Doctoral Student Rebecca Wissink

My doctoral research explores the gendered cultural possibilities and nodes of connection between feminism, women’s solo travel, and women's travel media. Over the past decade, there has been an increase in popular media texts centered on women’s solo travel – from Eat, Pray, Love to Wild. Most often, this travel is discursively positioned as empowering for the women protagonist, a source of autonomy, and self-exploration (Hamid et al., 2021). Beyond these popular media texts, women’s solo travel is becoming more prolific, with social media platforms hosting groups dedicated to the phenomenon and women travel influencers producing content documenting their solo journeys. Taken together, I understand these diverse media texts as a genre I call feminized travel media that frames femininity and solo travel as a path to a form of feminist empowerment for women. This project aims to explain and describe the cultural and political significance of feminized travel media as a genre by questioning how solo women travelers make meanings from these prolific media texts, theorizing both as an expression of popular feminism (Banet-Weiser, 2018), a feminism that is widely circulated in media.

My master's research (2021) interrogated the gentrification scenes in the US version of Shameless. By narrating the stories of members of a large, normatively dysfunctional, poor, White family in present-day urban Chicago, Shameless articulates subjective positionalities of the working-poor and barely working-class. In choosing to tell stories from the perspective of economically disadvantaged protagonists, this series diverges from a normative, middle-class televisual representation. The show is also unusual in how it deploys the technical codes of television: Shameless toys with televisual conventions and articulates its own discursive logics about the neighbourhood and class. Further, the show deploys an Us versus Them binary predicated on class unpredictably, that is, this binary does not faithfully adhere to logics that a particular political stance would seem to demand. My key findings are that despite its potentially subversive choice of protagonists and use of storylines that expose some of the causes and consequences of gentrification, Shameless leaves several structural causes under-illuminated. The reasons for this are twofold. First, Shameless’s unreliability as a text compromises its ability to offer a sustained critique of public policy, particularly as it relates to the urban restructuring process of gentrification. Second, Shameless individualizes the gentrifier and focuses on the socio-cultural aspects of the process, thus its narrative logics silence neoliberal capitalism’s role in gentrification.