Michele White

Michele White is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. Her field is media and visual culture studies, 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. She teaches Internet and new media studies, television and film theory, visual culture studies, gender and queer theory, and critical race and postcolonial studies. White holds a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College, and a PhD in Art History and Certificate in Film Studies from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York.

In The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship (MIT Press, 2006), White analyzes the kinds of viewing positions that are produced by Internet settings. White continues to consider how viewers and buyers are constructed in Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay (Duke University Press, 2012). White studies how eBay's brand community, linking of families and corporations, control of categories and collecting, gender and sexuality narratives, and work mandates are extended and refuted by participants. White argues that women employ traditional femininity to foreground, profit from, and challenge their positions in Producing Women: The Internet, Traditional Femininity, Queerness, and Creativity (Routledge, 2015). She uses the term "producing" to emphasize the interconnected ways women are constructed, produce themselves as subjects, are associated with maternal and monstrous reproduction, form vital production cultures, work, and deploy technological processes. Her related book, Producing Masculinity: The Internet, Gender, and Sexuality (Routledge, 2019), describes how cultural conceptions of masculinity are reliant on ideas about femininity and women. Technology companies and individuals, as Michele White argues in Touch Screen Theory: Digital Devices and Feelings (MIT Press, 2022), displace the constructed aspects of touchscreens and online sites by correlating physically touching and emotionally feeling. In these books, White also proposes critical strategies for researching Internet settings and other digital technologies.