Five authors consider responses to the music video WAP (2020) to argue that refusing ‘objectification’ as an organising concept might open up the analysis of a media text.
Susanna Paasonen
Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland. She is the PI of the research consortium Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture funded by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland and author of Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (2011), (with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light) NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (2019) and (with Jenny Sundén) Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (2020). She serves on the editorial boards of Sexualities, Porn Studies, New Media & Society, Social Media & Society, and International Journal of Cultural Studies.
WHO SUPPORTS US
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey