Department of Communication Studies
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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 Restricted Woke girls: from The Girl’s Realm to Teen Vogue(Taylor & Francis, 2020) Coulter, Natalie; Moruzi, KristineThe article places the girls’ magazine Teen Vogue within the broader history of girls print culture, by reading it in relation to the Victorian girls’ magazine Girl’s Realm. These two periodicals represent two moments in the history of print culture, the rise of magazines in the late 19th century, bookended by what appears to the end of print culture in the early 21st century. During these moments, both magazines make and remake the ideal girl through the redefinition and contestation of narrow models of girlhood that reimagine the implied girl reader as invested with political agency. Both of these magazines reimagine the female reader as engaged with the social and cultural politics of their respective eras. The political legacies of these two magazines open up new possibilities for scholars of girls’ media studies to rethink the historical trajectories of feminist girls’ cultures and the relevance of the girls’ periodical press in defining politically activist girl readers.Item Open Access Selling the Male Consumer the Playboy Way(Routledge, 2014) 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 From Toddlers to Teens: Colonizing Childhood the Disney Way(University of Winnipeg Centre for Research in Young People's Texts and Culture, 2012) Coulter, NatalieItem Open Access Nickelodeon Nation, by Heather Hendershot (editor)(Canadian Journal of Communication, 2006) Coulter, NatalieItem Open Access Regulating Screens: Issues in Broadcasting and Internet Governance for Children, by André H. Caron and Ronald I. Cohen(Canadian Journal of Communication, 2014) Coulter, NatalieItem Open Access Ontario Boys: Masculinity and the Idea of Boyhood in Postwar Ontario: 1945-1960. By Christopher Greig.(Canadian Committee on Labour History, 2015) Coulter, NatalieItem Open Access More Than a Bargaining Unit: YUFA’s Commitment to Social Unionism(Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, 2015) Erwin, Lorna; Coulter, NatalieItem 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) Coulter, NatalieItem Open Access Locked In: Feminist Perspectives on Surviving on Academic Piecework(New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 2015-03) Coulter, Natalie; Ramirez, HelenWhile increasing media attention is given to examining the status of contract faculty on university campuses there is little note made of the pervasiveness of women in these positions. This paper, by drawing on Marxist and feminist theory ties the gender precarity faced by academic contract female workers to the historical practices of industries to use female labour to reduce labour costs. The textile piece worker system of the 19th century has found a 21st century form represented in the unlikely position of the female academic contract worker. The argument builds on the autoethnographic narratives of two contract women to demonstrate how the university administration’s “economic pressure” justification is an economic myth to occlude the exploitation of female workers.Item Open Access Separate Playgrounds: Surveying the Fields of Girls’ Media Studies and Boyhood Studies(Canadian Journal of Communication, 2012) Coulter, NatalieItem Open Access “Missed Opportunity”: The Oversight of Canadian Children’s Media(Canadian Journal of Communication, 2016) 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 Cultural imperialism of the North? The expansion of the CBC Northern Service and community radio(Intellect, 2011-07) MacLennan, AnneRadio broadcasting spread quickly across southern Canada in the 1920s and 1930s through the licensing of private independent stations, supplemented from 1932 by the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission and by its successor, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, from 1936. Broadcasting in the Canadian North did not follow the same trajectory of development. The North was first served by the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals that operated the Northwest Territories and Yukon Radio System from 1923 until 1959. The northern Canadian radio stations then became part of the CBC. This work explores the resistance to the CBC Northern Broadcasting Plan of 1974, which envisaged a physical expansion of the network. Southern programming was extended to the North; however, indigenous culture and language made local northern programmes more popular. Efforts to reinforce local programming and stations were resisted by the network, while community groups in turn rebuffed the network’s efforts to expand and establish its programming in the North, by persisting in attempts to establish a larger base for community radio.Item Open Access Women, Radio Broadcasting and the Depression: A “Captive” Audience from Household Hints to Story Time and Serials(Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2008) MacLennan, AnneThe image of women radio listeners during the Depression is unduly influenced by contemporary ideas about daytime serial dramas. This distortion must be revisited in light of new evidence uncovered through content analysis of the program schedule and interview research. Interviews reveal that the conception of listening both as an active and a passive activity took time to develop. Conceptions of and forms of listening served to influence program scheduling. The program schedules evolved slowly and content analysis reveals that women’s programming did not fall into an established routine until the latter part of the 1930s.Item Open Access An Exploratory Study of Graduate Student Unions in Canada(Département des relations industrielles de l’Université Laval, 2005) MacLennan, Anne; Zinni, Deborah M.; Singh, ParbudyalGraduate student unions are beginning to attract attention in Canada and the United States. In Canada, unionization on campuses is especially important for organized labour, as union density has dropped below 30 percent for the first time in five decades. Graduate student unionization is also important in the wider context of precarious employment in North America. Despite the decline in overall union density, graduate student unions have continued to grow in the past decade. However, there is a paucity of scholarly research in this area. In this article, we trace the historical origins of graduate student unions in Canada, discuss relevant legal concerns, analyze pertinent collective bargaining and strike issues, and suggest avenues for future research.Item Open Access Charity and Change: Montreal's English Protestant Charity Faces the Crisis of Depression(Urban History Review / Revue d'histoire urbaine, 1987-6) MacLennan, AnneDurant les années trente, tous les organismes charitables tant publics que privés, à travers le Canada, doivent s'adapter aux nouvelles circonstances engendrées par la Dépression. La crise est ressentie de façon particulièrement aiguë par le Montreal Council of Social Agencies, une organisation de la minorité protestante anglophone, dans une ville peu encline à accepter sa part de responsabilité au niveau des services publics. Le Conseil se voit contraint d'assumer le fardeau des services d'assistance destinés aux membres de sa communauté. La Dépression provoque un bouleversement brusque et à long terme des opérations du Conseil l'obligeant ainsi à réévaluer et à réaffirmer son rôle au sein des services sociaux. Par conséquent, le Montreal Council of Social Agencies exerce des pressions sur les autorités municipales, provinciales et fédérales, les incitant à s'impliquer davantage dans l'assistance sociale afin d'alléger les problèmes immédiats et potentiels. Il est important de souligner que durant les années trente, le Montreal Council of Social Agencies s'appuie sur les principes de la Charity Organization Society. Ces principes n 'ont pas fléchi durant cette crise, au contraire ils se sont maintenus et consolidés.Item Open Access Private Broadcasting and the Path to Radio Broadcasting Policy in Canada(Media and Communication, 2018-02-09) MacLennan, AnneThe largely unregulated early years of Canadian radio were vital to development of broadcasting policy. The Report of the Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting in 1929 and American broadcasting both changed the direction of Canadian broadcasting, but were mitigated by the early, largely unregulated years. Broadcasters operated initially as small, independent, and local broadcasters, then, national networks developed in stages during the 1920s and 1930s. The late adoption of radio broadcasting policy to build a national network in Canada allowed other practices to take root in the wake of other examples, in particular, American commercial broadcasting. By 1929 when the Aird Report recommended a national network, the potential impact of the report was shaped by the path of early broadcasting and the shifts forced on Canada by American broadcasting and policy. Eventually Canada forged its own course that pulled in both directions, permitting both private commercial networks and public national networks.