Cultural Genres Research Articles

Creative Misreadings of “Thai BL” by a Filipino Fan Community: Dislocating Knowledge Production in Transnational Queer Fandoms Through Aspirational Consumption

Creative Misreadings of "Thai BL" by a Filipino Fan CommunityDislocating Knowledge Production in Transnational Queer Fandoms Through Aspirational Consumption Thomas Baudinette (bio) While browsing the internet one night in late December 2014, I encountered a Thai television soap opera, or lakhon, named Lovesick: The Series. As a scholar of Japanese queer popular culture who investigates boys love (hereafter BL), a genre of homoerotic media produced and consumed primarily by heterosexual women,1 I quickly recognized that Lovesick conformed to the generic tropes associated with classic Japanese BL texts.2 Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had serendipitously stumbled upon an emerging genre of popular culture known in Thailand as "series wai."3 But in 2015, as I scoured the internet to learn more about this intriguing series, I came across English-language fan spaces on Facebook where Lovesick was being discussed as representative of a phenomenon that fans called "Thai BL."4 Curious, I began to observe these English-language fansites for "Thai BL" and determined that the majority of the people participating in the space were young Filipino men and women and that most sites were curated and administrated by Filipino men who identified as gay. In fact, the Philippines has emerged as an important space for fandom of so-called Thai BL, a point recently recognized by Philippine media.5 As I observed such fan sites over several years, it became increasingly apparent that the Filipino men and women participating in this fandom viewed BL as fundamentally Thai and that they actively attempted to differentiate it from what they called "Japanese yaoi."6 For these fans, BL was positioned as a form of Thai popular culture and was therefore understood to be categorically not Japanese. Previous work exploring the transnational circulation of BL has tended to advance theory which firmly centers Japan within its analysis, exploring how "culturally Japanese" products such as BL are adapted or "glocalized" to new contexts.7 Many of these studies draw upon Koichi Iwabuchi's seminal exploration of the transnational circulation of Japanese popular culture throughout East and Southeast Asia in the late 1990s.8 Iwabuchi develops a sophisticated [End Page 101] framework for understanding how the "cultural odor" of a product—that is, a product's recognizability and desirability based in its embeddedness or centering within a specific cultural context—plays an influential role in its reception. Iwabuchi further contends that the Japanese government has played an active role in bolstering the Japanese "cultural odor" of certain popular culture products such as anime and manga by essentializing what he terms Japan's "national brand."9 Throughout his scholarship, Iwabuchi calls upon scholars to "re-center" Japan within processes of globalization and to draw upon this re-centering of Japan as a space for critical reflection on the politics of transnational cultural flow. In so doing, Iwabuchi suggests, scholars can account for the influence of national producers on the reception of Japanese cultural products outside Japan.10 Iwabuchi's theories of transnational flow are useful in understanding the processes of adaption when a Japanese cultural product such as BL leaves Japan and enters a new national space. But Iwabuchi's theories become less useful for understanding how a glocalized product further transnationalizes and potentially develops new meanings and associations through this process. Iwabuchi's insistence on "centering" analysis on the point of production (i.e., Japan) thus fails to account for situations when the so-called cultural odor of Japan is diminished or even extinguished. Furthermore, Iwabuchi's emphasis on critical reflection based in "centering" analysis on Japan may lead one to conclude that consumers who fail to recognize the "Japaneseness" of a cultural product such as BL are somehow "mistaken." While I am broadly sympathetic to Iwabuchi's scholarly project, I am concerned by his criticisms of fans whose reading practices are positioned as "misunderstanding" Japan's role in the production of the texts that they consume. Like Bertha Chin and Lori Morimoto, I am also troubled by Iwabuchi's conflation of nation and culture and his lack of engagement with the intensely affective nature of fannish consumption.11 Taking inspiration from Eve Sedgwick's call to read data through...

ЖАНР РОК-ОПЕРЫ И ЕГО ВЫДАЮЩИЕСЯ ОБРАЗЦЫ В МУЗЫКАЛЬНОЙ КУЛЬТУРЕ ПОСЛЕДНЕЙ ТРЕТИ XX ВЕКА

The article reveals the features of rock opera as a genre of mass musical culture in the last third of the XXth century. On the example of two outstanding genre samples — "Jesus Christ Superstar" by E. Lloyd-Webber and T. Rice and "The Star and Death of Joaquin Murieta" by A. Rybnikov and M. Zakharov — the specifics of the plot interpretation, dramaturge organization, musical and expressive means and life forms of the work are considered. At the same time the author presents the background content of the two rock operas, the characteristics of their creators and the history of the first performance. The conclusion is drawn about their significance in modern mass musical culture. The media side of a rock opera is also emphasized, which tunes it to comparison with the art of cinema, establishing a connection between rock opera and musical, as one of the most popular and communicative genres of modern musical theater. The conclusions highlight the liveliness and innovation of the two works, which are an organic part of rock aesthetics. Both works introduce into the musical and poetic text "lexemes" the spoken language of youth as markers of the genre and attributes of belonging to rock culture. Until now, they are undisputed masterpieces of world popular music and stage culture.

Comic-book "Pride and prejudice" by Nancy Butler as an adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel

Comic book adaptations of classics have become more and more popular as a genre of mass culture. No wonder, that their creators turned to such a cult author as Jane Austen. In the article, the reasons of the interest to her novel Pride and prejudice by the mass culture, as well as by Butler, who wrote the script for the adaptation, are investigated. The types of the major transformations of the original are defined and the reasons of their introduction, either caused by such genre features of comics as dynamism, visual orientation, segmentation etc., or by the nature of mass literature are described. The comparative analysis of the novel and its adaptation shows that the adaptation lacks the specific style characteristic of Jane Austen’s work as the author’s commentary is reduced to its minimum. The description of everyday life, the psychological depth and plot complexity are contracted all the attention is focused on the love line, the episodes and characters not connected with Darcy — Elizabeth relationships are omitted. The portraits of the characters are drawn in the grotesque “Marvel” production style, which simplifies the characters making them “flat”. However, the adaptations of literary classics become a good way of popularization of the “high-brow” literature: the readers’ responses show that more than 60% of them felt urged to read the novel after getting acquainted with its adaptation.

АНТРОПОЛОГИЯ ПРОЛЕТАРСКОЙ ТЕЛЕСНОСТИ: ИДЕОЛОГИЧЕСКАЯ СТРАТЕГИЯ ПОТРЕБЛЕНИЯ СТРАДАНИЙ И СМЕРТИ В КУЛЬТУРНОЙ ТРАДИЦИИ АМЕРИКАНСКОГО ФИЛЬМА УЖАСОВ

Purpose. The article analyzes the strategy of sublimation of the corporeality of bourgeois pro-duction into the artistic tradition of the American horror film as a specific, visual mythology and psy-chosomatic consumer ideology of modern mass culture. Theoretical basis. The key methodology is the principle of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, psychoanalytic research, developed and tested by the team of authors in a number of scientific papers. The applied scientific and practical approach made it possible to carry out an original, complex, com-parative analysis of symbolic interpretations of the tradition of American horror films in various spheres of socio-cultural practice. Carried out interdisciplinary study of the phenomenology of horror, makes it possible to isolate ideologically significant images sublimated in more than a century of the tradition of American horror films. Originality. The anthropological mechanism of sublimation of the proletarian physicality formed in a bosom of classical capitalist production is opened. Its essence is the unconscious attitude to the perception of bodily suffering and death as inevitable and “natural” companions of the worker's production image and guarantee of its demand in the labor market. At the same time, intensive tech-nologization of production is accompanied by a sharp inflation in the value of physical labor. At the same time, the persisting attitude to bodily suffering requires the appearance of its new forms, displac-ing the “physical” into the “visual”. It was the American horror movies most adequately perform the social order of government and business, subliming bodily suffering in the most profitable art forms. This is how the figurative and symbolic mythology of horror films is constructed, which commercial-izes the artificially formed psychosomatic dependence of the layman on the consumption of bodily suffering and death. The active popularization of horror mythology visualizes the ideology of the “American way of life”, lobbies the practice of ousting competing cultural genres and traditions, and lays the foundations of westernized post – industrial civilization – post-human, post-teles and digital world. Conclusions. Under the conditions of widespread degradation of the production type of civiliza-tion, the technology of sublimation of active attitude to the world into visual forms of its consumer destruction was formed, the driving forces of which (collective in form and individual in ways of expe-rience) were American horror films. They most adequately represent a new artistic and anthropological reality, the contours of which are so clearly drawn by the human body, the exhausted profile of power and production standards.

Korea’s cultural industry clusters 20 years on: evolving policy and practice

ABSTRACT Since 2000 South Korea has implemented discontinuous local cultural and creative industry (CCI) cluster and development policies, especially in non-capital regions. The number of CCIs has increased, but to different extents in different regions, and labour productivity has improved. Disparities between the capital and non-capital regions have, however, increased notwithstanding the goal of balanced regional development. Challenges therefore remain. In future, more attention should be paid to cultural genre and local cultural specificity and to research and development and innovation capacity with a new policy scheme based on a quadruple helix approach.

The Semantics of Virtuosity in Genre-Stylistic System of C. Saint-Saëns’s Album for Piano op. 72

The Semantics of Virtuosity in Genre-Stylistic System of C. Saint-Saëns’s Album for Piano op. 72

Violin miniature in creativity by Liudmila Shukailo: features of the genre interpretation

Violin miniature in creativity by Liudmila Shukailo: features of the genre interpretation

The role of cultural production in celebrity politics: Comparing the campaigns of Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura (1999) and Donald Trump (2016)

This article draws out the significant similarities between the political insurgencies of Jesse Ventura in 1999 and Donald Trump in 2016, charting their own premillennial political collaborations as members of the Reform Party, before identifying wider lessons for studies of contemporary celebrity politicians through a comparison of their individual campaigns. Its analysis is based upon the concept of the ‘politainer’, introduced by Conley and Schultz, into which it incorporates Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the carnival fool. The heterodox nature of both Ventura and Trump’s political campaign styles, it argues, is in part explained by the nature of the cultural spheres within which their public personas were produced; specifically, the fact that these personas, which they carried over from the entertainment to political spheres, were produced within genres of popular culture generally positioned as having ‘low’ cultural value. This, it argues, furnished both with an anti-establishment ethos as ‘no bullshit’ straight-talkers, marking them as outsider candidates able to act as conduits for political protest by an electorate alienated from mainstream political elites. It concludes by emphasising the potential importance that political celebrities’ specific cultural production can play in shaping a subsequent political campaign in general.

Fascism at eye level

Fascism in our time is emerging not as a single party or movement within a particular nation-state but rather as a dispersed phenomenon that reverberates across the continent nested within the political contradictions of the European Union. Rather than focusing on a specific group to determine whether it is or is not “fascist,” we must look at how diverse parties and movements are linked together in cross-border coalitions revealing the political ecology of contemporary fascism and the intricate division of labor that sustains it. Underwriting contemporary fascism is an “illiberal” anthropology that can colonize every expression of identity and attachment. From the motifs and metaphors of diverse folkloric traditions to the countless genres of popular culture, fascism assimilates new meanings and affective predispositions.

A Conceptual Framework for Studying Evolutionary Origins of Life-Genres

The introduction claims that there might exist an evolutionary bridge from possible genres in nature to human cultural genres. A sub-hypothesis is that basic life-conditions, partly common for animals and humans, in the long run can generate so-called life-genres. To investigate such hypotheses a framework of interrelated key communicational concepts is outlined in the second, main part. Four levels are suggested. Signs are seen as elements in utterances. Further, sufficiently similar utterances can be perceived as kinds of utterances or genres. Genres are kinds of communication in a species' life-world. Utterance and genre are the framework’s key concepts. Both are seen as products and processes and as constituted by five reciprocal aspects: form, content, act, time, and space, the necessary elements to initiate and interpret communication. A model illustrates this integrative principle. Part three dwells with the idea of life-genres, and part four exemplifies and problematises how a chimpanzee’s ‘begging’ for meat, a fish’s nest-making, and kinds of birdsongs, could be seen as possible life-genres. The last, short part gives a brief summary, highlights challenges, and reflects over the framework’s relevance for biosemiotics.

Star Trek and Utopian future: race, gender and the cultural imagination analysis

Science Fiction as one of the popular culture genre, usually take theme about the future and utopias world. One of the popular sci-fi movies serial are Star Trek. The movies have so many issue talks about American dream, the dream of American’s utopia world as the better world for human being. The image of future society represented quit detail and well in these movies. How Star Trek give new perspective of future technology and how the American society in the future depicted in the movies will be discussed using American study theory and semiotic approach. The success of the movies brings the viewers to new world of Star Trek utopia. The world where human lived in peace and prosperity supported with high advance technology. DOI: 10.26905/enjourme.v2i2.2747

CONCEPT OF "SOUL" IN THE NARRATIVE-FANTASY OF VOLODYMYR ARENIEV "DUSHNYTSIA"

Problem setting. Fundamental scientific research on science fiction in contemporary literary criticism is rather an exception than a regularity. For a long time fantasy did not have sufficient scientific support, remaining just a genre of mass culture. However, lately, science fiction is seen not only as something purely entertaining. After all, it gradually develops: from the scientific object of separate researches (M. Nazarenko, A. Niamtsu, S. Oliinyk, O. Stuzhuk, etc.) to the theme of the great conference “Slavic science fiction” at Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University and later to the constantly acting (from 2015) research center of literature on fantasy at Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature in National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. There is also a trend from a single research to system ones. Therefore, in modern study of literature, the situation has improved considerably concerning proper understanding of this problem, but many aspects of science fiction need to be scientifically substantiated and explored.
 Analysis of the research. In our opinion among all modern Ukrainian fantasy writers special attention deserves Volodymyr Areniev (Volodymyr Puzii). However, there are few articles about his work. With the exception of the reviews (A. Rybalka on Bukvoiid, A. Shtefan on Chitomo or V. Chernyshenko on the Litaccent) or tangentially to a certain theme (Ovdiichuk L. “Chronotop as a genre factor in modern science fiction and fantasy for children”, Oliinyk S. “Book image in the fantasy world”, as an independent object, appeared in the researches of Oles Stuzhuk and Solomiia Khorob. Therefore, we see the actuality of this scientific article.
 Goal. To analyze the novel “Dushnytsa” by Volodymyr Areniev in terms of the functioning of the concept “soul”, which appears to be central in this work. It is also necessary to pay attention to the genre peculiarities of the existence of fantasy in the work of the chosen writer.

ЗАГОВОРЫ: МУЗЫКАЛЬНЫЙ ПОДХОД К АНАЛИЗУ НЕМУЗЫКАЛЬНЫХ ЖАНРОВ

The article attempts to analyse incantations (non-musical genres of traditional culture) with the use of modern studio hardware and software systems of audio editing, which allow considering the verbal segment as a sound multi-faceted information system. The technique of the comparison of the frequency characteristics of incantations melodic contour is stated. The author describes the principle of the occurrence of resonances by combining the timbre harmonics of human voice and acoustic environment. The principle of the detection of resonant frequencies and their influence on the object of the incantation are shown. The paper considers the interaction of the mid-frequency range of sound waves of acoustic environment and similar harmonics of the verbal part of the incantation.

Do Intersectional Variations Shape Prisoners’ Understanding of Their Past Lives? An Examination of the Stock Narratives of Persistent Offenders

Narratives have returned as an important resource for understanding how prisoners make sense of their lives. However, as a number of scholars have pointed out, these narratives do not emerge sui genersis; they are drawn from social constructs and cultural genres available to individuals. Using data gathered from a Life History Calendar and a modification of Canter and Youngs (2015) Life as a Film, we investigate whether the multiple locations individuals occupy (based on their race and gender) influence their narrative accounts and the contribution of both social structure and agency to these accounts. Our analyses of the narratives of 95 male and female persistent offenders’ (of whom 30 are Black and 65 are White) reveal the structural disadvantages, and advantages, they had experienced as well as the narrative tropes they deemed to be culturally relevant given their race and gender.

ОСОБЕННОСТИ РАННЕСРЕДНЕВЕКОВОГО ЭПИЧЕСКОГО ТВОРЧЕСТВА АРАБОВ


 
 
 The article is devoted to the most interesting phenomenon in Arabic literature - tribal legends, included in the Arab medieval literature called “Ayyam al- Arab” (“Days of the Arabs”). Oral narrative is an incomparable genre of Arab culture. Containing folklore origins and genetically related to the epic, it is at the same time quite distinctive and distinctly separate from other literary genres. The prose of Days, as well as poetry, is a work of high art with its own laws and its own poetics. And considering that for a long time, Arabic prose has not received proper development, the appearance of Ayyam Al- Arab should be regarded as one of the sources of historiographic prose, actually as the beginning of narrative prose in the history of Arabic literature.
 
 

El corrido mexicano en tiempos de YouTube: memoria colectiva, agencia cultural e hibridación en el caso Ayotzinapa

Se estudia la manera en que el corrido mexicano que circula en YouTube, en tanto modalidad híbrida de cultura popular subalterna para la construcción de memoria colectiva, se incorpora al repertorio subversivo de las protestas transnacionales contemporáneas por la justicia social. A partir del caso de los 43 estudiantes de Ayotzinapa, y basados en la teoría narrativa de Paul Ricoeur, se identifican elementos de permanencia y cambio en las formas de agencia cultural que surgen de las apropiaciones digitales del corrido que proveen de memorias alternativas al discurso oficial.

Why It Matters that Black Men and Queer Women Invented Digital Remix Culture

Why It Matters that Black Men and Queer Women Invented Digital Remix Culture Abigail De Kosnik (bio) Black men and queer women invented digital remix culture. In the mid- to late 1980s, Black men developed and popularized digital sampling, a technique of extracting segments from existing recordings and using them to form the musical tracks of hip-hop songs. In the 1990s, queer women founded and populated the first wave of online fan-fiction communities. While many non-Black and nonmale people have made significant contributions to sampling, and nonqueer and nonfemale people have participated heavily in fan production, digital sampling and fan fiction gave rise to the remix culture that has proliferated and thrived on the internet primarily through the creative labor of minority musical and fiction artists. The first digital sampler was invented in 1969,1 but sampling as a production technique began to reach mass audiences in the second half of the 1980s, when groups such as Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, Boogie Down Productions, N.W.A., the Beastie Boys, De La Soul, and [End Page 156] Run-D.M.C. incorporated as many as "20 or 30 clips in each song,"2 with some clips lasting only a few seconds.3 Over the melodies and rhythms constructed from these samples, rappers laid down their rhymes. Sampling introduced the acts of copying, cutting, and mixing to everyday culture, simply by being employed so heavily in the first wave of rap and hip-hop music. The sound of hip-hop consists of sampling plus rapping, and although many cultural critics and fans initially concentrated their attention on the mechanics and impact of MCs rhyming over beats, it was the beats—made of digitally copied and edited samples—that taught millions of people to accept that new, original media texts could result from older texts being chopped up into bits and the bits combined in unexpected ways. Because hip-hop as a genre helped define the cultural zeitgeist of the late 1980s, Black male artists' sampling innovations wove digital remix into popular aesthetic experience. By the time the World Wide Web launched in 1991, hip-hop had already proved that making and sharing remixes were among the most exciting and rich artistic practices that digital media could facilitate. Both official and fan producers issued a plethora of mixes, versions, and edits of films, television series, music recordings, video games, and other media forms that circulated online starting in 1991, but this cycle began with the technological advancements and marketplace triumphs of early hip-hop groups. Margie Borschke argues that "remix" is a term that scholars and journalists took up from the music world and applied very broadly to all digital transformations; she warns that "remix is neither new nor [exclusively] digital."4 Following this line of thinking, I assert that sampling can be viewed as the bridge between the audio remix styles that predated the internet and remix as it is widely understood today—that is, as a term that describes a wide range of cultural genres made with "cut/copy/paste technologies" and shared online.5 Remix culture was not born on the internet and is not restricted to the internet, but remix culture does thrive on the internet, and it does so largely because sampling-based music enjoyed enormous popularity just before the internet became a publicly available resource. Fan fiction's influence on contemporary digital remix culture may be more disputed, because fan fiction is still widely perceived as subcultural. However, fan fiction should be understood as a mass media format, not a marginal one, given that every month thousands of writers publish tens of thousands of new stories on fanfic sites, where millions of people read and comment on them.6 Fan fiction texts such as E. L. James's Fifty Shades (based on Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels and Summit Entertainment's blockbuster Twilight movie series) and Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments (based on the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling and films by Warner Bros.) have been [End Page 157] issued as best-selling novels and adapted as films and television series. The popularity of these texts suggests that fanfic's...

Sociocultural environment of the innovation in françois-francois Joseph Gossek’s Grand Symphony in c major

Sociocultural environment of the innovation in françois-francois Joseph Gossek’s Grand Symphony in c major

Произведения Александра Марданя в контексте „новой драмы”

The article attempts to allocate and analyze the most essential characteristics of plays by A. Mardan's, a popular Russian-speaking Ukrainian playwright, and to inscribe his work in the context of the dynamics of the phenomenon of the new drama. The attempt of the author is to understand a complex post-Soviet reality in order to reflect it in the artistic space of the drama. The plays demonstrate the destruction of habitual human values, including moral, ethical, aesthetic, and other norms that guide people in life. At the same time, his plays exploit the techniques and elements of various genres of mass culture. One may say that certain principles have become an integral quality of Mardan's plays such as the approach of the plays to the truth of life, the external everydayness, the use of elements of documentary theater and the theater of absurd, the construction of the plot with an eye for entertainment or scandalous intrigue, philosophical overtones and the author's attitude to the depicted world. This indicates that his plays may be regarded as works of ‘the new drama’ that occupy a worthy place in the contemporary Russian-language drama of the post-Soviet period.

ЦИРК ЯК ПОЄДНАННЯ МАСОВОГО ТА ЕЛІТАРНОГО МИСТЕЦТВА В СИСТЕМІ СУЧАСНОЇ КУЛЬТУРИ

The purpose of the article is to substantiate the possibility of considering circus and circus art as a specific space for combining mass and elite cultures. The research methodology was based on the system approach, which allowed for using the synergetic principle of interpreting complex and dynamic self-organizing systems, which include the cultural life of modern society. Attention was drawn to the fact that analyzing circus according to the “elite-mass” scale is a rather difficult task as circus art is not fully adapted for mastering the mass consciousness. Circus art can be called less mass but not elite. The main criterion that unites all “mass” types of art is to be found in dynamism and repeatability of the same elements and formulas, from which, above all, arises an emphasized easiness of perception. Circus art is seen as a multi-aspect and socially significant phenomenon of culture, relevant to the genre and specific potential of mass culture, which, at the same time, satisfies the criteria of elite culture. In this sense, circus is characterized by a sociocultural duality; that is, the penchant of circus for mass consciousness on one hand and the elitism of the artist’s craft on the other are the basis of its dynamic, progressive development. Circus genres available for elite and mass reception are clownery, pantomime, sketch, acrobatics, eccentricity, attraction, etc. At the same time, elitism is associated with the specificity of circus acts based on mechanical and technical effects. The scientific novelty of the work consists in the integral comprehension of circus as an art phenomenon which is characterized by a synthesis of mass and elitism. The definition of possible boundaries of the elite and mass through the example of specific circus performances or acts requires further research. Conclusions. It was concluded that modern culture has the level of development which is oriented towards a mass and elite consumer. Circus art, on the one hand, as the art of high culture is of great importance to the consumer who can perceive it. On the other hand, circus art adapts itself to a mass person. With that said, at every stage of its development, circus offers a mass option, which is necessary for the society, as circus satisfies the needs of its audience to the fullest extent.