Meenakshi Gigi Durham's work centers on media and the politics of the body, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, race, and youth cultures. Her work has appeared in leading academic journals, including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Theory, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, and Women's Studies in Communication. She is the author of The Lolita Effect (Overlook, 2008), and the co-editor, with Douglas M. Kellner, of Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks (Blackwell, 2001, rev. 2006). She serves on the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals, including Feminist Media Studies and the Journal of Communication. She also served on the advisory board for the Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents and the Media. She teaches classes in gender and media, critical theories of the media, and magazine writing. Her professional journalism experience includes reporting, editing, and design for various newspapers and magazines including The Pensacola News-Journal, The Times of India, and Science Today. She coordinated a statewide public information campaign on family involvement in education for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. She served as publications editor for the University of Wisconsin System from 1992-94. Before coming to Iowa in the Fall of 2000, she taught magazine journalism at the University of Texas at Austin for six years, where she was the recipient of an honorable mention for the campus-wide Gilbert Teaching Excellence Award in Women's and Gender Studies.
Articles
Lolita and the sexualization of childhood, Pajamas Media (2008)
Pajamas Media, an online magazine, at http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/lolita-and-the-sexualization-of-childhood/
Sex and Spectacle in Seventeen Magazine: A Feminist Myth Analysis, International Communication Association. Annual Meeting. Feminist Scholarship Division (2007)
This paper interrogates the semiotic processes by which semiological codes operate to construct female sexuality...
On the Social Implications of Invisibility: The iMac G5 and the Effacement of the Technological Object. (with peter D. Schaefer), Critical Studies in Media Communication (2007)
The iMac G5 represents a contemporary trend in the design of new media objects, whereby...
Books
Contributions to Books
Ethnic chic and the displacement of South Asian female sexuality in the U.S. media, Media/Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches (2009)
Myths of race and beauty in teen magazines: A semiological analysis., Women in mass communication (2007)
Sex in the transnational city: Discourses of gender, body and nation in the ‘New Bollywood, Cinema, law, and the state in Asia (2007)
Girls, media, and the negotiation of sexuality: A study of race, class and gender in adolescent girls’ peer groups, Women’s Voices: Feminist Visions (2006)
Popular Press
Presentations
M.I.A.: A production analysis of musical subversion, International Communication Association, Feminist Scholarship Division (2009)
The Lolita Effect: The spectacle of adolescent female sexuality in an era of globalized media, Greenlee School of Journalism, Iowa State University (2008)
The Lolita Effect: The spectacle of adolescent female sexuality in an era of globalized media, Arkansas Literary Festival (2008)