American Studies Commons^™

Re-Masculating The Vampire: Conceptions Of Sexuality And The Undead From Rossetti's Proserpine To Meyer's Cullen, Emily Schuck

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

This paper explores the relationship between sexuality and the undead from Victorian England to present day vampire narratives. Specifically, I examine the shift in the vampire narrative from the frightening Dracula to the extremely sexualized nature of vampires in the early twenty-first century. My results are concerned with the nature and exchange of fluids between vampire bodies and their victims (or lovers) and the power associated with that exchange. My conclusion implies that re-masculating the vampire is a return to a patriarchal dominant discourse promulgates the heteronormative status quo, unlike their early predecessors, which tend to undermine heteronormative sexuality.

Beauty-Ful Inferiority: Female Subservience In Disney’S Beauty And The Beast, Jeremy Chow

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

The ubiquity of Disney movies has certainly transformed the American cultural landscape. The Disney zeitgeist manifests itself as generations of children actively seek Prince Charmings, unrealistic fairy tale relationships and the omnipotent, happily-ever-after. One such Disney favorite, Beauty and the Beast (1991), reveals typical Disney themes such as the power of altruism, the transformation of the anthropomorphic, and the catharsis of true love. Yet, under these benevolent-seeming Disney themes lurk more sinister, subliminal messages. Beauty and the Beast promotes female subservience and subjugation in addition to the glorification of abusive relationships. Belle, the female protagonist, embodies these gendered disparities and …

Godly Heretics: Essays On Alternative Christianity In Literature And Popular Culture, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

"When computers freeze, they are "rebooted" and soon working properly again. Similarly, legendary thinkers throughout history have argued that Christianity should start fresh by recapturing the humanitarian spirit of Jesus' original message. These include such disparate individuals as Thomas Jefferson, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, and the religious leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Surprisingly enough, even classic television shows and films meant to be entertaining--Lost, Battlestar Galactica, It's a Wonderful Life, Groundhog Day, Decalogue, and A Charlie Brown Christmas--are attempts to apply the basic principles of Christianity to modern times. …

Style Watch: Blackface Edition, Rashida Aluko-Roberts

SURGE

The above quote is from a statement/apology offered by Sebastian Kim, a photographer, whose recent editorial, “African Queen,” which featured a 16-year-old white female made to appear black, was marred with controversy. According to the photographer, dousing a young white female in deep bronze, accessorizing her in elaborate head wraps and heavy jewels (symbols that are often associated with Africa), was in no way an attempt to depict what an “African queen” looks like. Rather, his spread was attempting to showcase “the beauty aesthetic of his shoot” by using a “tanned or golden skin” model. [excerpt]

Cleaver, Oscar Payne, 1905-1996 (Mss 106), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 106. Miscellaneous papers related to the military and civilian careers of Hart County, Kentucky, native Oscar Payne Cleaver, who was a lighting expert and was instrumental in the development of night vision equipment. Includes a brief reminiscence about his lighting work on the film “Gone With the Wind.”

Ravelings (Fa 752), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Collection 752. Clippings of "Ravelings" column from "Harland (Kentucky) Daily Enterprise" and "Corbin (Kentucky) Daily Tribune" with collected mountain superstitions, customs, and folkways.

Walking Box Ranch Custodianship Quarterly Progress Report: Period Ending January 10, 2013, Margaret N. Rees

Walking Box Ranch

• UNLV provides stewardship of Walking Box Ranch (WBR) by providing a caretaker who oversees the property, facilitating use of the property by researchers and educators, developing a use and research policy for the property, and coordinating these activities with BLM and in accordance with TNC restrictions.
• UNLV currently addresses security issues for the property through the presence of the caretaker and two Metro Officers who reside on the property in two recreational vehicles.
• UNLV continues to work with BLM, supplying content for interpretation at the future Walking Box Ranch museum.
• BLM and UNLV visited the ranch on December 5th to …

Pinto, Chelsea (Fa 591), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 591. Paper, titled “Paul McCartney Wanted Dead or Alive”, written by Chelsea Pinto for a folk studies class at Western Kentucky University. Pinto details the urban legend surrounding the alleged death of Paul McCartney of the English rock band The Beatles, and his subsequent replacement by a “look-alike”. Pinto bases her conclusions largely on a small number of interviews conducted with Beatles fans.

Mike & Molly -- An Other World, Maureen Elizabeth Johnson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis explores the impact of the television show Mike & Molly on the modern debate related to fat in America. The thesis uses the work of Michel Foucault as well as disability scholars such as Lennard Davis and feminist scholars such as bell hooks to examine how a comedy show like Mike & Molly can further disenfranchise fat people in society. The thesis shows that fat makes people an Other in society, and television shows and other forms of comedy that mock those who are fat just reinforce that Other status.

Bodies Of Debt: Interrogating The Costs Of Technological Progress, Scientific Advancement, And Social Conquests Through Dystopian Literature, Melissa R. Ames

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

This essay discusses the successes and challenges of teaching a particular cross-curricular course that focused on controversial issues appearing in scientific research and dystopian literature. The course studied narratives that wrestle with ethical concerns surrounding “progress” (societal achievements, technological advancement, scientific discoveries, and so forth). Contemporary debates and specific issues addressed throughout this course included cloning, stem cell research, black market organ transplants, human trafficking, surveillance technology, euthanasia, and capital punishment. In alignment with research concerning best practices in teaching social responsibility topics, this course was centered on a set of inquiry questions that stretched across all units, texts, and …

Punk And Punk-Related Subcultures: Striving For Change And Always Changing, Elliot Chi Wang Fong

Theses Digitization Project

This study will explore academic constructions of punk subculture which overlook the complexities of punk discourses. "Academic punkism" perpetuates an idea of a monolithic and totalizing construction of punk subculture that derives from particular eras of mainstream punk culture.

Resisting The "Sound Of Muzak": Alienating Effects In Conceptual Progressive Music, Bryan Michael Mcculley-Mendoza

Theses Digitization Project

This study was to showed how popular music is used to create passive consumers driven by a need for instant gratification, rather than objective, active listeners. It then discusses how "conceptual progressive music", demonstrated my Porcupine Tree and Pink Floyd rebels against this mass culture nature.

Cleveland Jazz History, Second Edition, Joe Mosbrook

Scholarship Collection

Contents: What is jazz? -- Cleveland's earliest links to jazz -- The jazz age in Cleveland -- Art Tatum at Val's in the alley -- Duke Ellington in Cleveland -- Count Basie's Cleveland connections -- The big band era -- Central High School -- Freddie Webster -- Tadd Dameron --Meet Benny Bailey -- Cleveland jazz clubs -- Cleveland jazz guitarists -- The singers in Cleveland -- Boogie woogie piano -- "Modern" jazz -- Big bands of the 1950s -- The far-ringing 1960s -- Traditional jazz -- Resurgence in the 1980s and '90s -- Joe Lovano -- Ken Peplowski -- Other …

Gastrophilanthropy: Utopian Aspiration And Aspirational Consumption As Political Retreat, Patricia Mooney Nickel, Angela M. Eikenberry

Public Administration Faculty Publications

In this paper we inquire into the practice of gastrophilanthropy—the individualized consumption of food products under the aegis of philanthropic action. In particular, we examine the case of the philanthropic cupcake. By positioning gastrophilanthropy within the complex of consumption and social relations of power we attempt to shed light on why it has become so well accepted in society today and how the impulse to consume and the impulse to be philanthropic relate to each other and to the contemporary political moment. We question the transformative impact of gastrophilanthropy on those who practice it and on those for whom it …

Vaudeville, Popular Entertainment And Cultural Division In The Inland Empire, 1880-1914, Mark Hauser

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This paper discusses the emergence of vaudeville in California’s Inland Empire region of San Bernardino and Riverside counties. It will consider the social changes underway in late nineteenth-century America and their impact on attitudes towards popular entertainment. This paper will draw on Lawrence Levine’s observations of cultural hierarchies that emerged during the late nineteenth century and shaped American understandings of culture. Entertainment of the nineteenth century will be examined for the ways it was unable to match urban trends, and contrasted with vaudeville’s appeal to a diverse urban populace. The cities of San Bernardino, Redlands and Riverside were home to …

Reconciling The Consequences Of Modernity: College Football As Cultural History, Kurt E. Kemper

Research & Publications

Scholars have placed their examinations of college football's larger cultural significance against the backdrop of broader venues of conflict in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Most notably, the game as an institution has been used to interpret industrialization, masculinity, and race and civil rights.

There Is No Word For Work In The Dragon Tongue, Kevin Moberly, Brent Moberly

English Faculty Publications

The past decade or so has witnessed a relatively steady stream of scholarly interest in the mundane medieval—in labor, local economies, and their influence upon wider cultural production.¹ Despite this interest (and perhaps as a reaction to it), popular medievalism has continued to emphasize versions of the medieval that are decidedly more heroic—productions that are simultaneously (and paradoxically) more “realistic” and more “fantastic.” Labor plays, at best, a supporting role in these fantasies: while not absent, it rarely, if ever, has the same productive presence as it does in recent scholarly treatments of medieval economies. Inasmuch as popular medievalism …

Married, With Children And An Xbox: Compromise In Video Games Play, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) In a home with two children under six, managing to find the time and the games that allow for play with a partner who has completely different tastes and capabilities produces compromises both inside and outside the game, as well as a hybrid form that spans the two. This last point highlights the fact that compromise remains a popularly studied topic in considerations of games, but only within very discrete boundaries that do not necessarily have anything to do with play or with players. Said another way, compromise appears in studies that foreground games as promoting aggression and …

Profiles Of Selected Mormon Actors, J. Michael Hunter

Faculty Publications

“Profiles of Selected Mormon Actors” provides brief profiles of over 80 Mormon actors and actresses, including some biographical information and career highlights. This chapter appears in the first volume of Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon (Praeger 2013), a comprehensive treatment of Mormons and popular culture, providing an introduction and wide-ranging overview of the topic.

The End Of The Billy Goat Curse: Why Cubs Fans Should Let It Go, Jack Bales

Administrative / Professional Faculty Articles

The Friendly Confines have been decidedly unfriendly, lately. After Cubs owner Tom Ricketts unveiled his plans to renovate the 99-year-old Wrigley Field, few observers of the national pastime were surprised when die-hard fans objected. Ricketts in turn threatened to move the Cubs if his proposals were blocked, adding that “all we really need is to be able to run our business like a business and not a museum.”

How The Other Half Lives, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

This chapter from The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth describes the evolution of the culture that, today, is known as that of the Trump supporter, the red-state American culture descended from that of the Scots-Irish Borderers who came to the British colonies, primarily from Ulster Plantation, in the 18th century.

Urban Culture, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Encyclopedia entry on "Urban Culture" submitted for inclusion in the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, ed. by Joan Shelly Rubin (NY: Oxford University Press, 2013) 516-522.

The Cult Of Individualism: A History Of An Enduring American Myth, Introduction, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

Why do we have the Red State/Blue State divide in the United States today? This book traces the background of contemporary political strife to immigration from Ulster Plantation and the Scottish lowlands of the 18th century.

Some Kind Of Monstrosity: What Youth Ministry Can Learn From Heavy Metal, Jason Lief

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

This article brings Slovoj Zizek’s articulation of Pauline Christianity into conversation with Norwegian Black Metal (Gorgoroth) in order to demonstrate the subversive role of popular culture as it challenges the panoptic ideological power of the status quo. Through dialogue with elements of popular culture, like Black Metal, youth ministry is reminded of its prophetic function to challenge the powers of this age as it proclaims the monstrosity of the crucified and resurrected Christ.

Louis Armstrong, Gene H. Anderson

Music Faculty Publications

Despite his lifelong claim of 4 July 1900 as his birthday, Armstrong was actually born on 4 August 1901 as recorded on a baptismal certificate discovered after his death. Although calling himself “Louis Daniel Armstrong” in his 1954 autobiography, he denied knowledge of his middle name or its origin. Nevertheless, evidence of “Daniel” being a family name is strong: Armstrong's paternal great-great-grandfather, a third generation slave brought from Tidewater Virginia for sale in New Orleans in 1818, was named Daniel Walker, as was his son, Armstrong's great-grandfather. The latter's wife, Catherine Walker, sponsored her great-grandson's baptism at the family's home …

Mormonism And The Family (Forum), Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

When we speak of the family in Mormonism, the term can mean many things. There is an idealized Mormon family, the one described in church magazines, General Conference talks, and Mormon public service commercials. There is the family of the Mormon theological tradition, stretching endlessly off into the eternities, bound together with temple ordinances, the forever family of Mormon bumper stickers. There is another family, product of a more speculative bent in Mormon theology, which comes of an eschatological reading of the Abrahamic covenant, and which imputes to a temple-sealed Mormon couple the right to an endless seed, a posterity …

Unlocking The Paradox Of Christian Metal Music, Eric S. Strother

Theses and Dissertations--Music

In 1984, Stryper released its first album The Yellow and Black Attack and introduced audiences to a different kind of heavy metal. Instead of lyrics about sex, alcohol, and Satan, Stryper sang about Jesus, salvation, and God. While there were a number of fans ready for this change more were not. Members of the Church as well as members of the metal subculture were in agreement that Christianity and heavy metal were incompatible. Despite these objections, however, more bands emerged, and Christian metal became a significant genre within the Christian music industry. These bands presented Christian-oriented lyrics within the full …

Sundance Film Festival / Computer Generated Imagery / Video Game Industry / Battlestar Galactica / Pageants / Stereophonic Sound, J. Michael Hunter

Faculty Publications

Many people are unaware of how influential Mormons, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), have been on American popular culture. Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon parts the curtain and looks behind the scenes at the little-known but important influence Mormons have had on popular culture in the United States and beyond. Included here are six sidebars that reveal some of the more fascinating contribution Mormons have made to American popular culture.

Profiles Of Selected Mormon Athletes In Professional Sports, J. Michael Hunter

Faculty Publications

“Profiles of Selected Mormon Athletes in Professional Sports” provides profiles with career highlights of over 200 Mormon athletes in professional sports, including baseball, basketball, bodybuilding, boxing, football, golf, hockey, racing, running, volleyball, and wrestling. This chapter appears in the second volume of Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon (Praeger 2013), a comprehensive treatment of Mormons and popular culture, providing an introduction and wide-ranging overview of the topic.

A Midwestern Culture Of Civility: Student Activism At The University Of Northern Iowa During The Maucker Years (1967-1970), Christopher J. Shackelford

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This project examines the changing social dynamic of those affiliated with the University of Northern Iowa during the latter half of the 1960s, with special emphasis on student activism and the changing attitudes of administrators and community members. This project intends to use the medium of alternative newspapers as a central component in the analysis of the time studied and as an unfiltered voice of student dissent. By narrowing the focus of this project to an individual university and community, an intimate narrative emerges that acts as a testament of the overwhelming atmosphere of change that engulfed American colleges throughout …