Browsing by Subject "media studies"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item The Ideal Tourist: Power, Identity, and Environmental Privilege in Tourism Marketing(2021-10) Hamilton, JoyMany states in the U.S. are competing to attract wealthy travelers through magazines, commercials, and elaborate branding campaigns. To keep pace, governments increasingly employ corporate advertising methods that target ideal consumers. Using Colorado as a case study, “Ideal Tourist: Power, Identity, and Environmental Privilege in Tourism Marketing,” uncovers the content and circulation of tourism media and the public-private partnerships that drive taxpayer-supported tourism promotion and research. Although tourism offices view their work as apolitical, this project reveals that tourism media reinforce other systems of inclusion and exclusion and thus exercise political power in assigning worthiness to identity groups in relation to who can travel where and under what circumstances.Item Post-Gay Television: "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," Marriage, and Bullying On and Off Screen(2015-06) Elias, LioraThe 2000-era has been a momentous time for LGBT policy shifts. This dissertation is an interdisciplinary project on these policy changes in the areas of military service, marriage rights, and bullying in schools within the context of post-gay television. I take as a starting point that post-gay politics assumes that civil rights for gays and lesbians have been achieved and continued activism is no longer needed. Since the 1990s post-gay politics has gained currency within important modalities of discourse (news media, television, print media). I investigate a cluster of television shows in which post-gay themes suggest that equality for gay and lesbian individuals has been achieved. Drawing from media studies, feminist studies, critical race studies, queer theory, and cultural studies, this dissertation examines the television shows Army Wives (Lifetime), Modern Family (ABC), and Glee (Fox) as case studies for theorizing the ways in which media facilitates the emergence of post-gay discourse. It does so by situating these shows within the context of, on the one hand, government hearings and documents and Supreme Court decisions, and, on the other hand, the industrial and popular discourse surrounding these TV programs. Post-gay television is often comprised of conservative and assimilationist political values such as the desire for gays and lesbians to openly serve in the U.S. military, same-sex marriage, and "equality"� based initiatives to eradicate bullying in schools. These initiatives often mask structural issues such as the continued prevalence of homophobia in the U.S. Military, the assimilationist qualities of same-sex marriage, as well as the enforcement of heteronormativity and gender policing common in U.S. high schools. These series do not simply represent LGBT lives on screen; they also participate in fundraising and public relations efforts for issues like marriage equality. Following the call to move beyond the politics of representation, my dissertation provides a critical historical and contextual perspective on the way in which the implementation and repeal of policy legislation is productive of what I am calling the politics of norms. It also considers how these policy changes and their treatment on television are informed by post-gay discourse.Item Trans/materiality: Digital Media and the Production of Bodies(2021-11) Gentleman, RyeThere are many instances in scholarly writing and pop culture in which transgender identity is invoked as a metaphor for the fragmenting, decentering, and virtualizing effects of digital media and technologies, contributing to cultural tropes that imagine transgender people as unreal, futuristic, and unknowable. In response, this dissertation argues for an understanding of the link between digital technologies and the post-1990s iteration of transgender as a material, historical assemblage composed (at least partially) of media elements, bodies, and systems such as surveillance culture and big data that participate in processes of gendering and racialization. In attempting to rethink the trans/digital technology assemblage in a way that accounts for the material reality of trans bodies, practices, and lived realities and the material stuff of digital culture, each chapter engages with a specific material aspect of new media. Engaging with each of these different types of media necessitated using slightly different methods in each chapter including social research (primarily interviews), cultural analysis, and autoethnography. Karen Barad’s theory of Agential Realism, which proposes a posthuman model of performativity that takes into account nonhuman entities, is employed throughout the project. This makes possible a nuanced theorization of the trans body, one that does not stop at the enactment of gender at the body’s surface but also takes into account the way that trans bodies materialize in concert with a host of other matter, beings, and forces, including digital media and technologies. At times my analysis suggested that trans/digital encounters produce a productive trans friction that creates new possibilities for trans modes of being. At other times, my analysis suggested that trans/digital encounters result in transnormative efforts to eliminate friction. The variability of these findings exposes the incongruousness of the trans/digital technology metaphor which attempts to fix transness as a stable entity that can stand in for specific qualities of digital technologies and media. Instead, this project shows that transness is situational and that the relationship between transness and digital technologies is multivalent.