Books and chapters by Fredrika Thelandersson
Palgrave MacMillan, 2023
This open access book examines the conversations around gendered mental health in contemporary We... more This open access book examines the conversations around gendered mental health in contemporary Western media culture. While early 21st century-media was marked by a distinct focus on happiness, productivity and success, during the 2010s negative feelings and discussions around mental health have become increasingly common in that same media landscape. This book traces this turn to sadness in women’s media culture and shows that it emerged indirectly as a result of a culture overtly focused on happiness. By tracing the coverage of mental health issues in magazines, among female celebrities, and on social media this book shows how an increasingly intimate media environment has made way for a profitable vulnerability, that takes the shape of marketable and brand-friendly mental illness awareness that strengthens the authenticity of those who embrace it. But at the same time sad girl cultures are proliferating on social media platforms, creating radically honest spaces where those who suffer get support, and more capacious ways of feeling bad are formed.
Using discourse analysis and digital ethnography to study contemporary representations of mental illness and sadness in Western popular media and social media, this book takes a feminist media studies approach to popular discourse, understanding the conversations happening around mental health in these sites to function as scripts for how to think about and experience mental illness and sadness
21st Century Media and Female Mental Health: Profitable Vulnerability and Sad Girl Culture, 2023
This chapter serves as the introduction to 21st Century Media and Female Mental Health: Profitabl... more This chapter serves as the introduction to 21st Century Media and Female Mental Health: Profitable Vulnerability and Sad Girl Culture. As such it describes the prevalence of sadness and mental health awareness in the popular media landscape of the 2020s. I describe the main sites studied—magazines, celebrities, and social media networks—to understand the contemporary discourse around gendered mental health, and the feminist media studies theories I use in my analysis. The chapter also contains a timeline of the emergence of a twenty-first-century sadness, exemplified by the artist Lana del Rey and her employment of a sad aesthetics. I also define my use of the terms neoliberalism, governmentality, biopolitics, postfeminism, and popular feminism, before briefly accounting for feminist approaches to affect theory. The chapter ends with an outline of the other chapters in the book.
21st Century Media and Female Mental Health: Profitable Vulnerability and Sad Girl Culture, Oct 23, 2023
Women’s affective states have a long history of being pathologized under names like neurasthenia,... more Women’s affective states have a long history of being pathologized under names like neurasthenia, hysteria, and schizophrenia. In culture, the sad and mad woman has appeared as various popular figures: the Victorian madwoman, the hysteric, the schizophrenic, and the Prozac-consuming American woman of the 1990s, to name a few. This chapter traces a brief history of how women’s mental health has been pathologized in the American and European West, and accounts for feminist interpretations of these various pathologizations. I hope to show that mental illness diagnoses are neither completely discursive (socially and linguistically constructed) nor fixed neurological truths (biological facts of life that always look the same), but emerge and take shape in a complex interplay between sociocultural discourses and an ever-developing medical science.
21st Century Media and Female Mental Health: Profitable Vulnerability and Sad Girl Culture, 2023
This chapter looks at conversations around depression and anxiety in the online archives of Cosmo... more This chapter looks at conversations around depression and anxiety in the online archives of Cosmopolitan (US) and Teen Vogue. I examine the different orientations of these magazines when it comes to mental health by discussing their respective styles, tone, narratives, mode of address, and types of pedagogy and support around these issues. While Cosmopolitan tended to follow a script for postfeminist media—full of contradictions, covering serious topics in a tongue-in-cheek way that undermined any gravity, Teen Vogue offered a nuanced portrayal of mental illness that incited its readers to a more critical and engaged interpretation of dominant mental health paradigms. In this sense Cosmo provides an example of profitable vulnerability in that it aligns itself with the trendy themes of depression, anxiety, and other diagnoses, while maintaining a comfortable distance that avoids striking a too somber or heavy tone. Teen Vogue, on the other hand, does offer more spacious definitions of mental illness that does not shy away from difficult conversations. With their focus on support and their providing of resources, they are more aligned with the critical sad girl culture found on social media.
21st Century Media and Female Mental Health: Profitable Vulnerability and Sad Girl Culture, Oct 23, 2023
Celebrities are an important part of the pop cultural landscape and the ways they approach mental... more Celebrities are an important part of the pop cultural landscape and the ways they approach mental health function as models for how to think about such issues in culture at large. This chapter explores how mental illness has been talked about in celebrity discourse during the 2010s. I delineate the shift in celebrity media from outside speculation about what ailments a star might suffer from to a climate where celebrities themselves speak firsthand about their painful experiences. Part of this was a changing media landscape broaching increasingly intimate topics as authenticity has become one of the most valued aspects of celebrity branding. The primary focus is on the celebrity health narratives of Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez, but I also discuss Lana del Rey, Britney Spears, and the spate of “trainwreck”- celebrity coverage of 2007-2008. The analysis of these health narratives shows how a profitable vulnerability and supportive conversations around mental distress exist in tension with each other in the world of celebrity media.
21st Century Media and Female Mental Health: Profitable Vulnerability and Sad Girl Culture, Oct 23, 2023
This chapter turns to social media platforms and looks at the figure of the sad girl as she emerg... more This chapter turns to social media platforms and looks at the figure of the sad girl as she emerged online as an indirect response to a popular culture overtly focused on happiness. It discusses how she appeared on primarily Tumblr and Instagram, exploring the general sad girl discourses on these platforms as well as some examples that received extra attention. These include the artist Audrey Wollen and her sad girl theory, the girl group Sad Girls Y Qué, the Instagram club Sad Girls Club, the social media brand My Therapist Says, and prominent Instagram accounts. Here I look at the critical and acritical tendencies within the figure, acknowledging both the potentially subversive aspects of the activist-oriented sad girls and the more commercialized versions of popular sad girls. This chapter explores how Tumblr sad girls might be seen as resting in sadness; how relatability is employed as a political strategy by some Instagram sad girls; the ambivalence of normalization; and the limits of using commercial social media platforms for meaningful social action.
Articles by Fredrika Thelandersson
Karen Ross (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, 2020
This entry reviews the ways in which “traditional” intimacy concerning sex and relationships have... more This entry reviews the ways in which “traditional” intimacy concerning sex and relationships have been transformed by communication technologies, as well as how these technologies have made a range of other connections “intimate.” It does so by discussing three different kinds of mediated intimacy as it is expressed in the Global North. The first meaning refers to work on the way in which discourses of sex and relationship advice are mediated in women's magazines and other kinds of self-help literature. This concerns a more traditional understanding of intimacy as relating to one-on-one romantic relationships that involve sex and the family and explores how these relationships are portrayed in various media sites. The second meaning of mediated intimacy refers to intimacy and social media, and concerns how digital communication technologies have transformed personal relationships and added a level of intimacy to a wide range of relationships. Most of our friendships are now maintained through personalized networked publics on various social media platforms, in which we display intimate connections in front of imagined audiences. The last definition of mediated intimacy pertains to the way celebrities (self-made microcelebrities or conventionally famous people) use social media to create intimate relationships with fans. Communication technologies have transformed the relation between celebrity and audience to make almost all contemporary interactions between famous person and fan inflected by intimacy.
Karen Ross (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, 2020
When the television show Girls premiered in 2012 it reverberated far and wide in the media landsc... more When the television show Girls premiered in 2012 it reverberated far and wide in the media landscape of the Global North. It was equally celebrated for its body positive message and critiqued for its whiteness and privileged blindspots. The show's creator and star, Lena Dunham, became an essential part of its paratext, her persona as hotly contested as the show itself. Often compared to the “ur-postfeminist” text Sex and the City, Girls differs starkly from its predecessors in its focus on failure and disappointment rather than empowerment and choice. A precarious job market and insecure future prospects are obvious backdrops for the stories being told, which is one reason why the series seemed to resonate so well with young millennials coming of age in a socioeconomic climate heavily affected by the financial crash of 2008. Girls received plenty of attention for its portrayals of sex, which were often uncomfortable and sometimes disturbing. Dunham was often at the center of controversy because of her willingness to put her own “nonconventional” body unclothed in front of the camera. The show also received a significant amount of critique for its lack of racial and ethnic diversity, which Dunham and her collaborators countered in flustered and sometimes offensive ways. This, coupled with Dunham's presence as creator and as a “new” kind of millennial feminist, contributed to consistent media attention being given to the show throughout its six season run.
This paper examines virtual manifestations of " sad girls " on the media platform Tumblr. Here us... more This paper examines virtual manifestations of " sad girls " on the media platform Tumblr. Here users write about their struggles with mental illness, revealing a set of shared experiences that encompass both psyche and body. Predominant narratives of what it means to be mentally ill are questioned, and alternative con-ceptualizations of the psyche are introduced. I argue that the sad girls legitimize each other's experiences of mental illness while also romanticizing melancholic sadness. I use the concept of sadness as referring to a multifaceted affect that includes clinical diagnoses like depression as well as general sad sentiments. By looking at the way content is circulated in a meme-tic fashion among the sad girls on Tumblr, I discuss how a shared discourse around sadness is created. I suggest that this collective discourse is an example of what Lisa Blackman calls " distributed forms of perception, " which can be seen " in social media practices that allow traces and fragments to become linked together to assume a collective authorial voice " (2015, p. 37). I ask if the sad girl represents a new kind of sadness that challenge the norms around mental illness which tend to conceive it as something to be immediately cured. This question is examined by mapping out various ways of conceptualizing and analyzing sadness. Finally, I discuss the productive possibilities of resting in sadness by examining the sad girls' potential resistance to neoliberal demands for self-governance.
Papers by Fredrika Thelandersson
Springer eBooks, Oct 23, 2022
As instructive texts for how to live, women's magazines have been of interest to feminist scholar... more As instructive texts for how to live, women's magazines have been of interest to feminist scholars as reproducers of social norms and structures. The emergence of digital media has significantly weakened the hold of magazines on popular women's discourse, leading to declining revenues as advertisers and readers move to free online platforms. 1 But as publications with large corporations behind them, they are still worthy of study as representatives of traditional advice media that espouse scripts for how to approach mental health. This chapter thus looks at conversations around depression and anxiety in the online archives of Cosmopolitan (US) and Teen Vogue, based primarily on material published from 2008-2018. I examine the different orientations of these magazines when it comes to mental health by discussing their respective styles, tone, narratives, mode of address, and types of pedagogy and support around these issues. Angela McRobbie's study of the girls' magazine Jackie was one of the first and most influential feminist analyses of this media genre. 2 McRobbie argues that publications in this genre "define and shape the woman's world, spanning every stage from early childhood to old age [where] the exact nature of the woman's role is spelt out in detail, according to her age and status." 3 One aspect of this guidance was the supportive function provided by these magazines, often in the form of advice columns where experts answered questions about everything from relationships to medical problems. 4
Springer eBooks, 2023
This open access book examines the conversations around gendered mental health in contemporary We... more This open access book examines the conversations around gendered mental health in contemporary Western media culture. While early 21st century-media was marked by a distinct focus on happiness, productivity and success, during the 2010s negative feelings and discussions around mental health have become increasingly common in that same media landscape. This book traces this turn to sadness in women’s media culture and shows that it emerged indirectly as a result of a culture overtly focused on happiness. By tracing the coverage of mental health issues in magazines, among female celebrities, and on social media this book shows how an increasingly intimate media environment has made way for a profitable vulnerability, that takes the shape of marketable and brand-friendly mental illness awareness that strengthens the authenticity of those who embrace it. But at the same time sad girl cultures are proliferating on social media platforms, creating radically honest spaces where those who suffer get support, and more capacious ways of feeling bad are formed. Using discourse analysis and digital ethnography to study contemporary representations of mental illness and sadness in Western popular media and social media, this book takes a feminist media studies approach to popular discourse, understanding the conversations happening around mental health in these sites to function as scripts for how to think about and experience mental illness and sadness
Tumblr Feminism: Third-wave Subjectivities in Practice For many feminist scholars, the last two d... more Tumblr Feminism: Third-wave Subjectivities in Practice For many feminist scholars, the last two decades of mainstream discourse has been defined by postfeminism -the general acceptance of feminism as something already achieved and therefore no longer needed. Yet the presence of young feminists on Tumblr, raised in theories of gender performativity and intersectionality, is solid proof of a still relevant and active feminist discourse. One of the loudest subgroups on blogging and social networking site Tumblr is the enclave of self-identified feminists whose political and theoretical discussions dominate a large chunk of the Tumblr cloud. This paper explores how feminist online identities created on Tumblr are situated in the intersection of post-feminist and third-wave discourses, and what the technological affordances of new media can contribute to contemporary feminist practice. How does Tumblr function as a site for radical identity practices with the aim of subverting heteronormative, sexist, racist and cisgendered conformities? I propose Tumblr as a site for feminist "world building" (Berlant and Warner, 1995), 1 that on the one hand provides a space safe from harassment and discrimination for those who are at risk of it in their everyday surroundings; and on the other hand, it is a place for nuanced political discussion among the already politically engaged.
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Books and chapters by Fredrika Thelandersson
Using discourse analysis and digital ethnography to study contemporary representations of mental illness and sadness in Western popular media and social media, this book takes a feminist media studies approach to popular discourse, understanding the conversations happening around mental health in these sites to function as scripts for how to think about and experience mental illness and sadness
Articles by Fredrika Thelandersson
Papers by Fredrika Thelandersson
Using discourse analysis and digital ethnography to study contemporary representations of mental illness and sadness in Western popular media and social media, this book takes a feminist media studies approach to popular discourse, understanding the conversations happening around mental health in these sites to function as scripts for how to think about and experience mental illness and sadness