Between 2019 and 2020, three streaming series premiered on Netflix, Apple+, and BBC One/HBO: Unbelievable, The Morning Show, and I May Destroy You. All three narratively centered sexual violence against women, foregrounding the experiences of the women characters, and were produced within the context of the global movement #MeToo. We offer a conjunctural analysis of these programs within what we call the economy of believability, arguing that these shows should be read as fictionalized real-world phenomena, distilled for television but nonetheless reflective of deeply sedimented assumptions about women, sexual violence, and believability. We argue that the programs examine the struggle for belief as it manifests in three key forms of labor: (1) the affective performance of believability; (2) payment of the costs of believability; (3) entrepreneurially attaching value to believability. Our analysis positions the discourses and narratives of these shows—and of the real-world contexts they speak to—within the broader frame of a mediated, intersectional economy of believability, where contestations about how and when women may be believed play out in and through struggles over visibility, authenticity, and recognition.

Based on a thematic analysis of 7,569 posts on the online parenting forum Mumsnet Talk, in this article we examine how domestic cleaning-one of the most invisible aspects of reproductive labour-and the people who perform it are made visible. We conceptualize Mumsnet discussions as a "visibility sensor:" a technological and affective space that captures, analyses and relays information and feelings in ways that contribute to visibilizing cleaning labour and sensitizing its users to recognize the women they employ to clean their homes. At the same time, our analysis highlights the limitations of this sensor: how the visibility Mumsnet discussions afford to cleaning and cleaners tends to reinscribe its meanings within a gendered and individualized logic. This mediated visibility mostly fails to expose the systemic structures that produce and sustain the invisibility of cleaning and cleaners, and does little to sensitize participants to the ways in which their own lives are shaped by patriarchy. The article contributes to the growing feminist scholarship examining how gender and class come into public visibility through social media platforms and the "digital mamaspehere," and the implications of this visibility for the configuration and reconfiguration of power relations.

The new prominence of ordinary voice in crime journalism – claims to have seen things, experienced things, felt things ‘first-hand’ – has the potential to decenter elite perspectives and open up crime news narratives to the voices of systemically criminalized subjects. However, I argue in this paper that the political potential of ordinary voice can only be realized in and through concrete instances of its use, and so needs to be examined within news texts as sites of micro-political struggle over meaning. Looking at Australian current affairs television coverage of so-called ‘African gang’ crime in Melbourne, this paper approaches crime news texts as sites of vulnerability politics, where different and sometimes competing claims to vulnerability encounter one another and struggle for public recognition. A close multi-modal analysis of three episodes of current affairs television uncovers four specific strategies of textual composition and presentation by which the criminalization of Black African youth is able to persist despite the testimonial interventions of the criminalized: appropriation, marginalization, subjugation and calculation. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this analysis for future studies of ordinary voice and citizen testimony in news reporting.

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This article explores the mediated spacetime of crime events to reconsider how criminalization works through visual journalism. Drawing on close analysis of 45 images from Australian newspaper reports about so-called ‘African gang crime’ events in the city of Melbourne, it develops a typology of five distinct ‘ways of looking’ at crime that news images can open for their viewers. Each extends unique imaginative demands and so conditions perceptual relationships of spatial, historical and political significance between crime events and those who watch them unfold through the news in distinct ways. Together, these ways of looking constitute an intertextual representational mechanism that the author calls kaleidoscopic visuality, holding fixed the ‘who’ and ‘what’ of crime events while endlessly shifting and destabilizing the ‘where’ and ‘when’. The concept of kaleidoscopic visuality helps clarify how and why hypermediated crime events and phenomena resist discrete and/or desecuritized interpretations of their political significance, and thus broadens existing accounts of how news images criminalize.