Browsing by Subject "Cultural Studies"
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Item Casual Encounters: Constructing Sexual Deviance on Craigslist.org(2017-05) Reynolds, ChelseaDespite the prevalence of dating websites and hookup applications, mass communication scholars have largely ignored news coverage of sex in the digital age. Research about online sexuality has built on early theories of cyber identity, in which the Internet was conceptualized as a great emancipator. Online, it was argued, people could explore “disembodied” sexualities with little interference from offline reality. This dissertation builds a research line that investigates journalistic discourse about online sexuality using more than a decade of coverage of Craigslist sex forums as a case study. It also examines user activity on Craigslist sex forums, testing dominant theories of online identity. For journalists, Internet-mediated sexuality represents a compound moral threat. Since 2003, national U.S. newspapers have consistently identified the classified ads website Craigslist as a hotbed for sexual deviants — people whose sexual interests mainstream culture deems immoral or even illegal. Newspaper journalists call on police and government sources to frame Craigslist users as prostitutes, violent criminals, and cheating politicians. By relying on elite sources, news media surveil social deviance for the public. This is an outcome of normative reporting practices. Representational scholars have argued that media made by marginalized groups will provide more nuanced narratives than the mainstream press. But in stories about Craigslist sex forums, alternative media reproduce stigma about online sexuality. Popular LGBTQ and feminist online magazines describe Craigslist sex forums as catalysts for illegal and immoral activity. They sometimes privilege sex workers’ voices and cover the experiences of sexual minorities, but they contribute to the same deviance-defining discourse about Craigslist sex forums as does the mainstream press. Media across the ideological spectrum police social deviance and reinforce cultural norms — online and off. Mass media surveillance of online sexuality encourages people to surveil their own behavior online. Ads on Craigslist sex forums reflect dominant cultural norms about sex despite posters’ attempts to explore their “unusual” fantasies. The Craigslist Casual Encounters forum provides a productive outlet for people to fantasize about kink, non-monogamy, race, and sexuality. But it also reflects the politics of its white male user base. Sexism, homophobia, and gendered logics saturate the forums. Offline stigmas about sexuality bleed into online sexual expression. This dissertation theorizes the role of normalizing judgment in determining media representations of online sexuality. It offers perspectives from journalism sociology and cultural studies to help explain why media paint Craigslist sex forums as spaces that foster illegal and immoral sex. The dissertation concludes that online sexuality must be added to definitions of deviance in news. It problematizes theories of representations of sexuality by alternative media, and it demonstrates that online sexuality is deeply intertwined with offline identity.Item Fail Epics: Gender, Race, and the Narration of Institutional Failure(2016-12) Bashore, KatieEverywhere around us we see instances of institutional failure: government malfeasance, fraud and corruption in the banking industry, the collapse of mass access to higher education, home foreclosures, rising rates of poverty and houselessness, swelling prison populations, and failed military endeavors, among other examples. One can argue that the crisis management strategies engineered by various statist and imperialist entities in light of recent disastrous events create the conditions under which institutions face erosive restructuring. While valid, such an analysis does not allow us to explore the complex ways that people grapple with these circumstances. “Fail Epics” is invested in developing a cultural study of institutional failure, the narration of which is integral to how subjects see themselves as part of their political modernity. As such, I argue that the story we tell about institutional failure is just as important as the contexts from which it emerges. My work critiques the rhetorics through which we name and assess institutional failure. It explore how the languages of injury, loss, abandonment, and betrayal, so commonly used to articulate failure, liberalize the themes of precarity that have long animated the lives of the racially and sexually marginalized: the poor, criminalized, undocumented, and unprotected. To broadly attribute the precarious nature of life is not merely to trespass on these histories but to occult them, rendering certain, minoritized experiences of and reactions to institutional failure something wholly unrecognizable, even uncanny, to contemporary formulations of injustice. In turn, I contend that the narration of institutional failure reproduces normative notions of violence and injury that, nevertheless, do not go uncontested. This dissertation illuminates the ways that vernacular representations of institutional failure—in popular political nonfiction, television, and news media—implicitly center particular experiences that do not allow us to more robustly examine the traumatic effects of power or the politics by which lives come to matter.Item THe fantasy of Asian America : identity, ideology, and desire.(2009-07) Kim, Chang-HeeThis dissertation reconsiders the extant critique of Asian American identity politics in Asian American literary studies. The intellectual "war of position" initiated over claiming the legitimacy of Asian America has been articulated in the combined terms of both race and gender. I argue that the way in which the war of position is articulated in the binaries between nationalist and feminist critiques and between race-bound identity politics and non-identity politics is a misguided framework for understanding the point at issue in Asian American literary studies. The intra-racial anxiety about the identity-based politics of Asian America originates not so much in the identitarian distinction between the real and the fake or between the good subject and the bad subject; rather, it is attributed to a discursive gap in the self-affirmation of "what Asian America is" within the larger framework of American nationalism. This gap results from the variable extent to which Asian Americans make their dynamic relationship--namely, both resisting and collaborating--with American nationalism in relation to which Asian America came into being both autonomously and subordinately. Within the contextual framework, this dissertation explores the way in which the stereotypes of Asian Americans operate as fundamental to the constitution of both Asian America and white America. I make use of psychoanalysis as a methodological tool to analyze the dialectical dynamics between Asians in America and the gaze of white-centered American society where the exotic presence of the former evokes the desire and anxiety of the latter simultaneously. Within this framework, this dissertation collects some representative cultural products of Asian America as touchstones of Asian American representation. I consider the collection an ideological matrix of the symbolic reality that constitutes the uneven relations of our lives in terms of race, gender, and sexuality and takes them for granted. Simultaneously, this collection shows how both white and Asian Americas negotiate with each other to attend to both intra-racial and inter-racial anxiety and trauma caused by their racial, cultural, sexual, geographical encounters at various levels of different historical and political contexts.Item Hungry for More: Anthony Bourdain and the Cultural Valorization of Chefs and Cooks(2016-08) Bergh, JustinFood, food media, and celebrity chefs make up an increasingly important element of the cultural industries. The craze is not altogether new, but the cultural relevance and ubiquitous appearance of chefs in all forms of popular media is a relatively recent phenomenon. Anthony Bourdain, although by no means the first celebrity chef in the era of cable television and omnipresent chef personae, did introduce a new and important image of chefs in the culinary media industry, what I call the “chef underground.” For this brand of chef the kitchen represented an escape from mainstream culture and values. The kitchen was not a sight for self-promotion or entrepreneurism, but rather a space that allowed for a prolonged commitment to subcultural participation. The kitchen was, and is, of course, a space of labor exploitation. Yet, for those travelers in the chef underground the kitchen allowed for the development of a transient existence, relatively free from outside scrutiny as well as normative notions and expectations of workplace and lifestyle behavior. By identifying and detailing the alternative social and cultural dispositions of the chef underground in his writing—and aligning himself with them—Bourdain at once managed to construct a unique anti-establishment media persona for himself as well as render the once nebulous group of outsider chefs and cooks legible in mainstream consumer culture. This dissertation investigates the cultural influence of the new archetype of chefs following Bourdain’s rise to prominence. In the midst of a broad cultural valorization of chefs and cooks, the promotion of Bourdain’s anti-establishment persona through multiple mass media created a new popular image of professional chefs. The previously unglamorous career of working in a restaurant kitchen was transformed into a cool and authentic occupation and subcultural formation. This dissertation explores the cultural significance of this re-articulation of chefdom by employing multiple methodological approaches in order to understand how the re-presentation of chefs and cooks after Bourdain’s rise to fame has affected the everyday lives of individuals working in contemporary professional kitchens and influenced the broader culinary and media industries.Item Magic, Madness and Mud: The Progressive Realism of Premchand, Manto and Chughtai(2018-12) Durham, EmilyThis project takes up the question of Progressive Realism through the essays and short stories of three seminal authors: Munshi Premchand, Sa’adat Hasan Manto, and Ismat Chughtai, which circulated in journals during the years immediately preceding and following independence, a period of intense debate about the role of literature regarding the emerging nation. This dissertation explores the ways in which these three authors sought to engage new publics through their work while at the same time complicating some of the most prevalent ideas about nationhood and national belonging. Through close readings of these short forms which made up the majority of social commentary during this period in India, along with the work of critics like Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Namwar Singh and Jean-Luc Nancy, this project seeks to look beyond the usual commentary on Progressive Literature as for or against leftist propaganda and instead focuses on the ways in which the devices of an innovative and unique realism brought into print social actualities that had never before been expressed, and which continue to have a profound impact on the social and political debates happening in India today.Item Marketplaces of remembering: violence, colonialism, and American innocence in the making of the Modoc War.(2012-02) Cothran, Boyd D.Marketplaces of Remembering: Violence, Colonialism, and American Innocence in the Making of the Modoc War explores the intersection of cultural history and critical indigenous studies with special focus on historical memory, historiography, and popular representations of American Indians. It focuses on the historiography of the Modoc War (1872-1873), California’s so-called last Indian war to explore the complex and oftenoverlooked relationship between how Natives and non-Natives alike have remembered incidents of U.S.-Indian violence and the marketplaces – the systems, institutions, procedures, social relations, and arenas of trade – within which those remembrances have circulated. It argues that individuals have shaped their historical remembrances of the conflict, transforming an episode of Reconstruction Era violence and ethnic cleansing into a redemptive narrative of American innocence as they sought to negotiate these marketplaces. My aim in looking at these cultural and commercial associations is to delve into the question of how, since the nineteenth century, they have been directly related to the widespread belief that the Modoc War and other incidents of U.S.-Indian violence were ultimately justified and the tendency to view the westward expansion of the United States within the framework of inevitability. The dissertation locates American capitalism and colonialism at the center of our understanding of both violence in the American West and popular representations of the American Indian experience. Moreover, it breaks new methodological ground by reading traditional memory studies sources (e.g. novels, plays, commemorations, reenactments, memorials, and speeches) along side less orthodox memory studies sources (e.g. pension files, local histories, and promotional literature) to produce a materialist interpretation of historical knowledge production. Above all, it seeks to show how the Indian wars of the nineteenth century did not end with the cession of hostilities in 1873, 1890, or 1898, but have been reproduced through the marketplaces of remembering U.S.-Indian violence.Item The politics of personal information privacy for the Facebook Age - towards an articulation and assemblage theory of PIP(2014-05) Weise, LarsLocated at the intersection of privacy studies, media studies, and cultural studies, this dissertation challenges the notion of post-privacy and radical transparency. It argues for the reinvigoration of the political dimension of personal information privacy and challenges readers to scrutinize the ways in which journalists, politicians, Facebook officials, and scholars alike make it more difficult for ordinary people to define and negotiate for themselves the meaning and relevance of their personal information privacy. The first chapter looks at seven years of journalistic reporting, Facebook's data use policy as well as The White House Guidelines for Consumer Privacy. I argue that journalists, Facebook officials, and politicians alike overemphasize individual user control and technical options as solution to the complicated relationship between PIP and Facebook. I criticize that journalists make no or only superficial attempts to connect Facebook's privacy policy to larger contextual factors - either political, cultural, or economical. The second chapter investigates the economic dimension of the PIP discourse and examines more closely Facebook's SEC statements, Facebook's quarterly business reports as well as other internal documents, and newspaper articles from the The Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine. I argue that journalists provide a one-dimensional and trivializing account of the economy. The chapter demonstrates how journalists and prominent scholars help to perpetuate the myth of the technological sublime and, in so doing, render themselves involuntary allies to Facebook's misleading rhetoric of individual user empowerment.The third chapter attempts to correct the mistakes above and suggests first steps towards an articulation and assemblage theory of PIP. The chapter outlines how such a theory relies on the ordinary and pragmatic tradition of cultural studies while simultaneously introducing the notion of accountability for information. The final chapter applies the articulation and assemblage theory of PIP to the college class room. It discusses the foundations of a new PIP pedagogy, introduces a number of guidelines and exercises for the classroom, and discusses a variety of readings that address the issue of PIP in a network culture. The chapter culminates in a syllabus that is designed with a college class room in mind.Item (Re)membering the Madrid Movida: life, death, and legacy in the contemporary corpus.(2010-06) Garcés, Marcela TheresaMy dissertation explores the legacy of the Movida, a cultural renaissance that took place in Madrid, Spain from 1976-1986. I examine a series of cultural products that have contributed to the legacy of this fundamental moment in contemporary Spanish history, including museum exhibits, documentaries, novels, and feature films created between 1999 and 2007. I argue that the memory of this moment is constantly evolving, creating a series of narratives about the life, death, and second life of the Movida. The resurgence of commemorative efforts about the Movida serves a number of purposes. In certain instances, the Movida is viewed through the lenses of nostalgia, mourning and melancholia. Generally, the Movida serves as a place of memory on which many people dwell. In other instances, the moment of the Movida is used for the process of working through the past. Other products I consider transform the memory of the past, sometimes offering critical perspectives about how the Movida is remembered via the concepts of pastiche and postnostalgia. Still others utilize the past as an inspiration for the present or the future, creating a "Removida" by mobilizing the concepts of parody and kitsch to engage with the past. My analysis of these products demonstrates that in recent years, the Movida has been "re-membered" and given a new and distinctive form in its second life.Item Spectral materialisms: colonial complexes and the insurgent acts of Chicana/o cultural production.(2011-07) Watson, Cathryn MerlaThis dissertation uses an interdisciplinary lens to theorize the multiple ways in which contemporary forms of Chicana/o cultural production disturb and extend beyond specific "colonial complexes" or seemingly ossified compounds of time and space. Specifically, I examine how Chicana feminist theory in conjunction with Marxian and poststructuralist theory; the literary work of Bárbara Renaud González and Sandra Cisneros; the folklore of La Llorona; the urban legend and social performance of San Antonio's Ghost Tracks; and the visual art of the collaborative Project MASA (MeChicana/o Alliance of Space Artists) disrupt, redistribute, and surge beyond colonial cartographies, re-imagining and enacting alternative horizons of possibility or decolonial imaginaries. I ground my study in San Antonio, Texas, whose Chicana/o cultural production and neo-colonial geography has received scant scholarly attention, to bring to the fore both the specificity of colonial legacies and to connect these legacies to larger neo-colonial (trans)national geographies. I engage and extend diverse theorizations of the ghostly--or, that is, the contingent and ephemeral structures of desire, difference, history, lived experience, and memory--to bring into purview how colonial legacies inhere in the present and collectively enunciate what I term a "spectral materialism": that which is profoundly felt and experienced, but not necessarily visible or intelligible through language. I further argue that although this spectral materialism is animated by particular cultural and socio-spatial logics, it also gestures toward a more general embodied form of knowledge production that acknowledges the ways in which the ostensibly immaterial always already imbues the material world. This dissertation, finally, intervenes in Chicana/o, Latina/o, and American Studies through critiquing the dialectic (a dominant analytic for ascertaining meaning from cultural production) as a binary colonialist ontology that severs the material from the immaterial, as well as articulates a more supple, complex, and inductive analytic for understanding how Chicana/o cultural production generates meaning through lived experience and indexes the potential for other postcolonial futures.Item A Tale of the Digital: Governing China with Data Infrastructure(2023-06) Liu, KevinThis dissertation is about how data technologies become an “infrastructure of governing” in contemporary China’s pursuit of socialist modernity. The research is situated in China’s current endeavor of utilizing “New Infrastructure” for national governance, and of achieving an enhancement of the state’s governing capacity through digital technologies. It describes the “structure of feeling” of digital governance, which I argue is emerging as a new Chinese governmentality. The research critically contextualizes today’s digital endeavor within China’s modernization history, and with detailed case studies focusing on one of China’s eight National Data Hubs—Guizhou Hub, it reveals how data technology has become and is still becoming an infrastructure for the Chinese state’s governance of its people and the Chinese people’s understanding of their everyday lives. I argue that through what I call “state-commercial complexes” and “infrastructure of feeling,” data technologies become the undergirding networks of power that sustain a mode of digital governance. The research combines theoretical interventions of infrastructure studies, governmentality, and media studies. It provides “thick descriptions” of the political-economic arrangements, local institutional formations, and complex interactions among the central/local government, stateowned-enterprises, as well as domestic and international corporations in the process of Guizhou Hub’s emergence; It also unearths how these formations involve particularities of local, ordinary people as they live through the landscape cultural-scape transformation of Guizhou’s development of data centers and data technologies, and how these, in turn, produce contingent outcomes that shape and re-configure how data technologies are localized. With an interdisciplinary approach that combines historical, political economy, cultural and ethnographic analysis, this research showcases how national strategy and digital technologies are institutionalized and normalized on regional and local levels and thus become a symbiotic part of the local power network. It argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a new Chinese governmentality that—with datafication and dataismrevitalizes the socialist rationality of seeking full access to its governing subject. However, the localization of digital governance rationality is challenged by the very processes of its own implementation, as the infrastructurizing of data technologies inevitably involves contingent processes of localization where anti-hegemonic forces emerge.Item Tambien Bailamos en el norte: sonidero transnational, lives, and Mexican migrants in the Midwest(2014-06) Aguilar, RodolfoThe United States of America holds a legacy of xenophobic attitudes towards Mexican immigrants dating back to the massive repatriations of the 1930s. In response to anti-immigrant actions, Mexican immigrants have often turned to popular culture to document racial violence and labor exploitation. Currently, popular music serves as a means for Mexican immigrants to proclaim a cultural presence in the United States. Tambien Bailamos en el Norte is an interdisciplinary study incorporating ethnography and lyric analysis to examine the intersections between Mexican immigration to the Chicagoland area and the popular social dances known as sonidero. Sonidero dances consist of a Mexican Sonido (DJesque performer) with enormous sound systems playing popular música tropical such as cumbia and salsa for large crowds. Sonidero was born in the urban Mexico City barrios during the late nineteen-fifties when Mexican Sonidos used humble sound systems and Colombian cumbia records to host street bailes (dances). The pioneer sonidos of Mexico City provided Latin American rhythms to working-class residents originally restricted to elite Mexican socialites. The Sonido eventually incorporated saludos (shout-outs) delivered concurrently with the music. Sonidero's popularity expanded to the Mexican immigrant communities of the Chicagoland area and the rest of the U.S., due to accelerated waves of immigration during the 1990s and 2000s. This dissertation argues that sonidero enthusiasts engage in a unique Mexicanidad fusing Mexican nationalism with adopted Latin American cultural codes to create transnational lives in the Chicagoland area. Chicagoland sonidero enthusiasts challenge how scholars study popular music in U.S. Mexican immigrant communities because the Mexicanidad invoked in sonidero, conflicts with the long-standing musical traditions of rural northern Mexican corridos. I use this unique expression of Mexicanidad found in sonidero spaces and in the lives of my research subjects to theorize new ways of studying community formation, transnationalism, cultural citizenship, political economy, and mass communications among recently-arrived Mexican immigrants. In doing so, the participants of my dissertation demonstrate how Mexican immigrants cross cultural borders as well as geographical ones by forging transnational lives, linking Mexico City with the Chicagoland area.