Sarah Casey

Netflix show, Grace and Frankie, is significant in its representation of ageing. While it may appear ground-breaking to see people in their seventies and eighties navigating (re)invention of self and sexuality within mainstream media, upon closer inspection-in particular, Season Four-the inherent contradictions common to postfeminist texts are exposed. Initial offerings from 1 Grace and Frankie extend to positive representations of ageing sexuality, female agency, and self-efficacy; however, these themes are rather negated as the seasons progress. Such incongruities feature notions of what might be considered as effective ageing: a dualism in which ageing femininity is both celebrated and fought; discourses of empowerment via rigorous, yet relatively ineffective, corporeal self-maintenance/somatic discipline; a sexualised 'feminism' which also features the women as variously alone, but dependent upon their ex-husbands, each other, or their children; and a postfeminist 'makeover' paradigm in which the pendulum swings between preservation and restoration, individualism and conformity. Albeit within neoliberal and postfeminist discourses, Grace and Frankie, while flawed, remains an important text in which visibly ageing bodies, ageing sexuality, and non-normative identification are elevated and explored.

On this episode, Kaite is joined by Dr. Sarah Casey, who was awarded a PhD in Media, Communication, and Feminist Cultural Studies from Griffith University (2015). She lectures in Screen Media and Communication at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. Sarah has published in the areas of Media Studies, Feminism, and Celebrity Studies, and she is particularly interested in digital feminist activism, as well as the role of popular media feminist celebrities in campaigns. Sarah is currently finalising a monograph entitled "Heroines'", and is the co-author of Media and Society (with Michael O'Shaughnessy and Jane Stadler). Sarah leads the "Stories of Country Women" project that documents the lived experiences of women in drought-affected regions of outback Australia. Sarah is the Vice-President for the Australian Women's and Gender Studies Association, the peak body for such research in Australia.

The changing role of mainstream media has transformed how feminist issues are disseminated and debated resulting in the number of feminist commentators in the Australian media substantially increasing. This amplification of feminist discourse by certain voices is occurring due to the possibilities for celebritisation generated by online and social media, gendered news and lifestyle commentaries. While this opens up space for greater representation of feminist voices, paradoxically, much of the feminist discourse in the mainstream media problematically reinforces the dominant paradigm rather than challenges it. Mainstream media celebrity feminist can seem unvarying in their homogeneity; their presence is non-threatening, privileged and palatable, and is often connected with a 'feminism-as-a-business model'. In contrast, feminists who are perceived as more difficult or dogmatic as positioned as outliers or unpalatable. In this article, we discuss data collected in 2014 from two breakfast TV panels, The Mixed Grill (Today) and Kochie's Angels (Sunrise) when both offered all female panels, headed by the male hosts of the programs. We also look at the same panels on both programs again in 2016 after they had been renamed as The Grill (Today) and Newsfeed (Sunrise), and had been restructured to include male panelists. In this paper we discuss contemporary celebrity feminism and question if the populist feminisms advocated in the mainstream media can offer opportunities for substantive political change or are devoid of meaningful feminist politics. These questions are explored through the conceptual framework of the unpalatable-palatable which asserts that celebrity feminism is not an uncomplicated or binaristic state but instead reflects a disrupted and disruptive state of flux.

Media and Society explores the relationship between the media, their institutions and the world we live in, examining how they are connected and how society and the media affect each other. The book analyses representations of the world found in films, television, advertisements, news and online to understand the impact of the media in the contemporary world. The sixth edition explores several themes throughout the text, including the contradictory nature of the media and the psychological concerns of the media, to provide clear explanations of complex theories and ideas.