Mediating Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the GenZ Era

This volume explores how so-called digital natives of GenZ use media in the crafting of generational beliefs and representational practices around sex, gender, and sexuality. Through qualitative chapters of critical, ethnographic, discursive, and textual analysis, an international team of authors explore mass media representation; queerness and visibility among the generation; GenZ feminism on social media and reactions to it; how GenZ learns about sexuality through various media; and gender and media effects. While considering global implications, the authors analyze experiences and points of view from various contexts, including Chinese social media, Korean mass- and social-media, Indian movies, Sri Lankan image-based social media, Japanese movies, Turkey and mediated visibility, Norway and online/offline romantic relationships, a UK-based genderqueer gaming celebrity, and multiple topics and contexts within the United States. This accessible and varied volume will appeal to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers interested in social and mass media across a wide range of platforms and practices, digital culture, youth culture and human development, sex education, sex and gender studies, and communication and culture change.

Rachel R. Reynolds is a Professor in the Department of Communication and Graduate Programs in Communication, Culture & and Media at Drexel University in Philadelphia, USA. She works on theories of sexual violence and globalization, including approaches to the political economy of sexual violence as an instrumental element within television production. Dacia Pajé is an Assistant Professor at Providence College, USA. Her research agenda focuses on the televised construction and audience reception of sexual violence and rape culture, with particular attention to crime and legal dramas. Sienna Medina is an independent researcher in the Midwest USA. She researches (anti)feminist discourses in popular culture. Recently, she has focused on depictions and discussions of sexual violence both in mainstream media and pornography. John Gigante is a Ph.D. student at Drexel University, USA, in the Communication, Culture and Media program. His research focuses on media representations of necropolitical domains, with a particular focus on mobility infrastructure.

Prologue: Introducing GenZ Introduction. "Visibility and Inclusiveness around Sex, Gender and Sexuality as Central to GenZ Communities" Part I. Mass Mediating GenZ: Representation in TV and Cinema 1. "We are Glamorous Women of Color Who Deserve a Sexy High School Life!" Reimaging Childhood Through Teen Comedy Television About Sex, Sexuality, and Gender Expression 2. Reclaiming the Witch: Crafting GenZ Affective Structures in Chilling Tales of Sabrina 3. Representations of Transgender Women in the Age of Generation Z: A Cross-Cultural Semiotic Analysis of Bollywood and Japanese Movies 4. "Worthy to be loved": GenMZ's engagement with Autism representation in Extraordinary Attorney Woo Part II: Queering Social Media: Visibility, Platforms and Power from Audience to State 5. Let Us Play: Digital Campaigns toward Inclusion in Youth Sport 6. A Resurrection from the banned cringe social media Queen: Long live Guonfucius through House of Fandom and Prosumption 7. Day 206 of being a girl: Exploring How LGBTQ+ GenZ Influencers on TikTok Communicately Perform Gender Identity and Sexuality 8. Do I Look like a Woman to You?: Twitch, Irony, and the Female-Presenting Breast 9. "Niang Pao" Prohibition: Masculinity, GenZ, and the Regulation in China 10. Turkey's Neoliberal Islamist Policies and the Marginalization of the LGBT Community: Exploring Online Spaces and GenZ Gendered and Sexual Identity Activists Part III. Feminist Subjectivity, Alliances and Backlash 11. How Did He Become a Feminist? The Subjectivation of Young Male Feminists in South Korean 12. "I want to get her too but no one knows that it happened to me": Tattoos of Medusa as a Symbol of Surviving Sexual Violence 13. Sexy Doesn't Equal Sexist: Depicting Women's Intersectional Empowerment on Instagram through the Eyes of GenZ 14. Youth perspectives: An assessment of victim blaming against women and girls in Northern, Sri Lanka Part IV: Sexuality: Information, Education and Disclosure 15. Offline in the closet, online and out, then offline, out and proud: The online/offline-ness of teenagers' queer worldmaking 16. Digitally Performed: Adolescent Gender and Identity Development through Social Media 17. Turning Anxiety into Agency: Sexual Education Experiences and Information-Seeking of GenZ Women Part V: Media Effects, Gender, and Sexual Scripts 18. The Uninhabited Informant: Popular Television and GenZ Sexual Scripts 19. Quantity, Quality and Effects of GenZ era Gender Minority Representations in Social Media Contexts - A Systematic Review Index