When the term “postfeminism” entered the media lexicon in the 1990s, it was often accompanied by breathless headlines about the “death of feminism.” Those reports of feminism’s death may have been greatly exaggerated, and yet contemporary popular culture often conjures up a world in which feminism had never even been born, a fictional universe filled with suburban Stepford wives, maniacal career women, alluring amnesiacs, and other specimens of retro femininity. In _Feminism and Popular Culture_, Rebecca Munford (...) and Melanie Waters consider why the twenty-first century media landscape is so haunted by the ghosts of these traditional figures that feminism otherwise laid to rest. Why, over fifty years since Betty Friedan’s critique, does the feminine mystique exert such a strong spectral presence, and how has it been reimagined to speak to the concerns of a postfeminist audience? To answer these questions, Munford and Waters draw from a rich array of examples from contemporary film, fiction, music, and television, from the shadowy cityscapes of _Homeland _to the haunted houses of _American Horror Story_. Alongside this comprehensive analysis of today’s popular culture, they offer a vivid portrait of feminism’s social and intellectual history, as well as an innovative application of Jacques Derrida’s theories of “hauntology.” _Feminism and Popular Culture_ thus not only considers how contemporary media is being visited by the ghosts of feminism’s past, it raises vital questions about what this means for feminism’s future. (shrink)

The eight essays contained in Philosophical Feminism and Popular Culture explore the portrayal of women and various philosophical responses to that portrayal in contemporary post-civil rights society. The essays examine visual, print, and performance media — stand-up comedy, movies, television, and a blockbuster trilogy of novel. These philosophical feminist analyses of popular culture consider the possibilities, both positive and negative, that popular culture presents for articulating the structure of the social and cultural practices (...) in which gender matters, and for changing these practices if and when they follow from, lead to, or perpetuate discrimination on the basis of gender. The essays bring feminist voices to the conversation about gender where is it taking place and attest to the importance of feminist critique in what is sometimes claimed to be a post-feminist era. (shrink)

This brief but ambitious book explores our relationship with nature through the imagery we use when we talk about Mother Nature. Employing the critical tools of religious studies, psychology, and gender studies, Catherine M. Roach examines the various manifestations of nature as "mother" and what that idea implies for the way we approach the natural world. Part One, "Nature as Good Mother," discusses the notion that nature is, or is like, a beneficent and nurturing mother who provides and maintains life. (...) In studying the "green" slogan "Love Your Mother," Roach questions the effects—for women and for the environment—of imputing female gender to nature. She asks us to look at the associations that "motherhood" and "mothering" carry within a culture still shaped by patriarchy. She notes the danger of such an apparently pro-environmental slogan if "mother" evokes the bountiful, self-sacrificing provider who herself requires no care. Part Two, "Nature as Bad Mother," looks at the contrary notion of nature as a violent, threatening, and wrathful mother. This image arises most often when humans and technology are depicted as masters of unruly nature. Here Roach draws on theological reflection to analyze this ambivalence toward nature manifested in a fantasy that casts humans as gods. She explores the contributions of eco-theology and eco-psychology to a "heart of darkness" perspective. Finally, Part Three, "Nature as Hurt Mother," looks at possibilities and pitfalls of environmental healing inherent in the image of nature as a mother we have wounded and now seek to heal. (shrink)

This enlightening book presents new perspectives on how women's bodies are viewed and absorbed in popular culture, and considers some of the ways in which the body is central to questions of women's sexual and other identities.

The eight essays contained in this book explore the portrayal of women, and various philosophical responses to that portrayal in contemporary post-civil rights society. They bring feminist voices to the conversation about gender and attests to the importance of feminist critique in what is sometimes claimed to be a post-feminist era.

Young women’s identities are an issue of public and academic interest across a number of western nations at the present time. This book explores how young women attending an elite school for girls understand and construct ‘empowerment’. It investigates the extent to which, and the ways in which, their constructions of empowerment and identity work to overturn, or resist, key regulations and normative expectations for girls in post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultural contexts. The book provides a succinct overview of feminist (...) theorisations of normative femininities in young women’s lives in western cultural contexts. It includes familiar sexist discourses such as sexual double standards, as well as more recent commentary about the regulation of young women’s subjectivities in neoliberal, post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultures. Drawing on ethnographic research in the context of an elite girls’ secondary school, the author explores how empowerment for young women is constructed and understood across a range of textual practices. From visual representations of young women in school promotional material, to students’ constructions of popular celebrities, the question of how girls’ resistance to normative femininities begins to develop is examined. This rich empirical work makes a unique contribution to the study of elite schooling within the sociology of education, drawing on important insights from the field of critical girlhood studies, and posing a challenge to popular feminist notions about media literacy, young women and empowerment. It will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in the areas of gender studies, sociology, education, youth studies and cultural studies. (shrink)

Written in a readable, accessible style, with plenty of up-to-date examples Psychoanalysis and Culture provides a brilliant introduction to key issues in the area of application of psychoanalytic theories to culture. The author argues that we cannot grasp the complexity of contemporary global issues without understanding some of the unconscious processes which underlie them. After introducing some major modern and postmodern psychoanalytic approaches, Minsky offers a broad-ranging critique of Lacan's theory of culture and the unconscious. She explores (...) a range of crucial and topical questions: how should we explain women's historical subordination and what is now often seen as a crisis in male identity? What constitutes 'masculinity' apart from power and control? How important is the father, actually and symbolically in children's development in the context of lone-parent families? Why is contemporary culture often still so violent and destructive? Why is consumer culture so attractive to so many and why is it so difficult to put limits on economic growth in the interests of preventing environmental disaster? This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, women's studies, cultural studies, psychology and history as well as psychoanalytic studies. It will also appeal to the general reader interested in the psychology of cultural change. (shrink)

Chicanas and Mexican women share a history of colonialism that has (a) sustained oppressive constructions of gender roles and sexuality, (b) produced and reproduced them as racially inferior and as able to be silenced, conquered, and dominated physically and mentally, and (c) contributed to the exploitation of their labor. Given that colonialism has also come to shape the way young women of Mexican heritage learn in mainstream US schools, informal education from everyday women's conviviality and solidarity becomes (...) a pivotal context in which they can learn how to reconstitute colonial legacies. We examine how a group of Mexican working-class immigrant women at home and in a sweatshop fashion a girl named Ana, the main character in the popular film Real Women Have Curves, into a confident young woman who engages in what Pérez (1999, 2003) refers to as empowering and dynamic decolonial ways of seeing, knowing, doing, being, and reconstituting. In spite of its contradictions that, at times, assist in reproducing Ana as an oppressed laborer, it is their doing that helps produce her as a woman who engages in decolonial practices by facilitating her to deftly negotiate an oppressive economic and patriarchal space, a mainstream feminist space, and a space where their embodiments and creative cultural discourse, practices, and beliefs shine. As such, the film provides a powerful counterstory (Delgado 1989) that disrupts the chokehold of the logic of colonialism and how it seeks to classify, stereotype, and control young women like Ana. (shrink)

Digital data inundation has far-reaching implications for: disciplinary jurisdiction; the relationship between the academy, commerce and the state; and the very nature of the sociological imagination. Hitherto much of the discussion about these matters has tended to focus on ‘transactional’ data held within large and complex commercial and government databases. This emphasis has been quite understandable – such transactional data does indeed form a crucial part of the informational infrastructures that are now emerging. However, in recent years new sources of (...) data have become available that possess a rather different character. This is data generated in the cultural sphere, not only as a result of routine transactions with various digital media but also as a result of what some would want to view as a shift towards popular cultural forms dominated by processes of what has been termed prosumption. Our analytic focus here is on contemporary prosumption practices, digital technologies, the public life of data and the playful vitality of many of the ‘glossy topics’ that constitute contemporary popular culture. (shrink)

Recently I saw a corporate TV advertisement for the American television network ABC. It showed brief shots of people in other countries—France, Japan, Russia and so on. These people were doing all kinds of things, but they weren't watching television. Americans, the commentary told us, watch more TV than any of these people. Yet America is the richest, most innovative, most productive nation on the planet. ‘A coincidence’, concluded the wry, confident voice, ‘we don't think so’.

This book demonstrates that the important educational developments of the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, which are often portrayed as new and revolutionary in nature, were in fact the culmination of an evolutionary process more than two centuries old. It also shows that popular literacy was considerably more widespread by the time of Spenser and Shakespeare than most recent studies suggest. The book treats the long period 1348–1648 as a unit by discounting the importance of the year 1485, which (...) marked the end of one dynasty and the beginning of another but had no discernible effect on educational and cultural conditions. Additionally, it argues that the massive changes of the final years of Henry VIII, which momentarily disrupted the universities and the grammar schools of the realm, were beneficial in the long run, since local energies were thereby unleashed and greater public support for educational institutions of all kinds soon materialized. A period of steady growth continued until the 1640s and 1650s, when the bitter experiences of the Civil War and rancorous arguments about the role of the universities and the grammar schools in precipitating the outbreak of hostilities caused the mainstream of public opinion to question the efficacy of advanced education, which increasingly came to be seen as a threat to established values and traditions. Thereafter an era of decline began that lasted until the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, the book treats the important contributions made by both clerics and women during the long period 1348–1648. Although laymen were the greatest beneficiaries of the steady widening of educational opportunity during those three centuries, clerics and women provided most of the funds, without which many fewer colleges, schools, and scholarships for poor boys would have been established. They did so because of their belief that improved education was necessary for the further spread of the Christian message. (shrink)

In this 4th edition of his successful Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, John Storey has extensively revised the text throughout.

In the decades since his death, Adorno's thinking has lost none of its capacity to unsettle the settled, and has proved hugely influential in social and cultural thought. To most people, the entertainment provided by television, radio, film, newspapers, astrology charts and CD players seem harmless enough. For Adorno, however, the culture industry that produces them is ultimately toxic in its effect on the social process. Here, Robert Witkin unpacks Adorno's notoriously difficult critique of popular culture in (...) an engaging and accessible style, looking first at the development of the overarching theories of authority, commodification and negative dialectics within which Adorno's work needs to be seen. This book is an essential guide for understanding one of the key thinkers of our time. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the Business Ethics literature by unpacking the multimodal construction of moral narratives in popular culture and its portrayals of organizations and organizational roles. Understanding such portrayals and their construction is crucial to Business Ethics scholarship because they shape organizational imaginaries, influencing understandings and expectations of the ethical/moral responsibilities of organizations and the actors within them. In particular, we study the construction of moral narratives within a reality TV show that focuses on immigration and border (...) control at an airport. We find that the immigration officers are depicted as rational and heroic figures whilst the travellers are presented as emotional and potentially dangerous characters. Our analysis highlights how this is achieved via five multimodal editing dimensions—the structure of interactional scenes, the ability to address the camera, the narrator’s comments, the visual and music effects—that are key in constructing clearly defined personae. We show how, through the intersubjective construction of clear-cut characters, the show downplays the moral complexity of its content. Portraying immigration officers as heroic, while presenting travellers as potentially dangerous, allows for a silencing of any ethical questioning of immigration officers’ organizational practices. (shrink)

The exploration of popular culture topics by academic philosophers for non-academic audiences has given rise to a distinctive genre of philosophical writing. Edited volumes with titles such as Black Sabbath and Philosophy or Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy contain chapters by multiple philosophical authors that attempt to bring philosophy to popular audiences. Two dominant models have emerged in the genre. On the pedagogical model, authors use popular culture examples to teach the reader philosophy. The (...) end is to promote philosophical literacy, defined as acquaintance with the key problems, ideas, and figures in the history of philosophy. In contrast, on the applied philosophy model, authors use philosophy to open up new dimensions of the popular culture topic for fans. The end is to illustrate the value of philosophy in understanding the popular culture topic, and ultimately, to demonstrate the value of philosophy in general. Taking stock of the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two models provides an opportunity to reflect more broadly on whether, why, and how philosophers should engage the public. (shrink)

New to this edition: 4 new readings Stuart Hall The rediscovery of 'ideology': return of the repressed in media studies Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe Post ...

The article is a response to criticism of my two recent articles on Richard Shusterman’s view of popular culture by Shusterman and Małecki. The former maintains that I have misrepresented his view on Europe, the USA and popular culture. But I point out that he talks as if there is no popular culture in Europe due to Europe’s aristocratic traditions, and that the USA is a hotbed of popular culture thanks to its (...) egalitarian traditions, and that Europe can be treated as a country comparable to the USA. He also says that I falsely think he is talking about popular culture while he is really talking about popular art. But I show that it is meaningless to talk about popular art without talking about popular culture and that as a pragmatist Shusterman should have understood that. I show that Małecki grossly misrepresents my article, maintaining that I am against all forms of popular art and against everything Shusterman says about popular art. I show that this is blatantly wrong. (shrink)

Almost wherever we look, depictions of sexuality, both subtle and not-so-subtle, are omnipresent. Whatever the medium, popular culture representations tell us something about ourselves and about the ideologies of which they are symptomatic. These essays examine the strategies of power implicit in popular representations of sexuality. The authors—scholars in fields such as sociology, philosophy, biology, political science, history, and English literature— eschew rigid disciplinary boundaries.

This paper questions the meaning of popular culture under the auspices of modernity. The late transition and extension of modernity is technology. This eventual process is characterized by material culture. However, it is difficult to ignore the moment of postmodernity when the effects of the transition and the products themselves have given impetus to new constellations of discursive formation. The visual culture tends to dominate the scheme of things in popular culture. It is argued (...) in this paper that popular culture operates through four rationalities; namely, dispersion, segmentation, integration, and extension. The first three are called the intention/logic of mass culture. The last element, however, speaks of the transition from modern to postmodern. From location to bilocation and virtual location—the entire route of cultural turns has made the possibility of postmodern regimented bodies through the television. (shrink)

This article takes the recent rash of unwanted pregnancy films, such as 2007's Juno and Knocked Up, as an opportunity to revisit Margaret Atwood's influential 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale. It argues that the novel deals with the same themes the films evoke during a pivotal time for reproductive politics, generally, and abortion politics, specifically. It argues that the novel offers several lessons and warnings on the nature of reproductive politics that are still relevant today. These lessons are connected to (...) how and why these films are able to `make sense' in naturalizing their heroines' choice to keep an unwanted pregnancy. (shrink)

The most common definitions of popular culture suffer from a presentist bias and cannot be applied to pre-industrial and pre-capitalist societies. A survey reveals serious conceptual difficulties as well. We may, however, gain insight in two ways. 1) By moving from a Marxist model to a more Weberian approach . 2) By looking to Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” and Danto’s and Dickie’s “Institutional Theory of Art,” and defining popular culture as “unauthorized culture.”.

These four volumes are part of the forty-one volume set _New Accents_. First launched in 1977, the New Accents series rapidly changed the face of literary studies. Its clear and concise volumes brought the latest in literary theory to students and academics and paved the way for undergraduate teaching on essential new topics and approaches.

Every citizen has an equal right to culture. The development of the means of diffusion and of democratic ideas has unquestionably furthered a trend toward the unification of culture, but this process is often hindered and retarded. Profound disparities separate the cultural ideas and practices of society, the ideal or real cultural models of different social classes and categories, those of different groups, and, finally, those of the leaders and of the public. Imbalances result from this, and it (...) is these imbalances that popular culture tends to modify. In order best to meet the continuously new cultural needs of industrial and democratic society, popular culture has adapted to modern life some of the features of traditional culture. It has initiated the masses into the elementary techniques of learning—writing and reading. An increasingly complex and extended primary education has become more widespread. Contemporary society raises problems that evolve so rapidly and are so intricate that popular culture must be continued after school and during a man's entire life. It finds its way into new systems of permanent instruction and training through the agency of large-scale means of diffusion, by means of groups or social relationships. (shrink)

Women have achieved lasting social change since the Sixties, but not because of Feminist politics. The vast majority of women have been empowered instead by popular culture, which gave them vital economic power and political significance as consumers. Factors like the marginalization of men under Margaret Thatcher, and Tony Blair's making government part of popular culture, combined to make women the dominant political force in our society. Yet by the very nature of the (...) popular culture that empowered them - trivial, emotional and irrational - women have brought about change in crucial aspects of our society which now threaten the democratic system itself. (shrink)

Contributions to the philosophical genre of popular culture and philosophy aim to popularize philosophical ideas with the help of references to the products of popular culture with TV series like The Simpsons, Hollywood blockbusters like The Matrix and Jurassic Park, or popular music groups like Metallica. While being commercially successful, books in this comparatively new genre are often criticized for lacking scientific rigor, providing a shallow cultural commentary, and having little didactic value to foster philosophical (...) understanding. This paper discusses some of these methodological and didactic objections and seeks to encourage a constructive discussion of concerns with the genre. It shows how the genre similar to previous attempts to foster public understanding of philosophy and that it is a methodologically viable approach to reach a broad range of readers with diverse informational preferences and educational backgrounds. Considering what makes this approach to the popularization of philosophical thinking successful will shed light on some of the criteria for popularization of philosophy in general. (shrink)

Utilizing an evolutionary perspective has proven fruitful in a number of areas of interest outside of the standard psychological or anthropological topics. This includes a wide range of fields from applied disciplines such as law, criminology, medicine, and marketing, to the study of the imagined worlds found in art and literature, the domains of the humanities. A number of excellent books, as well as numerous articles, detail the impressive work done in applying evolutionary insights to the study of art and (...) literature. This article focuses on evolutionarily informed explorations of popular culture, an area that, only relatively recently, has benefited from research taking this approach. The existing scholarship in this area will be reviewed, and future directions and challenges highlighted. (shrink)

The popular culture and philosophy (PCP) book publishing movement has always been about serving the public. The idea for Seinfeld and Philosophy was to explain a broad range of philosophy and philosophers in a way that anyone could understand because the examples came from a popular television show. Plenty of professors were referencing Seinfeld in the classroom to help students connect with big ideas. Seinfeld and Philosophy would spur some readers to pick up Plato or enroll in (...) a philosophy course. By applying philosophy to pop culture, authors deliver a truly novel philosophical insight into the artwork. There has never been complete uniformity in the genre of PCP, but for the most part motivations have been pedagogical. The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series have a website with a blog that is open to submissions. The value of public philosophy in general, and PCP in particular, remains an open question at many institutions. (shrink)

Lena dunham is not a pedophile : false narratives and scarlett letters -- Harry styles is (probably) not a creep : what makes you beautiful and the male gaze -- On my money and bitches who better have it : how modern anti-capitalists fail to account -- For racial politics of black artists -- Why does this white australian sound like she's from atlanta? : on cultural appropriation, white supremacy, and black sexuality -- Mother monster and Q.U.E.E.N. : context challenging (...) and changing the problematic -- Friendly fire: why our perfectionist lens makes us harsher on feminist media -- It's actually about ethics in feminist criticism : where white feminism and gamergate converge -- Do you even lift, bro : toxic masculinity, sports culture, and feminist ignorance of the problems -- Dinos, disasters, and dives : a feminist defense of that high heeled chase scene in jurassic -- World -- Selfie game strong : kim kardashian and de beauvoir's thoughts on beauty -- Pinterest perfect : how our home lives reflect an unhealthy obsession -- "I am big enough to admit i am often inspired by myself" : leslie knope as the paragon of feminist joy -- Teen girls are the future and that is a good thing : our perfectionism actively harms women -- Never say never: setting your own borders and understanding your boundaries -- Last notes -- Notes -- Bibliography. (shrink)

Contemporary cultural and media studies have been increasingly interested in redefining the relations between religion and culture (and particularly popular culture). The present study approaches a series of theories on the manner in which religious aspects emerge and are integrated in contemporary cultural manifestations, focusing on the persistence/resurrection of religious patterns into secularized cultural contents. Thus, the analysis departs from the concept of implicit religion, coined and developed by Bailey and the theories following it, as well as (...) other associated concepts, influential for the evolution of debates in the recent period, such as invisible religion , as approached by Luckmann, civil religion , by Bellah, folk religion, residual religion , by Davies or ‘wild’ religion, by Borg. In order to discuss the relations between religion and popular culture in contemporary U.S. and particularly the presence of certain religious patterns in popular culture messages, symbolism and rituals, the study uses an interdisciplinary approach, based on approaches currently used in media studies, film studies, cultural studies, visual culture perspectives, religious studies, and sociology. The article discusses, through different theories (and in its second part, a case study on James Cameron’s cliché masterpiece Avatar) the manner in which contemporary popular culture (and cinema in particular) recycles, integrates and reinterprets religious patterns, symbols and behaviours. (shrink)

Circulation of ideas among philosophers is the core of Philosophy itself. The lack of this circulation can lead to obscurantism and cultural provincialism. The latter, for instance, afflicted Italy during the first half of the 20th century because of the close-minded neo-idealism of Croce and the mutual indifference of science and philosophy. Antonio Gramsci tried to overcome the problem of provincialism. In this essay, I explain how he attempted to overcome it. I focus on his conceptual categories like heg emony, (...) organic intellectual, national-popular and so on. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Picking Up the Pieces of a Shattered Culture:Abandoning Sartre for AquinasR. E. HouserI expect to die in my bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. Then his successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.—Francis Cardinal George (2010)Here I propose (...) to present a feature of the ethics of Thomas Aquinas, his ethical doctrine of virtue, concentrating on the four cardinal virtues—justice, prudence or good practical judgment, courage, and temperance. Plato first selected them as the four premier virtues, but they go back at least to Homer, for whom wily Odysseus exemplified prudence, warlike Achilles courage, old Nestor justice, Penelope and Telemachus, Odysseus' wife and son, temperance. And I offer them as central to living the morally good life required to "rebuild civilization" in an America that so fair and judicious a man as Cardinal George could call a "ruined society." To see the need for Thomas's solution, we must begin with the problem. Now, all societies depend upon the deep and fundamental ideas of the most important thinkers, prophets and sages, saints, and yes, even philosophers. Their ideas "trickle down" to influence regular folk, like you and me, those who whose hard work actually makes a society thrive, or die. And when those fundamental ideas change, the moral principles of those who embrace those ideas change, and consequently their actions change, and as a result the wider society in which they live changes, for better or worse. Such effects can now be felt across America [End Page 135] by all; but most of us are unaware of the primary intellectual agents of these changes, since they operate at the level of fundamental ideas, not politics or business or day-to-day life. And often their originators have died before the ideas reach full cultural force. So, ignorance of history makes it difficult to deal with present problems caused by those ideas.My first conclusion will be that a major cause of the current coarsening of our culture is the group of ideas of the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, even though most Americans have never heard of him, and most of those who recognize his name have not read his works carefully enough to see the connection. Why Sartre? In the honors program at my university, I had a bright young lady of Muslim heritage who had gone to a lycée, one of France's elite classical secondary schools. "Did you read the classics?" "Yes." Expecting Montaigne or Pascal, I asked, "Who?" Her answer: "Sartre." So let us begin with the theory and practice of Sartre and his long-time lover Simone Beauvoir, whose book The Second Sex was an intellectual spark for the women's liberation movement. Then we turn to some real-life examples of Sartrean influence on ourselves and American culture. Finally, for the best remedy for non-Christian and Christian alike, I recommend Aquinas's doctrine of virtue, when taken in its full scope.Sartre's Ethics of Absolute FreedomIn 1946, the year I was born, Sartre gave a lecture to a meeting of French librarians, which became his most popular book, Existentialism is a Humanism. There he laid out the core of his thought about God, humans, and their ethical behavior. Here I arrange his main ideas in an order that facilitates comparison with Aquinas, beginning with his view of human ontology and proceeding to its impact on the four cardinal virtues.Human OntologySartre turned his back on the traditional metaphysical view that every creature is an individual substance defined by a nature or essence it has in common with all other things of that type. In his "first principle of existentialism," Sartre skips over other animate things, plants and animals, and compares humans to inanimate objects:Let us consider... a book or a paper-cutter: here is an object made by an artisan whose inspiration came from a concept.... One cannot postulate a man who makes a paper-cutter but does not know what it is... (shrink)

Cultural studies constitutes one of the most multi-perspectival research fields. Amidst a polyvocal theoretical landscape that spans different disciplines semiotics is of foundational value. In an attempt to effectively address the conceptual richness of the semiotic discipline, a wide roster of perspectives is evoked in this book against the background of a diverse set of cultural phenomena, including structuralist and post-structuralist semiotics, semiotically informed psychoanalysis, cultural semiotics, film semiotics, sociosemiotics, but also, to a lesser extent, music semiotics and more niche, (...) but certainly promising perspectives, such as postmodern semiotics, ethnosemiotics, phenomenological semiotics and rhetorical semiotics. The recruitment of semiotic frameworks and concepts is enacted against the background of advances in cultural studies (thus reinstating the dialogue with a discipline that took form by drawing on semiotics in the first place) and the various research streams that have become consolidated within the wider cultural studies territory, such as memory studies, celebrity studies, death studies, cultural geography, visual studies. At the same time, the offered readings engage dialogically with Consumer Culture Theory. As regards the diversity of cultural phenomena that constitute the empirical substratum of the offered analyses, music, cinema, new media, live-shows, branding, advertising and literature constitute the focal areas of concern. Under the aegis of a permeating textuality paradigm, the ubiquitously applicable tools of multimodal analysis, and time-hallowed qualitative research methods facilitated by advances in videography and archival research, the featured semiotic readings aim at scrutinizing the wider social implications and communicative functions of popular cultural artefacts, spectacles, processes and places, such as Lady Gaga’s monstrosity, Dio’s memorial, experiential consumption events, the ice-bucket challenge video meme. (shrink)

Chinese traditional costume is one of the important carriers of Chinese culture. The process of the emergence and development of the culture of traditional Chinese costume also reflects the cultural background and evolution of ancient Chinese society. In the context of the strengthening of the Chinese economy, the inheritance and development of Chinese clothing culture is of great importance for modern society. The epochs of Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern dynasties are a period of Chinese history marked (...) by frequent wars, ethnic integration and convergence of various ideas. Against this background, there was a weakening of the Confucian "ritual" style, followed by the spread of the teachings of Xuan Xue, Buddhism and Taoism, and a freer, down-to-earth, elegant clothing culture appeared. This article consists of the following three parts: Diversity of social background; Artistic forms of costume culture of the Wei-Jin eras; Modern trends in the development of clothing culture. Based, among other things, on such material as the scroll painting "The Fairy of the Lo River" by the artist Gu Kaizhi of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, this article analyzes the influence of the teachings of Xuan-xue, Buddhism and Taoism on the costume of the Wei and Jin dynasties, illustrates the direction of development of modern Chinese costume culture, and continued the path for the development of clothing culture with Chinese specifics. (shrink)

In recent times it has seemed to many people as if the unifying impact of mass forms of popular culture has been overshadowed by the postmodernism of cultural pluralism, identity politics, niche marketing and lifestyle diversity. Using insights from psychoanalysis, this new book suggests that powerful forces may still be at work extending and deepening their hold on popular experience through the unifying forms of modern culture. The practices and aesthetic codes of popular culture (...) provide ways of confronting and managing the basic psychic tensions and anxieties of modern life, appealing globally across the deep divides of class, gender and ethnicity. In a series of extended illustrations, Barry Richards explores the emotional underpinnings of the rise of football as the 'people's game', the appeal of the motor car and other consumer goods, the strategies of advertising, the cultural predominance of pop music, and popular images of the countryside. While each phenomenon has a range of meanings of its own, the illustrations reveal the common positive side of these cultural forms, which serve as vehicles for psychological integration. At the core of this book is the idea that the pleasures of popular culture are at their strongest and best when they confirm our sense of belonging in the social order. Despite the constraint and disappointment inevitably involved in this, the reconciliation with authority which it brings is vital for the containment of the anxieties with which we all struggle. Disciplines of Delight reveals how psychoanalytic thinking can add to social understanding and is an original contribution to current debates on the nature of contemporary society. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines the recent resurgence of interest in what we call “fabriculture.” Three dimensions of fabriculture are explored: the gendered spaces of production around new domesticity and the social home; the blurring of old and new media in digital craft culture; and the politics of popular culture that emerge in the mix of folk and commercial culture. Ultimately, we conceptualize craft as power, as a way of understanding current activist possibilities.

Much philosophical work on pop culture apologises for its use; using popular culture is a necessary evil, something merely useful for reaching the masses with important philosophical arguments. But works of pop culture are important in their own right--they shape worldviews, inspire ideas, change minds. We wouldn't baulk at a book dedicated to examining the philosophy of The Great Gatsby or 1984--why aren't Star Trek and Superman fair game as well? After all, when produced, the former (...) were considered pop culture just as much as the latter. This will be the first major reference work to right that wrong, gathering together entries on film, television, games, graphic novels and comedy, and officially recognizing the importance of the field. It will be the go-to resource for students and researchers in philosophy, culture, media and communications, English and history and will act as a springboard to introduce the reader to the other key literature in the field. (shrink)

Purpose: This research examines postmodernism's influence in social and political change and its relationship to popular culture. It examines how postmodernism changed media studies, cultural anthropology, gender studies, and youth culture. This study seeks to address gaps in our knowledge by analyzing how postmodern notions promote a more flexible cultural analysis and challenge traditional identity and representation theories. Materials and Methods: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Angela McRobbie are among the postmodernists and cultural theorists (...) explored in the book. Ethnographic, empirical, political, feminist, and cultural studies are used to study popular culture's evolution. This multidisciplinary research examines fashion, media, and moral panics in current youth culture to analyse cultural shifts. Findings: Postmodernism makes individuals doubt their beliefs, which fractures and changes their identities, according to the research. It concludes that cultural studies must remain flexible and unrigorous to address current social and political issues. The study shows that postmodernism has changed youth culture, media consumption, and gender relations. Additionally, it examines how famous cultural theorists have affected postmodernism and mainstream media discourse. Implications to Theory, Practice and Policy: Cultural studies must evolve to keep up with postmodern society's changing dynamics, according to study. It claims that empirical and interdisciplinary research are needed to understand cultural changes. It also invites cultural experts to investigate popular culture more openly and flexibly and reevaluate feminist theory in postmodern contexts. (shrink)

This interview – conducted by Peter Beilharz and Trevor Hogan with Clinton Walker over the course of three months (July to September 2011) between Melbourne and Sydney via email and Skype – explores the questions of Australian popular culture writing with, against, and of the culture industries themselves. Walker is a leading freelance Australian cultural historian and rock music journalist. He is the author of seven books, five about Australian music. He has been a radio DJ and (...) TV presenter. He compiled and produced four double CD album collections of Australian music – Inner City Sound, Buried Country, Long Way to the Top, and Studio 22. He has been a key writer in several multi-media projects, including the Powerhouse Museum Real Wild Child exhibition and CD-Rom (1995) and ABC TV’s hit documentary series/CD/DVD Long Way to the Top (2001). In 2006, a new US edition of his first book Inner City Sound (with soundtrack CD) was published. His Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car (2005) has been published in a revised edition in 2009. In 2012, his eighth book, The Wizard of Oz, will be published. Walker is currently writing with Beilharz and Hogan a book called The Vinyl Age: The History of Australian Rock Music, 1945–1995. The interviewers invited Walker to reflect critically on his 35-year ‘career’ as pop avatar, independent writer and critic in the post-war to post-modern Australian popular culture industries. Going from journalism to his path-finding books and television documentaries, the article traces this work’s development both in personal terms and as a symptom of the broader cultural evolution, from the suburbs to pop to art and rock and back again; between London and the provincial cultures of Oz; from one-way American consumerism to local DIY egalitarianism, analogue to digital to global dialogue, youth culture to multi-culturalism, and from the putative low brow to the legimitization process itself of popular culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond the Aesthetic Garden: Politics and Culture on the Margins of Fin-de Siècle ViennaScott SpectorThe rhetorical structure supporting Carl E. Schorske’s seminal Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture 1 is frankly exposed. The argument—which may have single-handedly changed the discipline of cultural history—is an apparently simple one, and it is reasserted in this series of essays on diverse areas of cultural activity through the use of recurring metaphors. (...) Schorske’s famous thesis (modern culture as political surrogate for a marginalized liberal bourgeoisie) is represented through constantly resurfacing dichotomies: liberal political engagement and (vs.) the aesthetic “garden” of modern art; history and (vs.) desire and “the psyche”; politics and (vs.) culture. All of this is well known. In this essay I want both to assess our necessary debt to Schorske’s powerful work and to suggest what lies beyond it. If at the end of our own century we want to rethink Schorske’s founding project of an interdisciplinary cultural history of Central Europe, we cannot limit this initiative to the obviously important question of extending the contents of cultural inquiry (from high culture to popular culture, from the hegemonic nationality to non-German-speaking cultures, from patriarchy to the voices of women). The formal question packed up in the image of refuge from the historico-political in the aesthetic garden or the fortress of the psyche may offer most productive access to rethinking the Schorskean paradigm, instead of merely expanding its scope. For these reasons I want to focus on the rhetorical structure of Schorske’s essay collection against that of aesthetic and critical works from the Central European turn of the century. 2 Schorske’s historical analysis seems to be at odds [End Page 691] with these projects seen on their own terms—but to utter this is ironically to reiterate the tension between history or politics and aesthetic modernism articulated in the essays.The question at hand is hence two-fold. First of all, what is ideologically at stake in a historiographical construction that identifies Central European modernist aesthetic innovation as an escape from history and politics? Schorske’s interdisciplinary project of contextualization (his significant subtitle “Politics and Culture” has become an unshakable legacy for cultural history) is peculiar insofar as his diagnosis is that culture became increasingly isolated from political life. I have chosen to focus on the rhetorical opposition of “center” and “margin” in this essay because of Schorske’s implicit claim that the very class which was central to nineteenth-century Austrian liberalism—the German-speaking bourgeoisie—was “marginalized” by the rise of hostile anti-liberal ideologies (the “culture-makers” were “alienated along with their class in its extrusion from political power”). 3 As I hope to show, this geometry of center and margins was at the heart of the most innovative and potentially explosive play within so-called aestheticist texts around 1900. This brings us to the second half of this two-fold question: how might the “aesthetic moment” of the Central European fin de siècle be seen if we wish to go beyond Schorske’s diagnosis of a forced retreat into the temple of art, the fortress of the psyche, or the aesthetic garden? To get at both sides of this question—the ideological valence of the aesthetic moment and of its histories—I will focus on literary products, in particular on essays, for several reasons. One of these is that Schorske’s synthetic work is, after all, itself a collection of essays published over two decades.The privileging of the essay genre in coming to terms with the problem of turn-of-the-century aestheticism was established long before Schorske’s work. If we can find early examples of this generic strategy in fin-de-siècle authors such as Musil and Broch, the paradigmatic instance—and the place where the function of the essay-critique within aestheticist criticism is worked through—is the collection of Georg Lukács, Soul and Forms. 4 Several positions are taken in that work which may be useful to an understanding of Schorske’s essay project: Lukács asserts the essay’s fragmentary nature at... (shrink)

In July 2015, Rihanna released a seven-minute long video for her new single, entitled ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ (more widely known as ‘BBHMM’), the violent imagery in which would divide feminist media commentators for its representation of graphic and sexualised violence against a white couple. The resulting commentary would become the focus of much popular and academic feminist debate over the intersectional gendered and racialised politics of popular culture, in particular coming to define what has been (...) termed ‘white feminism’. ‘BBHMM’ is not the first time Rihanna’s work has been considered in relation to these debates: not only has she herself been very publicly outed as a survivor of male violence, but she has previously dealt with themes of rape and revenge in an earlier video, 2010’s ‘Man Down’, and in her lyrics. In this article I explore the multiple and layered ways in which Rihanna, and by extension other female artists of colour, are produced by white feminism as both responsible for perpetrating gender-based violence, and as victims in need of rescue. The effect of such liberal feminist critique, I argue, is to hold black female artists responsible for a rape culture that continually subjects women of colour to symbolic and actual violence. In this context, the fantasy violence of ‘Man Down’ and to a greater extent ‘BBHMM’ dramatises the impossibility of ‘being paid what one is owed’ in a culture that produces women of colour’s bodies, morality and personal trauma as abjected objects of consumption. I read these two videos through the lens of feminist film theory in order to explore how such representations mobilise affective responses of shame, identification and complicity that are played out in feminist responses to her work, and how their attachment to a simplistic model of representation conceals and reproduces racialised relations of inequality. (shrink)

This book examines how humanity faces the absence of a coherent, universal conception of justice. By analyzing Star Trek, this book argues that in order to obtain true democracy and justice the productive forces of society must be geared toward achieving a thriving society, the whole individual, and the ecology.

The world of charlatans is a world of constantly shifting borders and redefinitions, a world of crossed lines and pushed boundaries. Can one even speak of “the world” of charlatans in the singular, when the examples we are given to read in this volume reveal such great diversity that they seem to defeat any attempt to define common traits, as Roy Porter tried to do in his time? Certainly, commercial interests and the lure of a quick and easy profit seem (...) to have motivated some charlatans. Certainly, the universal effects of the nostrum or therapeutic procedures were often put forward as a commercial argument. Certainly, many had an itinerant career; but this was not always the case. In fact, these traits are not shared, and the main reason is probably that, aside from a very particular context in early modern Italy, the qualification of charlatan was not claimed by the actors themselves, but was attributed to them by others, be they contemporaries or later historians. These features are therefore only common if we understand them as stigmata1 attributed to charlatans by those who wish to distinguish themselves from them or to draw a line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. (shrink)

While most other works focus on conspiracy theories, this book examines conspiracy panics, or the anxiety over the phenomenon of conspiracy theories. Jack Z. Bratich argues that conspiracy theories are portals into the major social issues defining U.S. and global political culture. These issues include the rise of new technologies, the social function of journalism, U.S. race relations, citizenship and dissent, globalization, biowarfare and biomedicine, and the shifting positions within the Left. Using a Foucauldian governmentality analysis, Bratich maintains that (...) conspiracy panics contribute to a broader political rationality, a (neo)liberal strategy of governing at a distance through the use of reason. He also explores the growing popularity of 9/11 conspiracy research in terms of what he calls the "sphere of legitimate dissensus." Conspiracy Panics concludes that we are witnessing a new fusion of culture and rationality, one that is increasingly shared across the political spectrum. (shrink)