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Introduction: corporeal media

It is time for feminist media studies to refocus its attention on the body. Bodies matter in the ways in which they are differentiated, globally positioned, valued, shared, disrupted, erased, mis-recognized, and spectacularized. In the current geopolitical and technological context, the body is not only an object of cultural representation, but also a medium through which economic and environmental forces circulate. The body is therefore often a surface on which particular knowledges and harms are inscribed. This was the call for papers we circulated in 2018, seeking to present a diverse set of scholarly approaches to the body and its place within media and cultural studies. Inspired by materialisms new and old, we were interested in highlighting work that looks to the weight of the material in adjudicating social hierarchies as well as to longstanding feminist concerns with the embodied location of knowledge and experience. The result is this collection of six timely essays. Together they approach the study of media through diverse analyses of distinct bodies and their intersections across global capital, digital affects, and geopolitical structures. The assembled authors articulate a range of directions, questions, and methods that demonstrate the enduring importance of the body in feminist media research, both as a site of gendered difference and performance, and as the material infrastructure through which power circulates transnationally and leaves its mark. This section begins with Tracy Ying Zhang’s call to attend to the non-representational elements of cultural production: principally the physical, migratory, and gendered pressures that undergird the Québécois circus industry. Through ethnographic research, Zhang demonstrates how, behind the stage and its symbolic codes ofmulticultural reconciliation, performers labor under restrictivework visas anddemandingworking conditions. These exact a heavy and unequal toll, especially on women performers whose bodies serve as both productive and reproductive sites of labor. Ethnographic studies of work also undergird Hemangini Gupta’s incisive analysis of startup capitalism in Bangalore, India. In this instance, it is the workplace ideology of “Do What You Love” that circulates across borders, manifesting physically in the affects and injuries of office workers in the Global South. These tech-sector employees, mostly young first-generation professional women, experience this higher-status labor through processes of bodily and emotional alignment: a form of ideological interpellation far more material and intimate than that imagined by Louis Althusser (1971), andmore differentiated in its global movement across sites of difference. The third commentary in this collection, Zhongxuan Lin’s analysis of Chinese feminist tactics of visibility, examines the connections between the corporeal and the spectacular in the struggle to circulate political speech in the context of significant state censorship. Lin details FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 2019, VOL. 19, NO. 2, 288–303 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1573545