By Jerski Jarzen Duria

This study explores the gendered dynamics of poverty porn vlogging in the Philippines, focusing on how male and female vloggers portray poverty and interact with impoverished subjects. "Poverty porn" refers to content that exploits the suffering of impoverished individuals for emotional or financial gain, often by framing the content creators as charitable figures. The research examines six vloggers-ForeignGerms, Raffy Tulfo, King Lucks, Ivana Alawi, Rosemarie Tan Pamulaklakin, and Alex Gonzaga-whose content frequently centers around poverty in the Philippines. Through a qualitative content analysis approach, this study identifies recurring patterns, themes, and narrative structures within their vlogs. Drawing on Gender Role Theory, the research explores how societal expectations shape the behavior of male and female vloggers. Power and Exploitation Theory further explains the power dynamics between vloggers and their vulnerable subjects. Key themes include the emotional exploitation and the commodification of gendered vulnerability, reinforcement of gendered power dynamics and the savior complex, the gendered gaze and performative charity. Male vloggers tend to adopt dominant roles, positioning themselves as rescuers, while female vloggers often emphasize emotional labor and caregiving. This gendered framing perpetuates stereotypes of men as saviors and women as dependent and vulnerable. This study highlights the ethical concerns of such content, where vloggers profit from the suffering of impoverished individuals, particularly women and children. By analyzing these gendered portrayals, the research contributes to the discourse on the ethics of poverty porn in the digital age, shedding light on how social media creators exploit poverty for profit.

Unpublished paper, 2024.

By Matthew Mitchell, Tully O’Neill, & Curtis Redd

While criminology has studied news media reporting for decades, it has largely overlooked reporting on anti-queer violence and depictions of crime outside mainstream outlets. This article addresses this gap by analysing how anti-queer violence is represented in LGBTQ community media. By analysing 1,295 articles from 11 LGBTQ publications across five Anglophone countries between 2019 and 2021, we examine which forms of anti-queer violence are deemed newsworthy in these outlets. Our analysis reveals that LGBTQ community media emphasize particular types of violence, relationships between victims and perpetrators and contexts of victimization while downplaying or disregarding others. We argue that this selective representation both mirrors and ‘queers’ prevailing norms in mainstream crime news reporting in culturally and criminologically significant ways. In grappling with this tension, we identify and critique several cisheteronormative assumptions embedded in the existing literature on news media representations of crime. Ultimately, our analysis calls for a re-evaluation and revision of the existing discourse within media criminology, urging scholars to engage with a broader range of experiences, communities and narrative practices to understand better how violence is culturally mediated.

British Journal of Criminology, Dec. 2024. 19p.