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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The New American Dream: Neoliberal Transformation As Character Development In Schitt’S Creek, William Joseph Sipe
The New American Dream: Neoliberal Transformation As Character Development In Schitt’S Creek, William Joseph Sipe
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
This article contextualizes the popular sitcom Schitt’s Creek within an era of unprecedented economic inequality and growing distain for the ultrawealthy. Via its over-the-top and self-effacing humor, the program invites audiences to discipline the Rose family for their former life of leisure and ultimately celebrate as each character is transformed into an ideal neoliberal subject via economic precarity and entrepreneurism. Through an analysis of the show’s 6 seasons, this essay articulates how the myth of the American Dream has adapted to neoliberal ideology that prizes precarity as a state of possibility and rejects leisure as laziness. Schitt’s Creek is emblematic …
The Working Class Promise: A Communicative Account Of Mobility-Based Ambivalences, Kristen Lucas
The Working Class Promise: A Communicative Account Of Mobility-Based Ambivalences, Kristen Lucas
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
In-depth interviews with 62 people with working class ties (blue-collar workers and adult sons and daughters of blue-collar workers) reveal a social construction of working class that imbues it with four core, positively valenced values: strong work ethic, provider orientation, the dignity of all work and workers, and humility. This constellation of values is communicated through a ubiquitous macrolevel discourse—which I coin the Working Class Promise—that elevates working class to the highest position in the social class hierarchy and fosters a strong commitment to maintain a working class value system and identity. However, this social construction is only a partial …
Cinematic Jujitsu: Resisting White Hegemony Through The American Dream In Spike Lee’S Malcolm X, Kristen Hoerl
Cinematic Jujitsu: Resisting White Hegemony Through The American Dream In Spike Lee’S Malcolm X, Kristen Hoerl
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X (1992) presented Malcolm X’s life story using the narrative framework of the American Dream myth central to liberal ideology. Working from Gramsci’s notion of common sense in the process of hegemony, I explain how Lee appealed to this mythic structure underlying American popular culture to give a platform to Malcolm X’s controversial ideas. By adopting a common sense narrative to tell Malcolm X’s life story, this movie functioned as a form of cinematic jujitsu that invited critical consciousness about the contradictions between liberal ideology and the life experiences of racially excluded groups. Other formal devices …