American Popular Culture Commons^™

Identity Of Pokemon Go Players: How Social Gaming Affects Behavior, Jasmine Quinn

Pop Culture Intersections

In July of 2016 Americans have received a fun new app that produces behaviors unlike any before. It causes people to gather at places, such as parks, in large groups, or causes them to wander around neighborhoods. Pokemon Go is an augmented reality game created by the company Niantic, and is available for free on mobile phones. An article From USA Today features the parks and recreation director of Kimberly Point Park, Michael Kading who says “I have never seen anything like this” as he has trouble getting people out of the park at closing time. The app has caused …

Human Computer Interaction And Data Visualization, Olivia Hsieh

Pop Culture Intersections

In 2013, SINTEF cited that 90% of the world’s data had been created over the past two years.1 With the onset of Big Data, the ability to analyze data at a rate directly proportional to its collection becomes quite near impossible, albeit nonetheless important. In “Play With Data – An Exploration of Play Analytics and Its Effect on Player Experiences,” Ben Medler explains its pertinence: “Data can be given a different context through relating it to other data. A relation informs someone of how data can be correlated or combined with other data.”

Becoming-Belieber: Girls' Passionate Encounters With Bieber Culture, Kortney Sherbine

Occasional Paper Series

In this article, I draw on French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) notion of becoming to consider the ways in which these encounters with people, materials, and technologies are productive, creating space for Beliebers to come into relationship with one another and with popular culture in ways that are new and that I never could have anticipated during my more carefully organized and school-curriculum-driven interactions with girls during my six years as an elementary school teacher. Through my current research into young girls’ after-school fanaticism, I have been able to come to know girls differently than I knew …

Fashioning Desire At B. Altman & Co.: Ethics And Consumer Culture In Early Department Stores, Tessa Maffucci

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We live in an age of fast fashion. Clothing is produced in greater volumes than ever before and the lifecycle of each garment keeps getting shorter and shorter. Many items are manufactured to be worn only one time and then thrown away—as disposable as a cup of coffee. There is much to be learned about our current fashion ecosystem by looking into the past. Beyond the garments themselves we must understand the larger historical and sociological context in which these articles of clothing were produced. How does the shopping environment shape the buying habits and fashion trends of an era? …

Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual …

Mccarthyism And The Id: "Forbidden Planet" (1956) As A Veiled Criticism Of Mccarthyism In 1950s America, William Lorenzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many American science fiction films of the 1950s served as political allegories commenting on the post-war fears of the nation. One major fear was the fear of communist infiltration: the Red Scare. In films of this era, the enemy walks as one of us. In most of these films, the alien other, the monster from without, takes on a familiar form. But at the height of all these fears comes the fear of the enemy from within, an enemy that winds up destroying us from the inside out, as can be seen in Forbidden Planet (1956). In this film, a …

Media Representation Of Asian Americans And Asian Native New Yorkers’ Hybrid Persona, Min Huh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Asian Americans, having been degraded in the realm of popular media and neglected in the consumer market, have been unable to obtain a voice or leave a trace in American pop culture. The meager representation that Asian Americans rarely have is highly controlled through a distorted lens, inclined to paint them in a grotesquely exaggerated light for comic relief. The absence of Asian Americans in the media has compelled the Asian American youth to adapt the personas of different cultures in their desires for social and cultural mobility. These factors have given birth to a hybrid persona among Asian Native …

Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything [Table Of Contents], Salvatore Basile

History

It’s a contraption that makes the lists of “Greatest Inventions Ever”; at the same time, it’s accused of causing global disaster. It has changed everything from architecture to people’s food habits to their voting patterns, to even the way big business washes its windows. It has saved countless lives . . . while causing countless deaths. Most of us are glad it’s there. But we don’t know how, or when, it got there.

It’s air conditioning.

For thousands of years, humankind attempted to do something about the slow torture of hot weather. Everything was tried: water power, slave power, electric …

The One Exhibition The Roots Of The Lgbt Equality Movement One Magazine & The First Gay Supreme Court Case In U.S. History 1943-1958, Joshua R. Edmundson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The ONE Exhibition explores an era in American history marked by intense government sponsored anti-gay persecution and the genesis of the LGBT equality movement. The study begins during World War II, continues through the McCarthy era and the founding of the nation’s first gay magazine, and ends in 1958 with the first gay Supreme Court case in U.S. history.

Central to the story is ONE The Homosexual Magazine, and its founders, as they embarked on a quest for LGBT equality by establishing the first ongoing nationwide forum for gay people in the U.S., and challenged the government’s right to engage …

Both Into And Out Of The Cage: New Media, Transgression, And The Remaking Of American Literary Connection, 1975-1999, Casey Henry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation addresses an absent history of late twentieth-century postmodern literature. Namely, I trace the shifts between 1980s postmodernism, described by Fredric Jameson as encapsulating a “wan[ed]”“affect,” and the emergence of 1990s post-postmodernism, marked by an exaggeration of affect. My dissertation posits that this reinvention of feeling was due to shifts in communication technologies and new media art during the 1970s and 1980s competing with, and eventually rendering obsolete, avant-garde literary techniques for “connection.” These latter strategies were encapsulated in the postmodern “encyclopedic” novel, a form miming the logic of new media, yet incapable of fully addressing new programmatic shifts, …

Apocalypse & Affect: Political Passivity In Film And Television Representations Of Nuclear Holocaust, W W. Rooks

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

Within the expanding canon of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic film and television, this project studies the subgenre that makes use of nuclear holocaust as a narrative device or setting in order to understand how, rather than engaging audiences with the dire off-screen politics that inform such films, it imposes a sense of political passivity on its characters. Similarly imparted is an assumption of that same sense for the audience. In this way, the framing of modern apocalyptic narratives meet an “affective limitation,” which is a concept steeped in the examination of media as a potential tool to motivate political action (Massumi …

A Family Of One's Own: Reconstructing Queer Families Of Color In Film, David F. Stephens

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

I will focus on the resistance to white heteronormative depictions of the American family occurring within two contemporary films directed by gay black men—The Skinny, directed by Patrik-Ian Polk, and The Happy Sad, directed by Rodney Evans. These movies complicate understandings of black gay male relationships by humanizing the characters and providing clarity about the motivations behind the decisions these characters make. As opposed to simply associating their queerness and immorality, the directors of these films explore what brings people to the various social positions they occupy. In this way, these directors resist the tendency to pathologize …

Picturing The Cajun Revival: Swallow Records, Album Art, And Marketing An Identity Of South Louisiana, 1960s-1970s, Jessica A. Dauterive

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In South Louisiana in the late 1950s, Ville Platte native Floyd Soileau joined a network of independent recording companies across the United States that provided an opportunity for local entrepreneurs and artists to profit from the global music industry. This paper analyzes the album covers of Floyd Soileau’s Cajun recording label, Swallow Records, during the 1960s-1970s. This period overlaps with a movement to subvert a negative regional identity among Louisiana Cajuns that is often referred to as the Cajun revival. Through a consideration of album covers as objects of business strategy and creative expression, as well as oral histories with …

Found In Translation: An Analysis Of Popular American Film In Spain, Emily Dushek

Honors Projects

This research examines American popular film in Spain with the aim of understanding if and how removing a popular text (such as a film) from its original language and socio-cultural context and translating it for consumption in a different language and culture affects the interpretation of the film. The study delves into the very successful 2012 films The Avengers (Joss Whedon) and Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino) and uses textual analyses and comparisons of the original English and the translated Castellano Spanish versions of the films, specifically focusing on the translations, as well as analyses of film reviews and critiques written …

The Inuit Vs. The Steamboat: Human Exhibitionism And Popular Concerns About The Effects Of The Market Revolution In The Early Republic, Ryan Bachman

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

In the early nineteenth century, a new form of human exhibitionism spread through eastern American cities. While public displays featuring live human beings had existed since the colonial era, these new shows specifically focused on Native Americans. This paper examines one such show, the Inuit Exhibition of 1820-1821, as a case study of this phenomena. Primarily through the use of contemporary newspaper accounts, this project argues that shows like the Inuit Exhibition occurred within a cultural context that legitimized the practice of human exhibitionism as a genuine, post-Enlightenment method of educating citizens about the natural world. Furthermore, so-called “Indian Exhibitions” …

The Amazing Adventures Of Bob Brown: A Real-Life Zelig Who Wrote His Way Through The 20th Century [Table Of Contents], Craig Saper

Biography

“A cross between an intellectual biography of this literary dynamo and a picaresque novel. Bob Brown has found a sensitive, insightful, and appreciative biographer who knows not only how to narrate (and condense) his amazing adventures but also how to draw the connections that make this overflowing life of letters seem all the more meaningful and significant in our era of digital multimedia.” —Louis Kaplan, Professor of History and Theory of Photography and New Media, University of Toronto

When Ink Turned Into Bullets: The Effect Of The Press In Buffalo, New York And The Nation Along With Its Role In Igniting A Civil War, Nicole C. Kondziela

History Theses

The American Civil War was a multi-faceted conflict: North versus South, states’ rights versus federal law, slavery versus abolition. Due to increasing and constant advancements in technology, this was the first war in American history that developed in full view of the public through newspapers. The Industrial Revolution and capitalism allowed the press to evolve into rich and powerful soap boxes for political bosses and editors alike to voice their opinions far beyond the village square. Unbeknownst to much of the public at the time, the Union had been at the mercy of newspaper editors and politicians in a grand …

Movements, Music, And Meaning: A Comparative Analysis Of Cultural Narratives In Vietnam Era And Post-9/11 Anti-War Music, Jonathan Nathaniel Redman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the presence of widely circulating cultural narratives in the lyrics of approximately eighty anti-war songs from the Vietnam and post-9/11 eras. Unlike prior movements and music research, this thesis privileges culture over movements and views movements as cultural antennae both picking up on trends and cultural narratives, and broadcasting their own altered cultural meanings back into the “cultural airways.” It sees music as a cultural medium which acquires cultural meanings from its surroundings, alters those meanings, synthesizes new ones, and perpetuates old ones. Drawing on comparative and narrative analysis approaches informed by grounded theory techniques, this thesis …

Small Houses, Big Ideas, Caroline Jean Winn

Student Scholarship

Architecture is the unavoidable art form.It permeates everyday life and wholly shapes lifestyle; it reflects culture and location as well as the economic power of a region. At its core, architecture is a testament to its surroundings, its design naturally requiring a series of decisions regarding space, form, and use – decisions born within a crucial and telling social context, decisions that quickly reveal the social climate of an era. Indisputably, architecture serves as a lens through which scholars can peer into a time past.

In the course of this thesis, I will examine how the designs of half …

Do-It-Yourself Girl Power: An Examination Of The Riot Grrrl Subculture, Lindsay Wright

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

No abstract provided.