Michele White

Research Interests

Michele White studies media and visual culture, with a research emphasis on the theories that can be developed for analyzing new communication technologies and the representations and political implications that occur with the internet. Her research uses feminist, queer, and anti-racist approaches to address popular and academic claims that individuals are equally empowered by digital media. Some of her current research concerns are the gendering of interfaces, Internet beauty and fashion cultures, popular feminisms, online hate, and how the interconnected experiences of physically touching and emotionally feeling are produced through digital media. In addition to authoring a number of monographs, she edited a special section of Feminist Media Studies on “The Mixed-up Politics of Disinformation, Anti-feminisms, and Misogyny” (2024). She also co-edited a dossier on “Screening Hands” for Screen (forthcoming); Anti-feminisms in Media Culture for Routledge (2022), and “Genealogies of Feminist Media Studies” for Feminist Media Histories (2018). She is working on a monograph about how feminist digital platforms employ close reading as a political practice and the ways these processes can be critically studied through related humanities methods.

Selected Publications

Touch Screen Theory: Digital Devices and Feelings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022.

Producing Masculinity: The Internet, Gender, and Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Producing Women: The Internet, Traditional Femininity, Queerness, and Creativity. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.