American Popular Culture Commons^™

Moving The Goalposts: American Sports Coverage In Newspapers And The Construction Of Gender, Race And Sexuality In The Olympics In 1928, 1932, 1936., Jacob Havers

All Theses

This thesis takes an in-depth look at the media coverage of women in the Olympics in 1928, 1932 and 1936. Specifically following the track athletes Kinue Hitomi, Louise Stokes, Tidye Pickett and Mildred “Babe” Didrikson the thesis explores how by being athletic women they had their identities as feminine figures heavily questioned and scrutinized in newspapers at the global level. The harshest of these critics was often the American media, who held strict standards of race, gender and sexuality in the late 1920s-mid 1930s. They sought to uphold these standards at the global scale, and the American media’s interrogation of …

Gender, Age, Class And Racial Stereotypes, And Power Relations In Television Ads: 2011-13 Vs 2021-22, Thomas D. Clark, Julie Stewart

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This article demonstrates how faculty and DEI experts can use resources included in this paper to highlight how a range of stereotypes are created and reinforced in television ads, and it identifies several topics for future analysis. To understand how depictions of gender, class, age, and race intersect in 8 television ads featuring the relationship between the race of individuals depicted in romantic and platonic relationships this article examines 4 pairs of commercials from 2011-2013 and 2021-2022. Drawing on concepts of intercategorical complexity, it describes product, setting, characters and relationships to help gain a deeper understanding of how various stereotypes …

Will The Odds Ever Be In Her Favor? Katniss Everdeen And The Female Athlete, Tony Kemerly

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Autoethnography is a qualitative research method that allows the author to write in a highly personalized style, drawing on his or her experience to extend understanding about a specific issue. One subset of autoethnography, critical autoethnography, combines the narrative or storytelling aspect of autoethnography with critical theory approaches in order to gain illustrate for the reader a specific site of oppression within one’s culture. Through an examination of the books and films of The Hunger Games’ saga, this paper will examine the interaction between students and professor in regard to the journey of the female athlete through the power …

Media Literacy, Education, And A Global Pandemic: Lessons Learned In A Gender And Pop Culture Classroom, Jessica Lowell Mason, Ebehitale Imobhio

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks writes that “to engage in dialogue is one of the simplest ways we can begin as teachers, scholars, and critical thinkers to cross boundaries.” Hence, this paper explores, through narrative dialogue, teacher and student perspectives on the pedagogical impact of the global pandemic on the process of engaging with and learning about media literacy. By naming and narrating teacher and student experiences and perspectives from a course on gender and pop culture that took place during the Spring 2020 semester, the paper aims to demonstrate the …

Resistance, Race, And Myth: A Critical Survey Of American Popular Music Culture In The 20th Century, Scott Haden Church

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The topic of popular music in the United States has garnered much analysis from scholars, particularly how popular music has created or reflected American myths, collective memory, and racial politics. This essay is a review of select research on the interface between 20th century American popular music, culture, and power. The essay reveals that pop music scholarship is rooted in paradox. Hence, it focuses on three chiastic or antithetical themes permeating scholarship on the topic: Popular music as either cultural hegemony or resistance to that cultural hegemony; Popular music as fundamental to the American myth, or the American myth as …

Making The Case For Teaching Character Change In Complex Tv: The Closer And Major Crimes, Emily C. Hoffman

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Jason Mittel’s 2015 book Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling offers enough material to sustain a semester-long undergraduate course. Because of its approachability and students’ interest in discussing characters, his chapter devoted to viewers’ parasocial relationships and characters’ potential for change is among the most teachable. However, teaching complex television that relies on intensely serialized story elements can make choosing televisual texts for study and discussion challenging. Therefore, series that skew episodic yet still incorporate serial elements, like police procedurals, can prove to be a practical alternative for classroom study. This article describes how using the interrelated …

A Gendered Perspective On Policing Violence In Happy Valley And Fargo, T. Allen Culpepper

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Portrayal of a police officer determined to fight crime and execute justice in a harsh, isolated environment has become a television and film subgenre, often featuring women facing gender-related challenges. The issues raised in Sally Wainwright’s British television series Happy Valley, can be made more accessible, particularly to American undergraduate students, via its commonalities with the Coen brothers film Fargo. In both, a tough but compassionate policewoman pursues the more sociopathic of a pair of criminals involved in a botched kidnapping attempt instigated by an inept businessman, taking on the case for personal and professional honor, and as …

Grounded Aesthetics: Pedagogy For A Post-Truth Era, Becca Cragin

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

With the rise of cultural studies, positivism and formalism fell out of favor. But in recent years, altered versions of these methodologies have been suggested as solutions to the deficiencies of the ideological approach dominating the field. Where the ideological approach looks at the content of texts to determine their meaning, the aesthetic approach adopted by media scholars in recent years returns to the close textual readings of formalism (while abandoning its assertion that meaning resides in the text alone). Similarly, where the ideological approach tends to use textual analysis devoid of sociological empiricism, the use of “big data” in …

“If You Want To Be The Man, You’Ve Got To Beat The Man”: Masculinity And The Rise Of Professional Wrestling In The 1990s, Marc A. Ouellette

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This paper traces the relationship between the shifting representations of masculinity in professional wrestling programs of the 1990s and the contemporaneous shifts in conceptions of masculinity, examining the ways each of these shifts impacted the other. Most important among these was a growing sense that the biggest enemy in wrestling and in day-to-day life is one’s boss. Moreover, the corporate corruption theme continues to underscore the WWE's on-screen and off-screen coverage, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, the paper provides a template for considering a widely consumed popular cultural form in ways that challenge the determinism …

Seeing Is Believing: Observing Trans Spirituality Through The Smith-Waite Tarot, Phoebe Santalla

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

In 1909 the Rider Company published the Smith-Waite Tarot deck which featured 78 illustrated cards by Pamela Colman Smith. With heavy use of appropriated and ambiguous symbology, the Smith-Waite deck became a meditation tool for realizing alternative realities. By observing the history of the deck, analyzing Smith’s approach to illustration, and retracing the counterculture occult explosion in the 1970s, this essay argues that the Smith-Waite deck is an object the reflects the queered body and self. The modern, trans-contentious, Western political climate creates an environment that obscures the fact that transgender people exist beyond the medicalization of their bodies. To …

Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

English-language mass-market romance novels written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers and starring BIPOC protagonists are a small but important group. This article is a comparative analysis of how recent representations of diversity in this sub-set of the genre, specifically the character of the Black academic and the language of racial justice, compare with the first group of BIPOC novels that were published in 1984 (Sandra Kitt’s Adam and Eva and All Good Things as well as Barbara Stephens’s A Toast to Love). In Adrianna Herrera’s American Love Story (2019), Katrina Jackson’s Office Hours (2020), and …

A View Of Black Speculative Past And Future: An Interview With Tim Fielder, Julian Chambliss

Third Stone

No abstract provided.

A Guide For The Everyday Woman Surfer: How Surf Culture's Patriarchy Marginalizes Ocean Lovers, Alexis S. Di Stefano

Women's, Gender and Queer Studies

Humans are naturally drawn to the water by wind and tide. It is a place of solace that we have a desire to know deeply, yet we have kept one another from experiencing it through biases that perpetuate inequality. White-supremacist hegemony has historically kept communities of color from coastlines, women from lineups, and queer communities from participating in surf culture. As more people from all social groups return to the water through surfing in the 20th century, surf culture needs to adapt to become more inclusive. This paper outlines surf culture's historical transition into whiteness and how female beauty standards …

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Examining The Power And Privilege Of Escapism In Young Adult Literature And Its Culture, Stacey Watson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will explore the systematic biases embedded within this genre, highlighting the ongoing battle between tokenism and inclusive storytelling. Thesis will also emphasize the importance of this genre, its tight grasp on popular culture, and showcase positive representations introduced by new creators over the years.

Gender, Race, And Religion In An African Enlightenment, Jonathan D. Lyonhart

Journal of Religion & Film

Black Panther (2018) not only heralded a new future for representation in big-budget films but also gave an alternative vision of the past, one which recasts the Enlightenment within an African context. By going through its technological enlightenment in isolation from Western ideals and dominance, Wakanda opens a space for reflecting on alternate ways progress can—and still might—unfold. More specifically, this alternative history creates room for reimagining how modernity—with its myriad social, scientific, and religious paradigm shifts—could have negotiated questions of race, and, in turn, how race could have informed and redirected some of the lesser impulses of modernity. Similar …

The Gender Epidemic: Intersecting Disease, Gender, And Sexuality In A Graphic Novel, Autumn Cejer

All NMU Master's Theses

For my thesis, I wrote a graphic novel set in a world where certain people possess powers that society tries to suppress by viewing them as a disease. The story focuses on two super-powered individuals on opposite sides of the law who handle this oppression very differently. Although these characters would easily be able to overpower the non-powered people in charge, they are too afraid to do so. Internalized guilt from possessing abilities they did not ask for adds an additional layer of conflict, just as women and disabled persons are constantly made to feel like they should apologize for …

The (Mis) Representation Of Racialized Minorities: Barbie Dolls As Social Problems In India, Namrata Ashvinbhai Bhadania

English Faculty Publications

The relation between commodities and consumers is directly related to the transactional relationship between kids and their interaction with the toys. The paper aims to critique how female representation through Barbie Dolls in popular culture shapes female identity. Production and consumption of Barbie dolls in India became a way of socializing mechanism to educate young Indian girls on the concept of beauty. A notion of beauty is attached to blue eyes, skinny waist, and fair skin giving rise to “American Exceptionalism” (Madsen, 2009, p. 14), where the model nation conceptualizes itself though national identity where perceiver compels to transform themselves …

Straight Men Come Out: Queer Eye And The Path To A More Mindful Masculinity, Eli M. Roush

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

My thesis explores the culture surrounding the 2018 reboot of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy in relation to contemporary arguments in masculinity studies about the costs of hegemonic masculinity, performance, and identity. This paper examines how Queer Eye carefully creates space where heteronormative men can safely express emotional vulnerability and embody a more functional masculinity that expands beyond the bounds of hegemonic performance. The bulk of the analysis involves close readings of specific episodes and scenes from Queer Eye that introduce and examine the strategies the Fab Five use to redefine their subject's engagement with masculinity, explore the effectiveness …

Gender, Race, And Class In Various Aspects Of American Literature: A Portfolio, Harry Olafsen

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Harry Olafsen takes a closer look at various texts in American Literature, including women in 1960s country music, Us directed by Jordan Peele, and southern women's diaries from the Civil War.

The Cultivation Theory And Reality Television: An Old Theory With A Modern Twist, Jeffrey Weiss

Capstone Showcase

George Gerbner, a Hungarian-born professor of communication, founded the cultivation theory, one of the most popular and regarded theories in the communications world. Developed in the mid 20th century, the theory focus on the long-term effects of television on people. Longer exposure to signs, images and people on television cultivates their perception of reality in the real world. The television became a household staple during this time. Families often spent time together watching programming together, however, it played out different effects for each person. Television's constant visual and auditory stimulation on a person made it easier to cultivate certain messages, …

In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …

'Tomboy' Is Anachronistic. But The Concept Still Has Something To Teach Us, Lynne Stahl

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This article explores the tomboy trope in film and literature and the "taming" that characterizes it, framing both in relation to contemporary debates about gender and sexual identity as well as cultural anxieties around queer, trans, and nonbinary identity. Examining texts from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women to the 1980 film Little Darlings, the article argues that even while the term tomboy may be obsolete, tomboy narratives document processes of rebellion that hold continuing value.

“In The Beginning Was Body Language” Clowning And Krump As Spiritual Healing And Resistance, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In the neighborhood of HollyWatts in Los Angeles, dance allows a shift from existing as bodies presented as sites of threat and extinction to sources of spiritual empowerment. Clowning and Krump dancers—their subjectivity and their dancing bodies—negotiate survival from trauma and socioeconomic marginalization. I argue that the dancers’ performances act as embodied narratives of “re-membering in the flesh.” The performance acts as a spiritual retrieval and re-integration of traumatic memories and afflictions into memory through the body. Choreography and quotes from dancers support the claim that Krump and Clowning is “re-membering in the flesh” that enacts self-worth, self-defined sexuality, and …

"And Nothing She Needs": Victoria's Secret And The Gaze Of "Post-Feminism", Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

A study of the Victoria’s Secret catalogues, which frames the period 1996-2006, reveals that the models’ poses and postures manipulate the formulaic gaze of objectification with seemingly empowering themes. Instead of the indeterminate, averted looks that Berger (1972) and Mulvey (1989) considered in their analyses, the more recent versions of Victoria’s Secret photographs confront viewers with pouts, glares, and stares of defiance. In this essay, I contribute to current conversations regarding mixed messages that concern post-feminism and third-wave feminism (Duffy, Hancock, & Tyler, 2017; Glapka, 2017; McAllister & DeCarvalho, 2014; McRobbie, 2009). In this regard, the Victoria’s Secret catalogues constitute …

Sleight Of Hand: Gender, Performance, And (In)Sincerity In E. D. E. N. Southworth’S The Hidden Hand, Samantha Martin

Scripps Senior Theses

One of the many cultural anxieties that existed during the nineteenth century in antebellum America centered on the dubious status of authenticity of one’s emotions, gender expression, or socioeconomic class. The fluctuating socioeconomic landscape of antebellum America destabilized the logic of categorization, rendering it an ineffectual means by which to evaluate others’ identities. In her novel The Hidden Hand, or, Capitola the Madcap, E. D. E. N. Southworth explores instead of censures the transformative properties of the self, specifically in terms of gender and class. Her interest in this lack of authenticity, or transparency regarding one’s self and intentions, …

"Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, And Broadway Bodies, Ryan Donovan

Publications and Research

This article surveys how contemporary Broadway musicals cast fat women and focuses on Hairspray. The use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses figure into the discussion of fat stigma and casting practices. Seemingly body-positive musicals both celebrate and undermine the identities staged in them.

“Well, Don’T Walk Around Naked... Unless You’Re A Girl”: Gender, Sexuality, And Risk In Jamtronica Festival Subcultural Scenes, Kaitlyne A. Motl

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

The purpose of this study was to explore emerging issues surrounding gendered fear, threat, and violence perpetration at music festivals – particularly events that feature a synthesis of jam band and electronic dance music acts – a genre termed jamtronica by its fans. Though gendered violence perpetration and prevention have been widely studied within other party-oriented settings (i.e., sexual violence perpetration on college campuses), very little research exists to address how wider disparities of gender and sexuality permeate a community whose members frequently claim the scene’s immunity from external inequalities.

In this three-year multi-sited ethnography, I incorporate participant observations, group …

Not So Revisionary: The Regressive Treatment Of Gender In Alan Moore's Watchmen, Anna C. Marshall

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

While Alan Moore’s comic book Watchmen is often hailed as a revisionary text for introducing flawed superheroes and political anxiety to the genre, it is also remarkably regressive in its treatment of gender. Some critics do argue that women are given a newfound voice in Watchmen, but this interpretation neglects to examine character Laurie Jupiter adequately, or the ways in which other female characters' appearance and dialogue are limited and/or based on their sexuality and relationships with male characters. Watchmen's main female characters, mother and daughter Sally and Laurie Jupiter, lack autonomy and their identities are completely intertwined …

Breaking The Cycle Of Silence : The Significance Of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction., Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek)

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the feminist significance of Anya Seton’s historical novels, My Theodosia (1941), Katherine (1954), and The Winthrop Woman (1958). The two main goals of this project are to 1.) identify and explain the reasons why Seton’s historical novels have not received the scholarly attention they are due, and 2.) to call attention to the ways in which My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman offer important feminist interventions to patriarchal social order. Ultimately, I argue that My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman deserve more scholarly attention because they are significant contributions to women’s …

The Book That Made Me: A Girl, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this installment of The Book That Made Me, a series from Public Books reflecting on the books that have changed our lives, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner reflects on the freedom he received—to become a whole other person, in a whole other place—from an unexpected source.