Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

A Rhetorical Analysis Of 13 Going On 30, Brynn Olverson

Schultz-Werth Award Papers

The film 13 Going on 30 is an iconic and nostalgic film for many, but more specifically for young women emerging into adulthood. This film is best classified as a coming-of-age film. Thirteen-year-old Jenna goes through the process of turning thirteen years old and emerging into middle school. Jenna craves to be accepted by the cool girls and is blinded by the idea of popularity which in turn ruins her lifelong friendship with her neighbor and best friend Matt. Jenna’s life was turned upside down when she woke up thirty years old, living in her thirty-year-old body, and working her …

The State Of Women In The Media: Representation, Coverage And Framing Of Women In East African Media, Aga Khan University, Graduate School Of Media And Communications

Graduate School of Media and Communications

This research examined the representation of women in East African news media organisations and the coverage and framing of women in top East African newspapers, TV and digital platforms. The study is premised on existent literature on the intricate interplay between media framing, coverage dynamics, and the representation of women in newsrooms’ workforce, given the consequential role all these play in shaping public perceptions of gender issues and shifting norms. Through a comprehensive methodology that incorporated content analysis, document analysis and interviews on the responsibilities and assigned roles of women in media organisations, the research presents findings from a content …

Divided Crowns: An Ideological Criticism Of Self-Black Determination And Conflicting Visions Of Wakanda In Black Panther, Alaya E. Hubbard

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Using an ideological criticism of Hollywood’s Black Panther (2018), this paper analyzes the differing portrayals of the self-Black determination of the film’s main characters, T’Challa and Killmonger, as it relates to their backgrounds, cultural connections, racial identities, power dynamics, and their fights for social justice. Aspects of the film that were analyzed included characters’ actions, dialogue, lore, and presence. Digging deeper into the film’s story once key themes were revealed. This examination included parallels to the real-world, including locations, social movements, and social reformation leaders. The goal of the paper is to show how the film offers insights into broader …

The Regenarrative: How To Change The Story In Order To Change The Future, S. Rose Bigheart O'Leary

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Abstract

In the era of Climate Change, many are concerned that the end of the Anthropocene, or the end of the era of human life on Earth, is upon us. Western European colonialism and its subsequent systems (settler-colonialism, colonial-capitalism, and globalization - sometimes termed “neocolonialism”) have all been implicated in contributing to unsustainable behaviors linked to accelerating climate change. In searching for possible solutions, some have called for listening to Indigenous Peoples, citing ethics of sustainability found among many Indigenous cultures. However, the cultural products of settler-colonialism are still dominant in ways that do not allow for Indigenous worldviews to …

Dishes Of Yesteryear: Memories, Stories, And Representations Of The Past Within Food Media, Diana Willis Bottomley

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

In 1963, Julia Child revolutionized cooking television. Child’s The French Chef, which ran for ten years on the Boston public television station, WGBH, changed how American’s viewed, produced, and consumed food. And in the sixty years since Child’s debut, food media has grown in scope and popularity, increasingly altering how we communicate identity in and through food and foodways. In this dissertation, I examine the relation between food, media, and memory, with particular attention to: how the past moderates the connection between food and identity; how food media produce a sense of place integral to identity; and how food …

Nostalgia, Satire, And Subcultural Capital At The Drive-In: Examining Horror Host Joe Bob Briggs As A Cultural Intermediary, Lisa Ellen Williams

Funded Scholarship

This article explores how journalist, cult icon, and Shudder host Joe Bob Briggs has used visual and verbal rhetorical devices to become a fixture in genre subcultures. Created and performed by John Bloom, the Briggs persona utilizes traits of past successful horror hosts while also implementing his own astute knowledge of film history and theory to confront questions about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste in film. Even though his work has been controversial, the evolution of his use of satire and parody has sustained his position as a cultural, or a subcultural, intermediary and transmedia celebrity. This article presents a variety …

Mula Sa Editor (Disyembre 2023), Rowell Madula

Malay Journal

Nilalaman nito ang pambungad na mensahe ng mga editor para sa isyu.

Off The Rails: Cinematic Trains As Technological Controls Of The Natural World, Trinity Thompson

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Short train rail lines across the United States are seeing increased national funding to reduce toxic chemical spills caused by train derailments, the most notable of which happened in February 2023 in East Palestine, Ohio. A year prior, the film White Noise (2022) featured a similar toxic train derailment incident, taking place, too, in Eastern Ohio, and featuring actors from the town of East Palestine. In considering other films featuring trains, I identified a pattern of environmental conflict, leading me to question the relationship between trains and the natural environment as portrayed in popular cinema. To conduct my research, I …

The Crusading Days Of Jackie Stewart: Evaluating The Development Of Safety In Motor Racing During The 1960s., Alex Twitchen

Journal of Motorsport Culture & History

This article critically evaluates the contribution of Jackie Stewart in making motor racing a safer sport for competitors. It challenges the validity of the popular assumption that Jackie Stewart by himself developed a ‘culture of safety’ that transformed the sport. Instead, the role of other individuals are identified alongside the importance of three social processes. These processes are identified as the changing balance of power between different masculine identities, the development of commercial sponsorship and a growth in the coverage of the sport on television.

The development of motor racing from the 1960s onwards as a safer sport in which …

Book Review: I Was A Nascar Redneck: Recollections Of The Transformation Of A Yankee Farm Boy To A Southern Redneck In The Golden Era Of Nascar And Beyond., Quinn Beekwilder, Daniel Dean

Journal of Motorsport Culture & History

No abstract provided.

From Patriarchal Stereotypes To Matriarchal Pleasures Of Hybridity: Representation Of A Muslim Family In Berlin, Rahime Özgün Kehya Dr

Journal of Religion & Film

Sinan Çetin’s blockbuster Berlin in Berlin (1993) is a Turkish-German co-production. In contrast to certain representational tendencies with German orientalism or Turkish occidentalism, it deconstructs the intersectional structures of migration, religion, and gender. The portrayal of religion in films about Turkish-German labour migration is a kind of cultural narcissism often projected into national cinema by denigrating the faith of the other and glorifying one’s own religion. However, perspectives at such intersections are critical and require sensitivity in filmmaking, as films can create prejudice or help build peaceful relationships around these sensitive issues. The paper employs discourse analysis in linking Derrida’s …

Icons In Lyari: Resonance, Visibility, And Global Blackness In An Indian Ocean Port Town, Zehra Husain

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This doctoral dissertation studies the resonances of boxing, football, and rap music in Lyari Town, a working-class neighborhood located in Pakistan’s commercial port city Karachi. Based on 12 months of in-person and remote ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation traces the circulation of iconographies of Blackness and global sports as they sediment in a port town on the Indian Ocean. Lyari has long been in the news for gang violence and urban strife, but is also noted for its talented boxers, footballers and more recently rap musicians, some of whom are of Afro-Baluch descent. These “two faces” of Lyari Town informs its …

Women's Interracial Friendships: Cultivating Coalitional Possibilities Across Difference Through Dialogue, Akie Fukushige Wenk

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation, I thread through the macro-structure as well as micro-operations of hegemonic ideologies, namely white-supremacist capitalist cis-hetero patriarchy (hooks, 1995, Valdes, 1996), that has historically plagued the United States, eventually gaining a global reach over time. I center interracial friendship between Black and White cis-women, where I locate coalitional possibilities that begin at the grassroots level. I situate this interracial relationship within the socio-ecological system where the personal meets the social (including racialized backgrounds). I use a series of analogies to equate these ideologies as toxins in the air, water, and soil. Soil is where we can work …

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

The Student-Teacher Romance Film Genre: Hollywood's Historical Representation Of Abuse Of Power, Darby Gilliland

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite vast literature analyzing films that depict romantic and sexual relationships between young students and their teachers, scholarship has yet to explicitly call this category of films and television a genre. The purpose of the present thesis is to define the student-teacher romance film genre and identify patterns that make it up as a means of illuminating the genre’s exploration of abuse of power in the classroom. I use a historical-generic methodology and gaze theory as a framework to conduct this analysis. I identify three distinct eras of the genre and analyze films from each time period. The first era …

Mixed Speak: Towards A Re-Poetics Of Race And Self, Celina Mizuki Ohga Samuelson

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

This paper tells the stories of mixed-race Japanese people. I engage in a re-poetics, positing storytelling as an essential tool into complicating our understandings of race and self. I examine the relationship between language and race, exploring how subjects existing within a space of mixedness navigate identity-formation and racial belonging. Operating under a socio-constructivist lens, I begin with a brief re-telling of the history of race in Japan, re-framing mythologies of race throughout literature, legislation, and into national and colonial projects. While popular discourse alleges Japan was and is a country of racial homogeneity, I argue that this falsifies colonial …

Remembering The Future: Wild Time And The Cosmic Imagination, Arabella Thaïs

Journal of Conscious Evolution

Entropy – the Second Law of Thermodynamics – is generally held to prove “time’s arrow”: that time is linear and unidirectional, and that the universe is following this trajectory. This paper presents a preliminary exposition into a new, integral ontology of time in which time is hyper-dimensional, non-linear and flows in both directions. This is supported through trans-disciplinary praxis at the intersection of aesthetics, cosmology, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory. The metaphysical implications of reverse causality are investigated, and confer a teleological universe that is coherent with the paradigm of an intelligent, self-realising cosmos in which beauty is a fundamental …

Salty: A Diffractive Inquiry Of Visceral Knowing And Embodied Aesthetics, Mei Ling Chua

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation takes a diffractive, onto-epistemological approach to everyday practices with salt in order to articulate an expanded understanding of meaning making and knowledge production. This research reckons with and challenges dominant modes of knowing that engage a Cartesian perspective to situate knowing as the exclusive domain of the mind in both form and topic of inquiry. This research acts simultaneously as both a direct practice of and metacognition about knowledge production by examining 1. the embodied (including sensory and emotional aspects) and 2. the relational (including interpersonal and socio-cultural) dimensions of experience as visceral knowing. This articulation of …

“For The Moment, I Am Not F*Cking,” I Am Tweeting: Platforms Of / As Sexuality, Jacob Johanssen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article develops the argument that digital platforms are significantly infused with originary (and unconscious) residues of the sexual. Drawing on Laplancheian conceptualizations of sexuality, I argue that the digital has always been sexual(ised) in itself – a process that precedes and exceeds the erotic or pornographic. For Laplanche, sexuality is constitutive of the human subject as such. Infantile sexuality is shaped and transformed in an enigmatic relation with the caregiver. Drawing on this model as an analogy, I claim that users are drawn to platforms because they (unconsciously) desire to return to infantile sexuality and a holding environment but …

Don’T Look Up: Hyperobjects And Bland Branding, Chloe Preece

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

Popular reviews of Don’t Look Up have been polarised, ranged from admiring to dismissive. This Netflix comedy satirises the difficulty of compelling the uninterested to care and the failure of government to tackle our imminent extinction. As such, we are left with the question as to whether it is still possible, in 2022, to find humour in a film about the end of the world? Ultimately, the film is the product of the discourse it satirises; the star-studded cast and their activist message is lost in a failure to hold to account those most responsible for global warming by focusing …

Identity And Perception Among Aspec Consumers Of Mass Media, Jericho Franke

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

The portrayals of sex and romance, as well as asexuality and aromanticism, in mass media can have a profound impact on the way asexual and aromantic media consumers view relationships and their own identities, and affect the perception and treatment of the aspec community as a whole. This study uses mixed qualitative methods of online discourse analysis and participant interviews to examine the how mass media has shaped the self-perception and life experiences relating to sex and romance among aspec audience members.

(Re)Constructing National Memory In Neoliberal Chile Through Patricio Guzman's The Cordillera Of Dreams (2019), Mica Barrett

Scripps Senior Theses

One of the most renowned Chilean exile filmmakers is Patricio Guzmán. Best known for his documentary work regarding the Allende years, Guzmán has continued to make films regarding his homeland in the decades following his initial exile.

The Cordillera of Dreams is the concluding film in a trilogy exploring the natural lands of Chile and their relationship to physical remnants of the human past. The initial and most renowned film in the series, Nostalgia for the Light, centers the Atacama Desert and Chileans’ relationship to the geography as a gateway to revealing artifacts of Chile’s recent history of genocide …

Editor’S Note, Deepak Shimkhada

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

This special issue of Monsoon is dedicated to the studies honoring the goddess traditions in South Asia. The onset of the Monsoon Season in South Asia typically commences in June and continues until late August and early September. The publication of this issue, therefore, has been strategically timed to coincide with that season, which is a vital source of sustenance for millions of individuals in this part of the world. This anthology consisting of five papers—written by scholars with expertise in the field of goddess and women studies—speak unequivocally about the goddesses or women for their strength, beauty, wisdom, and …

Constructing Jain Goddess Padmavātī In Gujarati Literature, Venu Mehta

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

Worship of the goddess Padmāvatī emerged more than a thousand years ago. This article explores three songs about her in Gujarati by Paṇḍit Vīrvijayajī (1773-1852). By analyzing the style and form of his work, one learns a great deal about devotional liturgies that commemorate goddess Padmāvatī’s protection of the Jina Pārśvanātha and, in turn, his protection of her.

Women’S Voices From History: Gond Rani Durgawati And Rani Lakshmibhai, Nandini Sengupta, Moupia Basu

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

Two strong women are compared and contrasted in this article. Gond Rani Durgawati (1524-1564) led a resistance movement in Jabalpur against the Mughal rule of Akbar. Rani Lakshmibai (1828-1858) organized the people of Jhansi against Sir Hugh Rose, an officer defending the interests of the British East India Company. Both women continue to be remembered for their bravery and their loyalty to the people they ruled.

Mai Bhago And Amrita Devi Bishnoi: Women Of Strength, Sowmya Ayyar

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

Mai Bhago (1670-1720), also known as Bhag Kaur, distinguished herself on the battlefield to defend the Sikh faith. Amrita Devi Bishnoi (d. 1730) is said to have sacrificed her life with 362 others to protect the Khejari trees in the Rajasthan desert. Both women continue to inspire social justice and ecological activism.

An Examination Of Gandhian Economic And Political Thought And Its Relevance To The Empowerment Of Women, Purnima Mehta Bhatt

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) sought to alleviate poverty and empower women. His commitment to nonviolence and the economic ideal of “small is beautiful” continue to inspire grassroots movements around the globe. This article discusses the Chipko movement of northern India, the protection of rain forests in Kerala’s Silent Valley, the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), and Medha Patkar’s valiant though ultimately futile attempt to save the Narmada River from a massive government damming project. The ongoing legacy of these movements can be found in AWAG, the Ahmedabad Women’s Action Group and Women’s Shanti Sena (Peace Force).

Indigenous Stitch-Arts Of India: Tradition And Revival In A Global Age, Punam Madhok

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

Stitch art allows for the creative expression and economic support of countless women throughout India. This article examines four notable styles: chikankari, flora and fauna stitched in white thread on fine white cotton, rabari, the stitching of mirrors into colorful cloth, phulkari, resplendent flowery motifs sewn into shawls in Punjab, and kantha, Bengali patch work yielding quilts and seating mats. In addition to describing each technique, this article discusses how women have been economically empowered through this art by such organizations as Self-Help Enterprise (SHE) in Kolkata and Adithi, a women’s cooperative, in Bihar.

Identities Of Women In Indian Art And History, Nalini Rao

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

The stereotypical image of Indian women portrayed in the art of stone sculpture is often interpreted as images of beauty that are sensuous, religious as well depict social life. There are historical reasons for depicting her as such. This paper inquires into the changing depiction and social forces that influenced feminine imagery. This paper examines the portrayal of beauty through idealization of female body which has evolved over the centuries in India. It also aims to understand their changing status and explores issues of feminine identity, status, and empowerment largely in ancient and medieval India. It also provides a brief …