“Gendered space”: A study of newspaper opinion journalism as emergent and oppositional to the dominant culture in journalism
Article
This paper reviews the literature in academic journals and books and asserts the importance of studying opinion journalism as a genre of emergent and oppositional journalism and a form of public engagement. Using Raymond Williams’s Marxist cultural theory of base and superstructure, this writer takes the perspective that newspaper columns are a genre that contributes to residual and emergent forms of alternative and oppositional culture which counters the texts and values in the dominant culture of journalism. Exercising traditional public scholarship, op-ed writers utilize columns, essays, and other forms of creative nonfiction to address issues that concern women, the working class, and other vulnerable groups that are kept at the periphery of public discourse.
Cruising Through Spaces: Exploring the Mediatization of Gay Cruising in the Philippines
Article
The emergence of new communications technologies has provided a new space for initiating romantic and sexual relationships among gays who perceive social and physical places to be a traditional space that largely promotes connection among heterosexuals. Now, mobile networking applications like Grindr have made it easier for gay men to “cruise” and meet other men, and are seen to lead to the increasing number of sexual partners, being exposed to risks like sexually transmitted infections (STI), among others. Thus this study, framed within the theory of Mediatization – which critically analyzes the dialectic process in which both media and communications on one hand, and culture and society on the other, mutually shape and change each other in an interactional process – explores the question: How have gays’ way of cruising, or the initiation of romantic or sexual relations (among others), in the Philippines been mediatized across history?
