘도구’가 필요하기 때문이다. 그러므로 예술은 새로운 기술적 장치를 표현의 도구로 적극 사용했다. 그러나 점차 예술 생산에서 매체의 비중이 커지면서, 매체예술이 등장하게 되었다. 최초의 매체 예술은 사진이다. 사진이 이미지의 기술적 복제와 재생산을 가져왔다면, 디지털 매체는 이미지의 변형을 가져왔다. 디지털 매체 시대에서는 원본성과 무관한 이미지들이 등장하기도 하고, 또 이미지의 변형이 자유롭게 이루어진다. (...) 그뿐만 아니라, 이미지와 다른 장르의 예술이 혼종화 형태로 자유롭게 이루어진다. 이 글에서는 이러한 변화는 중심으로 매체와 이미지의 상관관계를 분석하고, 디지털 매체 시대에서의 이미지를 둘러싼 논쟁의 문제점들에 대해 비판하고자 한다. 그다음 벤야민과 플루서의 이론을 중심으로 디지털 이미지의 기능과 가치에 대해서 전망하려고 한다. (shrink)

Illustrated by critically examining a range of architectural journalism, from an article by artist Paul Nash in 'The Architectural Review', 1940, to an early project by contemporary French architects Lacaton et Vassal published in the journal '2G' in 2001, to recent photography by Hisao Suzuki published in the journal 'El Croquis', this book brings a radical and detailed analysis of the architectural media. It addresses issues of architectural criticism, architectural photography and the role of journal editors, and argues that (...) the architectural media is a site of contestation and ambiguity regarding the role of critical and speculative thinking. The book highlights moments where a different type of critical voice emerges within the architectural media, indicating the possibility of a more progressive engagement with the media as a platform for critical thinking about architecture. 0The study is underpinned by theory about utopian thinking/discourse, primarily from the work of the French semiotician and art theorist Louis Marin and the American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson. Through this, it builds a fresh theoretical approach to the architectural media and begins to reveal a hitherto unexplored dimension of ‘latent’ or ‘unconscious’ discourse within the media portrait of architecture. Following Jameson’s charting of the role of the utopian imagination in the modern and post-modern periods, the book suggests that genuine utopian thinking has undergone comprehensive suppression in our current times and that the task of theory is to now to detect its presence and explore its meaning within new forms and sites of cultural production. (shrink)

The study, conducted in March 2022, involved the analysis of the content in several social media chats and groups; the participants of those chats live in the same place and therefore have a common experience of the space. The study was based on the hypothesis of a direct connection between the mental map (a system of individual ideas about space), the cultural reputation of topoi, and urban trauma, embodied in the unease infrastructure. The problem of assessing the significance of (...) a place was solved by means of folklore toponymies – the mechanism of renaming, which indicates the degree of awareness about a specific place and defines its location on the mental map as well as ascribes a certain status to it. These statuses demonstrate the degree of significance of a place for a certain subject and form a kind of hierarchy, a system of topographical preferences. Thanks to online communication, people can not only transmit information much faster than the traditional forms of folklore dissemination allow, but also broadcast personal attitudes, conveying them as a bundle of meanings (for example, while inventing new toponyms). Therefore, one of the objectives of the study was to identify established folklore toponyms in online communication: they serve as markers of attitudes, reputation, and significance; we also try to catalogue attempts to “rename” different places. Another task was to find the symptoms of such anxiety in online communication. (shrink)

Although scholars continue to debate the influence of social media on body image, increased social media use, especially engaging in appearance-related behaviors may be a potential risk factor for body dissatisfaction in adolescents. Little research has investigated how adolescents process appearance-related content and the potential strategies they use to protect body image perceptions on social media. To investigate coping strategies used by adolescents, four qualitative focus groups were conducted with 29 adolescents aged 15–16 years in (...) mixed-gender Irish secondary schools. Thematic analysis revealed that adolescents employed many different behavioral strategies such as avoiding negative content and selecting positive content. Cognitive processing strategies such as critically evaluating body-related content, psychologically distancing from and positively reframing challenging content were also used, although less frequently. Boys appeared to exhibit greater positive agency over their bodies and social media use and tended to use more active coping styles than girls. Efforts to promote body image on social media such as body positive pages and exposing artificial social media content were considered limited in their effectiveness. (shrink)

This study examined more than 2,500 war images from U.S. television news, newspapers, news magazines, and online news sites during the first five weeks of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and found that only 10% showed injury or death. The paper analyzes which media platforms were most willing to show casualties and offers insights on when journalists should use gruesome war images or keep them secret.

Because the traditional social media fuzzy static image interactive three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction method has the problem of poor reconstruction completeness and long reconstruction time, the social media fuzzy static image interactive 3D reconstruction method is proposed. For preprocessing the fuzzy static image of social media, the Harris corner detection method is used to extract the feature points of the preprocessed fuzzy static image of social media. According to the extraction results, the parameter (...) estimation algorithm of contrast divergence is used to learn the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) network model, and the RBM network model is divided into input, output, and hidden layers. By combining the RBM-based joint dictionary learning method and a sparse representation model, an interactive 3D reconstruction of fuzzy static images in social media is achieved. Experimental results based on the CAD software show that the proposed method has a reconstruction completeness of above 95% and the reconstruction time is less than 15 s, improving the completeness and efficiency of the reconstruction, effectively reconstructing the fuzzy static images in social media, and increasing the sense of reality of social media images. (shrink)

This study investigates how patterns of media use and exposure to media messages are related to attitudes about artificial intelligence (AI) image generators. In doing so, it builds on theoretical accounts of media framing and public opinion about science and technology topics, including AI. The analyses draw on data from a survey of the US public (N = 1,035) that included an experimental manipulation of exposure to tweets framing AI image generators in terms of real (...) art, artists’ concerns, artists’ outrage, or competing interpretations. The results show that technology news use and science fiction viewing predicted support for AI art but also predicted belief that AI image generators will take jobs and steal art styles from human artists. In addition, the experimental results demonstrate that exposure to specific media messages can influence these responses. The findings carry implications for understanding the future adoption, use, and regulation of AI image generators. (shrink)

As a conceptual approach in art practice, the female body has represented both a cultural barrier and a source of inspiration throughout art history. The adoption of the female body as an art theme is prevalent across many different artistic movements, using varying conceptual approaches. Women struggle against paradigms of inferiority to this day, though their individual cultural identity varies according to their society’s beliefs and customs – for example, many contemporary Middle Eastern cultures and customs are based on a (...) patriarchal past, when men wielded power over women. Women all over the world experience subjugation to varying degrees in the fields of employment, education, sexuality and reproductive choice. The female body in Middle Eastern societies is a red line that artists are not allowed to cross. Though many Middle Eastern civilizations have dealt freely with the female body, as can be seen in the paintings and sculptures of ancient Egypt, many social and religious factors made the female body taboo in most Middle Eastern cultures. However, on close scrutiny of modern art history in Middle Eastern and Islamic countries, we can identify outstandingly courageous female artists who succeeded in breaking the rules. They chose to express themselves through their own own form of art as an expression of freedom. They chose to use their own bodies as an art medium, which made them pioneers in their countries, and many female artists followed their example. Media art has flourished in Arab countries since the 1990s, especially in Egypt. Many of these female artists distinguished themselves as pioneers, aligning themselves with new art forms and challenging the prevailing stereotypical notion of the female artist at that time. This new mode of female self-expression and identity has developed over time and remains an ongoing process in the twenty-first century. This article considers how Middle Eastern female media artists have struggled to transform stereotypes of women by using their own bodies as an artistic element, and how they have expressed the concept of freedom through their self-body image. (shrink)

It has become a commonplace that "images" were central to the twentieth century and that their role will be even more powerful in the twenty-first. But what is an image and what can an image be? _Releasing the Image_ understands images as something beyond mere representations of things. Releasing images from that function, it shows them to be self-referential and self-generative, and in this way capable of producing forms of engagement beyond spectatorship and subjectivity. This understanding of images (...) owes much to phenomenology—the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—and to Gilles Deleuze's post-phenomenological work. The essays included here cover historical periods from the Romantic era to the present and address a range of topics, from Cézanne's painting, to images in poetry, to contemporary audiovisual art. They reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of the project of releasing images and provoke new ways of engaging with embodiment, agency, history, and technology. (shrink)

Propaganda in all its forms is the culture of a mass society. The media transmits propaganda to form public opinion and recreate the human being. Reversing the Western ideal of a rational and free individual, the media creates a childish conformist ensconced in the peer group, who acts unconsciously.

The following paper presents a reflection on the violence of images understood as the “power” that certain images have in “provoking” what appear to be disproportionate responses on the part of the viewer. In particular, this paper addresses the systematic censorship of images (such as the photographs from David Jay’s work The SCAR Project) in open and highly mediatized societies that advocate and defend freedom of speech. But this requires a new understanding of the image and the working hypothesis (...) of this paper is that we can find resources for this in the work of the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. (shrink)

Moulages are contact media – images made by contagion in the most literal sense: their production relies on a process in which the object to be reproduced is touched by the reproducing material. In the case of dermatological moulages, the plaster touches the infected skin of the sick and, once dried, serves as the negative form for the waxen image of a disease. Focussing on the collection of the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris, the article situates the production of (...) dermatological moulages within the visual culture of 19th-century medicine and raises the question how an ancient technique of image production could become such a prevalent tool for the documentation of skin diseases during a period usually associated with the rise of scientific medicine and a reconsideration of theories of contagion in medical aetiology. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to make a comparative study of China's national images as portrayed in editorials from Chinese and Thai media, specifically focusing on China Daily and the Bangkok Post. The research examines how political, diplomatic, and economic images of China are constructed through intertextuality in these publications. The findings reveal that China Daily frequently cites Chinese government officials, official documents, and neutral international organizations, providing specific data to depict a positive image of China. In (...) contrast, the Bangkok Post often references Western political leaders and anti-China organizations, with questionable sources and a lack of concrete data, projecting a negative image of China. The study concludes by suggesting that the Chinese government should enhance its efforts to share more accurate and detailed information with foreign media to improve its national image. (shrink)

The study will focus on the relationship between the representations of God’s image in the Bible and on film. How is transcendence presented and what is Christology like in film production in the time that is either negligent of the religious and the transcendental or tries to reduce it to a matter of human intellect? How does Christ differ in the films by Pasolini, Zeffirelli and Gibson? Can Jesus Christ the Saviour be replaced by a popular action movie hero? (...) The paper will deal with religion from another perspective, namely, it will try to see whether religion has truly disappeared from the public life as it is sometimes assumed. How were the ideas about God used or misused by some politicians and leaders, such as Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and George W. Bush? What to do if the media enable us to perceive how religion is made political and how politics is made religionist? (shrink)

A book review of Emmanuel Alloa, Looking through Images: A Phenomenology of Visual Media. Translated by Nils F. Schott. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021, xiv + 392 pp. ISBN 9780231187923.

Through a content analysis of print media and a comparison of media images with trends in women's behavior, the authors explore the rhetoric and reality surrounding the exit of college-educated women from the workforce to become full-time mothers, a phenomenon that has been dubbed “opting out.” The major imagery surrounding opting out emphasizes motherhood and family, elites, and choice. A close reading reveals some inconsistencies that counter the prevailing positive depiction. The authors also find that media coverage (...) of opting out appears in leading publications reaching large and diverse audiences. A comparison of articles' themes against actual trends in women's opting-out behavior shows that there is a disjuncture between the two. The authors discuss the implications of these results for the dissemination of a new feminine mystique. (shrink)