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within these debates, girls’ experiences are under-researched. How do girls themselves experience popular cultural notions of femininity? Moreover, we

will argue that the debate centralized in northern European countries. For example, McRobbie’s argument is intimately tied to political developments in

the U.K. Therefore, in this study, we investigated how girls themselves create and negotiate the meaning of mediated notions of femininity in everyday

life in Italy. Italy knows a different political and social context compared to northern European countries. One marked difference on gender discourses is

the importance of the family and the persistent presence of a sexist imagery on commercialTV and the heated public debates, instigated by the sex scandals

that followed the decline of the Berlusconi government. To answer our questions, we combined in-depth interviews with 32 Italian girls with digital obser‑

vation. All interviewees were between 15 and 19 years of age and lived in the area of Milano. They were selected from different schools to ensure diversity

in socio-economic background. The digital observation was directed (with consent) on the interviewees’activities on the most popular social network sites

(Facebook, Ask.fm, Twitter). A discourse analysis was employed to comprehensively analyse the data from the interviews and digital observations. Results

of the analyses show how girls employ a variety of strategies to negotiate parental discourses on Italian femininity. The mediated nature of SNS is not only

a structure for girls’negotiations, but also an opportunity for resisting the gender discourses constituted within heteronormativity and sexism. Hence, we

develop a critique on the postfeminist positioning of the ‘girl at risk’ versus the ‘empowered girl’, suggesting that the relationship between girls’ agency

(empowered girl) and the media that either structures (girl at risk) should be understood as infinitely dialectic of character.

PP 189

Thinstagramming and Meme Culture: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Pro-Ana Image Sharing Practices on Instagram

D. Ging

Dublin City University, School of Communications, Dublin, Ireland

Since the pro-anorexia phenomenon, also referred to as pro-ana or simply ana, began to emerge on the internet in the early 1990s, there has been a grow‑

ing body of academic work on pro-ana communities online. Underpinned by diverse and often conflicting disciplinary perspectives, most of this work

focuses on websites and blogs. In recent years, however, the pro-ana ‘movement’ has migrated onto social media platforms. When, in 2012, both Tumblr

and Pinterest imposed a ban to restrict pro-ana sharing, many pro-anas turned their attention to Instagram, a strongly visual application that was originally

designed for editing and sharing photos. There is, however, a dearth of research, particularly gender-aware research, on pro-ana practices and discourses in

the context of newer mobile social platforms such as Instagram. Using a dataset of 7,560 images, this study employs qualitative content analysis to explore

pro-anorexia and 'thinspiration' image sharing practices on Instagram. It asks whether the shift from websites and blogs to this social media platform

has entailed significant changes in terms of how the pro-ana community communicates and discursively constructs itself. It asks, in particular, what role

memes and the memetic nature of image sharing play in the construction of pro-ana identity, as well as how the peripherally governed, particpatory nature

of Instagram impacts upon pro-ana communicative practices. The vast majority (90–95%) of the sufferers of anorexia and bulimia are women (Boero and

Pascoe, 2012), and this analysis is theoretically underpinned by a feminist perspective, which takes into account the gender-specific experiences of teenage

girls.The study found that, while there is considerable continuity with the content shared on older forums, new Instagram-specific trends and practices have

emerged – in particular in relation to the meme format - that are worthy of feminist scholarly attention.

PP 190

Contesting Sexism with Humorous Memes: Visual Body Representations in #distractinglysexy

C. Brantner

, K. Lobinger

, M. Stehling

TU Dresden, Institute of Media and Communication, Dresden, Germany

USI - Università della Svizzera italiana, Institute for Communication Technologies, Lugano, Italy

University of Tuebingen, Institute of Media Studies, Tuebingen, Germany

With his statement '[t]hree things happen when they [girls] are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them

they cry," at the world conference of science journalists in June 2015, Nobel laureate Tim Hunt involuntarily initiated a debate on sexism and discrimination

against women in science. His misogynist remarks caused outcries on social media and beyond. Under the hashtags #distractinglysexy and #TimHunt, used

e.g. on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, scientists from all over the world openly contested Hunt’s statement by producing posts which were shared massive‑

ly. They stimulated a public discourse on gender equality in academia and on the visibility of female scientists (Shipman, 2015). In particular, the memetic

diffusion of more than 10,000 photo tweets in social media within a few hours in which female researchers posted humorous selfies and self-portraits in

lab situations fuelled the discourse. Memes, according to Shifman (2014) consist of various digital items that are not only shared but also produced and

altered by multiple users. Usually, memes are multimodal, consisting of visuals, captions, and tags. They share common content characteristics and are

linked to other items that belong to the same meme.The typical #disctractinglysexy memes contain photographs or selfies of female scientists in typical lab

situations humorously juxtaposed with Tim Hunt’s remarks. Memes have already been used in various protest campaigns (see e.g., Milner, 2013, on memes

in the occupy movement). In our research project we ask the following research questions: What kind of visual messages are used in the campaign? What

role does the (female) body play?What resonance and debate did the images trigger in other media (online and offline)? In this paper, we particularly focus

on the opportunities and challenges of 'hashtag feminism', i.e. feminist hashtags within the context of feminist (online) activism in general. Then we will

discuss #distractinglysexy as an example, particularly focusing on the role of the female body in the memetic discourse. We present the results of a quan‑

titative-qualitative image type analysis, combining a quantitative content analysis with an iconographic-iconological analysis of user-generated content

tagged with #disctractinglysexy or #TimHunt on Twitter and Instagram. We particularly focused on the role of the female body and on gendered visual