Gender and Popular Culture In Turbulent Times

Popular culture occupies a central place in the social construction of gender. From films and television series to music, fashion, and digital entertainment, cultural forms both reflect and actively shape the norms and representations through which gender is understood, performed, and contested. Far from being a mere mirror of social reality, popular culture operates as a productive force — one that legitimizes certain identities while marginalizing others, and that participates in the ongoing negotiation of what it means to be a woman, a man, or a person whose identity escapes binary categorization.

In a context marked by profound political and social turbulence, these dynamics have taken on renewed urgency. Feminist and queer perspectives have gained increasing visibility in mainstream cultural production, yet this progress has remained uneven and contested, raising critical questions about tokenism, co-optation, and the conditions under which marginalized identities gain cultural recognition. At the same time, the platformization of culture and the algorithmic mediation of content have introduced new structural constraints on what stories get told, by whom, and for which audiences — constraints that weigh unevenly on already marginalized voices.

This session invites contributions examining how popular culture produces, challenges, and transforms gender representations across a wide range of cultural forms and national contexts, including intersectional approaches attentive to the interplay of gender with race, class, sexuality, and other axes of social differentiation.