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Browsing Research and publications by Author "Coulter, Natalie"
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Item Open Access “Frappés, friends, and fun”: Affective labor and the cultural industry of girlhood(Sage Journals, 2018-10) Coulter, NatalieIn the cultural industries of girlhood, tween girls are almost always shown to be having fun. This article focuses mainly on tween retailer Justice, its corporate communications materials, the images in its online retail spaces, and the slogans on the T-shirts that the company sells. I argue that fun is a commercial epistemology that reaffirms the boundaries between the separate market segments of youth and legitimates market incursions into girlhood. As a result, fun becomes a political action that functions as a means to depoliticize girlhood. This article builds upon Sara Ahmed’s work on the happy housewife as a fantasy figure that obscures the unequal divisions of labor in patriarchal capitalism in its assertion that the tween girl is a fantasy figure of the 21st century consumer culture whose fun is a form of commodified, depoliticized girl-power that reifies girls as productive economic subjects.Item Open Access Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Mythology of DWYL in the Neoliberal Marketplace of Academic Labour(ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2014-12-01) Coulter, NatalieItem Open Access “Missed Opportunity”: The Oversight of Canadian Children’s Media(Canadian Journal of Communication, 2016-02-16) Coulter, NatalieCanadian communication studies have largely ignored Canadian children’s media as a field of study. The children’s cultural industries in Canada are rich and diverse. This article argues that these cultural industries need to be constitutively integrated into scholarship on the Canadian mediascape, as does the presence of young people as active participants in Canadian media culture. Focusing primarily on English-language television to illustrate this point, the article first outlines the long history of children’s media production in Canada, then discusses reasons why such scholarship is missing from the field, and concludes by outlining the impacts of this oversight.Item Open Access Selling the Male Consumer the Playboy Way(Popular Communication, 2014-08-06) Coulter, NatalieUnder the direction of Hugh Hefner, Playboy magazine’s early success was predicated upon the unique marketing strategies of forging the persona of an idealized, imaginary reader called the playboy, with particular lifestyles and taste preferences. At the same time, it sold the value of men’s participation in the hedonistic pleasures of accessible connoisseurship of the postwar marketplace by aligning consumer desires with sexual desires as innate components of modern masculinity. The purpose of this article is to illustrate how this persona is visually and discursively articulated throughout the entire Playboy empire, from the content of the magazines including the dewy centerfolds and the What Sort of Man Reads Playboy? campaigns to the brand’s clubs and television shows. The persona undertook the dual tasks of attracting a lucrative male readership and its corresponding advertisers, while simultaneously redefining male consumer culture.Item Open Access Separate Playgrounds: Surveying the Fields of Girls’ Media Studies and Boyhood Studies(Canadian Journal of Communication, 2012-07-01) Coulter, Natalie