Megan Le Masurier

The University of Sydney · media and communications

In its August issue 2010, Vogue Italia ran a 24-page fashion editorial by photographer Steven Meisel. Entitled ‘Water & Oil’, it was inspired by the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that began in April that year. The shoot caused an uproar in both new and old media. Across the journalistic coverage of the shoot and the attendant...

Slow journalism has emerged in the past 10 years as a term to describe a current phenomenon in journalistic practice and scholarship. It refers to a type of journalism that acts as a critique and response to the inaccuracies, overproduction, and ethical challenges of much journalism produced in the contemporary accelerated media environment.

A review of Lynn Comella, 'Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure', Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2017.

In the early years of the second wave, two very different approaches to female sexuality and feminist politics were in circulation, Anne Koedt’s ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’ and Germaine Greer’s theory of cuntpower. While the clitoral orgasm became the ‘feminist orgasm’ during these years, Greer’s more open and genitally inclusive theory of cun...

In an era of fast and instantaneous journalism and concerns about the deleterious effects of speed, it can be easy to lose sight of the other kinds of journalism being practiced, other temporalities for its production. There has been little scholarly work on slow journalism, so the first aim of this article is, if not to define, then at least to de...

Magazines are one of the oldest of media forms, arguably ‘the most successful media format ever to have existed’ (Holmes & Nice 2012: 1). But in an era of digital and convergent media, where technological platforms are multiplying, how can a magazine be defined? Teaching and researching in the space of magazines requires us to define our object of...

This essay considers the status of magazine studies as a cohesive and coherent discipline. We ponder why magazine studies, if considered at all, is usually conflated or elided with periodical studies and question whether this should be the case. We suggest that in addition to practical, methodological and disciplinary challenges (such as access to...

In current discussions of the democratization of media production, of ‘we the media’, where everyone is a journalist, everyone a publisher, the focus has been on digital culture. Yet in the shadows of this explosion of digital-led creativity and media making, there has been a resurgence in the production of one of the oldest forms of media, the sma...

The nude male centrefold spread like a virus through the new women's magazines of the seventies. At the time, and since, the academic gaze has viewed the centrefold as little more than a joke, a failure for feminism and female sexuality. This article returns to the heyday of the centrefold and listens to the responses of ordinary women in reader le...

Research into sport and gender in Australia has suggested that teenage girls are still under-represented in sport and physical activity when compared to boys of similar age groups. Sports such as football and cricket dominate media coverage (and sponsorship interest) and remain male-dominated. While there has been increasing opportunity for young g...

The second wave of feminism in Australia became a popular reality for ordinary women through many forms of media, and especially through the new women's magazine Cleo. The reader letters published in Cleo throughout the 1970s provide rich, if productively problematic, evidence for the media historian's desire to interpret the meanings readers can m...

The amphetamine derivatives p-chloroamphetamine (pCA), 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, 'Ecstasy') and D-fenfluramine can, if given repeatedly in high doses to rats, produce a degeneration of serotonergic nerve terminals which we have previously shown to result in a reduction in D-fenfluramine-evoked release of 5-HT in vivo. It is therefore...