Feminist media scholar

Jennifer McClearen is a feminist media scholar and visiting faculty in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarly work examines the cultural production of difference in contemporary society with an emphasis on the mediation of gender, race, and sexuality. She researches how intersecting subjectivities are written onto active female bodies in popular media such as action films or sports. In the classroom, she blends theory and practice to train students to critically analyze and produce media culture. 

Dr. McClearen is currently writing her first book, Branded Difference: Promoting Female Athletes in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which is under advance contract with the Studies in Sports Media Series with the University of Illinois Press. Her research can also be found in the International Journal of Communication, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory, and Politics, and in the edited collections Feminist Erasures: Challenging Backlash Culture and New Sporting Femininities: Embodied Politics in Postfeminist Times. She is an affiliated faculty member in the Center for Sports Communication and Media at UT and a diversity scholar with the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan. 

Dr. McClearen completed her Ph.D. in 2017 in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington where she was a dissertation fellow in the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity, a fellow in the Simpson Center for the Humanities’ Certificate in Public Scholarship, and a fellow in the Project in Interdisciplinary Pedagogy. Prior to joining the academy, she taught English in Spain, the Czech Republic, and Mexico and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco.