Susan J. Douglas is a feminist academic, columnist, and
cultural critic who writes about gender issues, media criticism and
American politics. She has published five books on American history, and
is currently Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor of communication studies
at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
She graduated from
Brown University with a PhD.
Douglas is probably best known for
her 1994 book Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass
Media, which was selected as one of the top ten books of the year by
National Public Radio, Entertainment Weekly magazine and The McLaughlin
Group, and which Michiko Kakutani described in the New York Times as
"provocative ... irreverent and sometimes very funny."
She penned
Listening In: Radio And The American Imagination in 1999, a nostalgic
look at the cultural impact of radio on American imagination, expressing
concern over creative stagnation at the time, yet cautious optimism for
radio's future. The book won the Sally Hacker Prize for exceptional
scholarship that reaches beyond academia to a broad audience in 2000.
In 2010, her book Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that
Feminism's Work Is Done was published. In it, Douglas examines the
evolution of the women in the media – the rise of depictions of power
and success giving credence to the idea of feminism having fulfilled its
aims, and of sexist old-style depictions of women as sex objects – and
how these undermine women's status and equality.
She has written
for The Nation, In These Times, The Village Voice, Ms. magazine, the
Washington Post and TV Guide, and was media critic for The Progressive
from 1992 to 1998. Her column “Back Talk” appears monthly in In These
Times.
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