Projects per year
Personal profile
Research interests
My research has long focused on questions of embodiment, gender, race and sexuality in popular culture, with a particular emphasis on feminist fat studies, queer theory, body image and the media, affect theory, porn studies, and indigenous, postcolonial and Black feminisms. My recent publications have focused on the concept of vulnerability in feminist, queer and anti-racist theorizations, trigger warning debates, so-called body positive imagery, porn spectatorship, the materiality and immateriality of embodiment, and the racialization of mediated feelings and exceptional bodies. Currently, I am launching a new research project called Queering Nordic Indigeneity: Media, Nature, Sexuality which maps out and "queers" contemporary popular cultural imagery and debates about Sámi people and Sápmi environment in the Nordic countries from a queer indigenous studies and posthumanist perspective. One key aim of the project is also to explore the ethical and epistemological terms and limitations of conducting such research from the "outside" as a non-indigenous scholar. The research project is conducted with the support of Kone Foundation January 2019-December 2021. I am a Docent in Media Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Turku, where I also received my doctoral in 2010. During 2016–2017, I was the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Sukupuolentutkimus–Genusforskning, the Finnish Journal of Gender Studies, together with Kuura Irni. My doctoral research, which explored ways in which media images of fat bodies address viewers on an affective level and shape their body images, was published as a book The Weight of Images: Affect, Body Image, and Fat in the Media in 2014 (Ashgate, republished through Routledge). Before Åbo Akademi University, I worked as a Senior Lecturer (fixed-period post) in Media Studies at the University of Turku (2015–2017), Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Fellow (2013–2015), Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher at Cinema Studies, Stockholm University (2010–2013), and Visiting Research Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney (fall 2012).
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Projects
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Politics of Vulnerability: Rethinking Representation and Materialism
Kyrölä, K., Koivunen, A. & Ryberg, I.
01/01/11 → 31/12/18
Project: Research
Publications
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Fat in the Media
Kyrölä, K., 2021, (Accepted/In press) The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies. RoutledgeResearch output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceeding › Chapter › Scientific
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Re-Imagining a Queer Indigenous Past: Affective Archives and Minor Gestures in the Sámi Documentary Sparrooabbán (2016)
Kyrölä, K. & Huuki, T., 2021, (Accepted/In press) In: Cinema Journal.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Scientific › peer-review
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Dekolonisaatio ja queer-näkökulmia asuttajakolonialismiin
Kyrölä, K., 2020, In: Sukupuolentutkimus. 3, p. 56-60Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Scientific
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"Feel in your body": Fat Activist Affects in Blogs
Hynnä, K. & Kyrölä, K., 2019, In: Social Media and Society. p. –Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Scientific › peer-review
Open AccessFile -
Negotiating vulnerability in the trigger warning debates
Kyrölä, K., 2019, Media and the Politics of Offence. Graefer, A. (ed.). Palgrave Macmillan, p. 207–232Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceeding › Chapter › Scientific › peer-review
Activities
- 1 Visiting an external academic institution
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Queens College, City University of New York
Katariina Kyrölä (Visiting researcher)
1 Nov 2020 → Mar 2021Activity: Visiting an external institution › Visiting an external academic institution