Popular Culture Discourse Research Articles

The Joker’s Shifting Face: Eighty Years of Mad History in Batman and American Culture

That “grim jester with a twisted brain,” Batman supervillain the Joker reflects shifting social constructions of mental difference in the US across eight decades. The article reads Batman serial comics, graphic novels, and film against four key moments in Mad History: eugenics, psychiatric survivor activism in the 1960s and 1970s, the trauma discourses of 1980s popular culture, and the criminalization of mental difference in the twenty-first century. Out of this complex conversation four models of madness are derived: toxic reproduction, liberation, mad genius, and the conflation of madness with violent crime. These models work intersectionally: Joker’s madness, queerness, and exceptionally white masculinity engender each other. Because of his distinctive qualities as a visual icon, he makes Mad History more visible, too.

Drawing the lines: Studying the Common Man caricatures by R.K. Laxman to understand dominant political discourse around legitimate political contestations in postcolonial India

ABSTRACT The paper studies the Common Man political caricatures by R.K. Laxman, a staff cartoonist at the Times of India, to understand dominant political discourses in postcolonial India. It argues that constructs like the ‘common man’ and ‘vote bank’ through popular cultural discourse like caricatures have a critical impact on the political landscape of the country. While the former is associated with an urban English-educated middle class, the latter is used to denote the socially marginalised sections of the electorate voting en masse as a form of political assertion. The latter is perceived as an aberration in the modern secular democracy and its political voice is often delegitimised. Further, the former is associated with economic liberalisation, development and anti-corruption. The paper demonstrates how Laxman’s Common Man is a proponent and mascot of these in the popular imagination. Thereby indicating that the popular cultural archive has indeed had a visible impact on the political, economic and sociological cartography of the nation.

Mythologizing late Victorian tea advertising: the case of the Illustrated London News (1890–1900)

ABSTRACT Late-Victorian popular culture discourses around tea advertisements by companies like Lipton's Mazawattee, and United Kingdom Tea Company constitute an essential archive of Victorianism's ideological moorings. Following a revolution in Victorian tea retail, in the 1890s, tea advertisements became complex aesthetic performances of mythologizing and reconditioning the semiotics of Englishness rather than simply marketing tea for consumption. The visual impact of this mythologization was most conspicuous in The Illustrated London News. This paper examines how an elusive force, recognizable as gastromythology, cultured a set of royal, chivalric, aristocratic, domestic, gendered, and racial values familiar to English consumer psychology, in tea advertisements, published in The Illustrated London News between 1890 and 1900, that, albeit not authored by its staff, resonated with the tone and ideology of the self-commoditized weekly's journalistic commodities. This placed imperial advertisers at the helm of selecting preexisting subliminal tendencies and mythologems to replough them for visual consumption and paradigmatization by a mass-audience, in ways anticipating modern-day digital algorithms. The sociocultural impact of these advertisements is entangled with the semiotics of postcolonial Coca-Colonizations of consumer psychology, following a scheme of proselytization and parasitism with respect to national ideologies, while also introducing pharmakons and power-capillaries to that scheme.

The Fish Out of Water Myth in Popular Culture and Political Discourse

The Fish Out of Water Myth in Popular Culture and Political Discourse

Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates

Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates

ΓΙΑΝΝΗΣ ΠΑΠΑΘΕΟΔΩΡΟΥ, «Αλλά τους τρελλούς τους κλείνουν εις τα φρενοκομεία». Υπερρεαλισμός, ψυχανάλυση και ηθικός πανικός στη δεκαετία του ’30

“Crazy people should be locked up in the asylum”. Surrealism, psychoanalysis and moral panics in ‘30s. In this paper, I discuss the ways in which the reception of psychoanalysis through surrealism diffused into the wider social discourse of popular culture during the interwar period. My central argument is that surrealism in Greece was connected to intellectual and mental illness. Thus, the concept of "scandal" is inscribed in the rhetoric of “moral panics”, that "paranoid modernism" causes. The polemic against surrealism emphasized its relationship with madness and the “margins” of the literary canon. On the other hand, this “cultural blockage” became a very productive field for surrealist poets to gain their own artistic autonomy.

Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity

Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity

“Almost Like Family. Or Were They?” Vikings, Frisian Identity, and the Nordification of the Past

In the course of the twentieth century, the glorified image of Viking Age Scandinavia exerted an increasing attraction on intellectuals and nation builders in remote parts of Europe, especially those which self-identified as peripheral, marginalized, and ‘northern’. In the Dutch province of Friesland, the cultivation of a Frisian national identity went hand in hand with an antagonizing process of self-contrastation vis-à-vis the urbanized heartland in the west of the country. Fueled by these anti-Holland sentiments, the adoption of Nordic identity models could serve to create alternative narrative molds in which to cast the Frisian past. In this article, I will chart this process of cultural “nordification” from its initial phase in the writings of Frisian Scandinavophiles to contemporary remediations of Frisian history in popular culture and public discourses. In this context, special attention will be paid to the reception history of the pagan King Redbad (d. 719) and his modern transformation from ‘God’s enemy’ to beloved national icon.

So-Fire-Town: The representations of a translucent urban Black femininity in the Black press through the signatures of Dolly Rathebe in the 1950s

abstract This focus reads the multiple selves of Dolly Rathebe as represented in popular cultural discourse, particularly in Drum magazine during the 1950s. Black translucent femininity is a conceptual tool, I argue, with opacity and obscurity; afforded is the opportunity to engage Dolly Rathebe and her various representations with complexity, elasticity and multiplicity. This conception of translucent Black femininities allows room for reckoning with selves that would ordinarily not be considered complex and contradictory. I analyse the representations of Rathebe as situated within the popular cultural discourse structured by a white capitalist and heteropatriarchal prism contoured by Black masculinity. I explore pseudonymity as a tool of (re)creating a self and the layered selves of Dolly Rathebe. The self-fashioning of Rathebe displayed in various representations opens the possibility of depicting layered selves, and I intend to show the elasticity of the figure of Rathebe by reading these representations alongside each other. In this way I illustrate the layered and multiple selves that stretch from the primary self of Rathebe – particularly the self-fashioning of the figure of the romantic advice column ‘Dear Dolly’ which appeared in Drum. It is also in the navigation of the various traces of the name Dolly, derivative of the name Dorothy, that I expand on the multiplicity and translucence of urban Black femininity represented by Dolly Rathebe. This informs expansion from singular and flat stereotypical representations to multiple and translucent representations, thus illustrating the elasticity of urban Black femininity as depicted in popular cultural discourse.

The pact with the devil or the alliance that did not exist. 1939 and the two variants of relations with the Third Reich in Poland’s contemporary historiographical and popular discourse

ABSTRACT In the interwar period (1918–1939), Polish political decision-makers focused on ensuring international security for the country that had regained its independence after the Great War. International relations became more sophisticated since the early 1930s and saw the Versailles order being challenged and weakened. The Polish policy of maintaining an equal distance between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union assumed the rejection of the idea of a Polish-German or Polish-Soviet alliance that would deprive Poland of self-reliance regarding the decision-making process and could provoke one of its neighbors to attack. By rejecting German offers presented starting in the autumn of 1938 (the annexation of Gdansk to the Third Reich, the construction of an extraterritorial highway running through Polish Pomerania, or most importantly, accession to the Anti-Comintern Pact seen as an action against the Soviet Union), Poland decided to defend its sovereignty and independence by establishing military alliances with Great Britain and France. In the twenty-first century, the majority of Polish historians have emphasized the impossibility of a ‘pact with the devil’ (an alliance with a totalitarian regime that held international law, rules of democracy, and human laws in contempt), the lack of possibilities for alternative alliances (no alternative for the Polish-British-French alliance) or the negative consequences thereof, with the possible pact between Berlin and Warsaw seen as an alliance between Gulliver and Lilliputians. However, for 30 years, the so-called counterfactual history has been coming to the forefront, with its supporters claiming that in late 1938 and early 1939, Poland should have seriously considered and even agreed to the offers presented by Germany. The main aim of this article is to analyze this historical and popular cultural discourse held by professional historians, journalists, and other publicists in contemporary Poland.

Representing, repressing and pushing back: Queer and trans (in)visibilities in media, law and culture

The increasing focus on non-normative gender identities and sexual orientations in cultural discourses creates a paradox for LGBTQIAP* communities. On the one hand, increased visibility paves the way for greater tolerance in the general public; on the other hand, it may also suggest the logical fallacy that on-screen representations mirror off-screen realities. This article argues that the hyper-visibility of queerness in media maintains and legitimizes existing, cis-heteronormative sociocultural orders that are reflected in legal developments. Further, the (popular) cultural discourse about queerness adds to its continuing normativization. The ‘mainstreamification’ of queerness risks cementing legal inequalities for LGBTQIAP* persons, leaving queers vulnerable to discrimination while popular discourse is able to imagine an emancipated queer subject on-screen.

Metallica the state/Metallica the war machine: A Deleuzoguattarian analysis of the world’s biggest metal band

Metallica has offered a diverse catalogue of music and breadth of performance over their careers. As a band occupying an integral cultural placement as measured by both level of fame and influential import, many academic inroads have been opened to their work, career and music. These lines of inquiry, along with more general lines of inquiry into the genre of heavy metal itself, frequently position Metallica as the unofficial ambassadors of the music. However, despite the depth and breadth of research devoted to these areas, an underdeveloped opening exists when it comes to the potential parallels and connections between the music and actions of Metallica and the philosophical works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, specifically their notions of the state and the nomadic war machine. These theories serve as the basis of exploration in this research and provide new considerations and perspectives of both the career of Metallica and the larger implications to the study of popular music. The relations between Deleuze and Guattari and popular music offer many connections and examples, but the work of Metallica was selected as a representation of all of these connections as they are the ideal band from which to launch and develop these notions. Metallica is a group with clear distinctive phases to their career that fall within the concepts of the war machine (1981–91) and the state (1991–2008). While Metallica is not the only example of a band that falls into these dichotomous categorizations, they offer the best opportunity to define and clarify the connections to the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari. This can then be applied to other bands, genres of music and aspects of popular culture. Metallica is symbolic of this undertheorized connection to the works of Deleuze and Guattari. While these theoretical connections to the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari may not serve as the final piece to a full comprehension of the complexities of Metallica’s controversial career, they offer insights and open nascent pathways towards further analysis of the band. This is important because they have existed both on the fringes of marginalization and as a significant part of the discourse of popular culture.

Performing “Realness” in a Transnational Ethnic Imaginary: Starring Dilraba on Post-2010 Chinese TV

Abstract This research examines the rising and televisual mediation of Xinjiang ethnic minority female celebrities within Han-centric China’s heteropatriarchal, nationalistic cultural imaginaries in the post-2010 years. Specifically, my analysis focuses on one of the most popular Uyghur female TV celebrities in China, Dilraba Dilmurat. By identifying a popular cultural discourse of “transnational ethnic imaginary” surrounding her celebrity images, I explore the ways in which her geo-cultural-ethnic-gender identity has been capitalized on by the Chinese TV industry and subjectively performed by herself within official and popular fantasies about a global, harmonious China. Ultimately, I argue that her success as a TV star in the post-2010 years exposes the artificiality and contingency of the self-imagined dimorphism of the dominant Han Chinese and ethnic minorities within the party-state’s interethnic, transnational, heteropatriarchal-structured fantasies about a global China and a homogenous Chineseness.

Embodying beauty, desiring the world: dress and fashion in the 1980s’ China

ABSTRACT This article studies the popular fashion and everyday dress culture of the 1980s, China’s transitional period from planned economy to market economy. Drawing from film representations, fashion magazines, and media reports, I treat popular fashion as the meeting place of individual desire and social conditions, as a process of subject formation in constant negotiation with social demands and confinements. I argue that the salient imitative nature of 80s fashion reinforced individual’s connection with the collective, and such connection was often measured against localized imaginations of cosmopolitanism. The shift of focus from labor work to the cultivation of the mind, from production to life and consumption in popular culture and official discourse helped to justify the pursuit of beauty under the name of “Beautification of Life.” But the criteria of beauty in everyday dress was largely conditioned by a temporalized world order which valued the foreign (yang) as more advanced than the local (tu).

ELEMENTI POPULARNE KULTURE I NjIHOVA FUNKCIJA U „DORUČKU KOD TIFANIJA“ TRUMANA KAPOTEA I BLEJKA EDVARDSA

The present paper examines the novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote and its adaptation into Blake Edward’s movie within the framework of John Fiske’s popular culture theory. Popular culture is present in many aspects of our experience: books, music, food, travel, movies and other content that surrounds us daily. Broadly speaking, the term ‘pop- ular’ represent some of the ways of cultural modeling of consumer goods. According to John Fiske, popular culture is a culture of “subordinated” and “disempowered” who do not agree to be “submissive”. Instead, they actively oppose the social system by reinterpreting the offered goods, according to the requirements of their own needs. We interpret the novel as an expression of human experience modified into movie dis- course, so the interpretation of the novel (main text) and its adaptation into the movie (meta- text) provides meaning making, while discourse of popular culture represents production of meaning. The concluding remarks indicate that the elements of popular culture represent the socio-historical framework of the narrative, which aims to present the birth of the modern (American) woman – Holly Golightly in the megalopolis of New York City. Moreover, ele- ments of popular culture provide a framework for characterization and identity construction of characters and the city, becoming an etnosocioal testimony of the American culture in the 1940s and 1950s.

Popular Culture, Gender and State Socialism: Zhenata dnes Magazine

This article deals with the discourse of popular culture during the state socialism in Bulgaria and especially with the media aimed at female audiences. The Zhenata dnes (The Woman of Today) magazine is a starting point for the topic of what are the concepts of gender within socialism and are they changing. During the Cold War, there was a widespread belief that media were a direct reflection of narrow ideological norms. However, the example of Zhenata dnes clearly outlines the permeability and flexibility of topics related to the emancipation of women. The magazine openly publishes letters from readers, as well as analyses criticizing the government for the unhappy fate of women. Dissent, feminism and Western themes. The magazine was disliked and warned in the period 1966‒1980 that it had gone beyond the ideologically acceptable limits, but nevertheless it still exists. How did popular media targeting women create their image in the society of that time? How did the government want to build their image and how is it achieved in the magazine, thanks to the progressive positions of its editors and authors?

Trendy Monsters: The Nazis, the Perpetrator Turn, and Popular Culture

Trendy Monsters: The Nazis, the Perpetrator Turn, and Popular Culture

Jarrett, Simon, Those They Called Idiots: The Idea of the Disabled Mind from 1700 to the Present Day

Simon Jarrett has written a remarkable history of mental disability in England (with some evidence from France and the United States) from 1700 to the early twenty-first century. His focus in Those They Called Idiots is on both changing conceptualisations of ‘the idiot’, primarily in popular culture and legal discourse, and on the treatment of people considered ‘idiots’ over three centuries. Jarrett notes from the outset the expansion of the categories of mental disability over time and includes categories such as ‘imbecile’, ‘moron’, ‘moral imbecile’, ‘feeble minded’, ‘mental defective’ and the like, in his consideration of those they called ‘idiots’. Those They Called Idiots is divided into three parts, with nine chapters and an introduction. Part one contains three chapters, which focus on the long eighteenth century (1700–1812). In the first two chapters of Part one, Jarrett relies primarily on civil and criminal (‘Old Bailey’) court records (Ch. 1) and cultural artefacts (Ch. 2), such as joke books, slang dictionaries, art and caricature to argue that ‘those they called idiots’ were largely integrated into community and family life, and on some occasions could be considered attractive sexual partners, responsible and reliable workers, and generally harmless. In Chapter 3, Jarrett argues that as England expanded its colonial power throughout the eighteenth century, philosophers, explorers, bureaucrats, settlers and everyday Britons increasingly associated ‘idiot’ and ‘imbecile’ with peoples and cultures that they considered ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’. A racialised hierarchy of mental ability and ‘cultural achievement’ with the English at the top and ‘savages’ (‘idiots’) at the bottom developed over the course of the eighteenth century. By century’s end, ‘stupidity’ or a perceived lack of mental acuity and cultural achievement and refinement came to be seen as innate and intractable among certain groups of racialised peoples.

Introduction: Cultural Constructions of Race and Racism in the Middle East and North Africa / Southwest Asia and North Africa

In recent years, scholars in the fields of cultural studies, American studies, history, ethnic studies, and Middle East area studies have approached questions of race and racism in this geographic region with renewed critical vigor. Recent work deconstructing anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia in the Americas and Europe has put these patterns of discrimination into intersectional conversation with anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. New historical efforts have drawn attention to the legacies of slavery in the Ottoman, Persian, and Arab Empires, working to understand how forms of racialization and racial hierarchization predated and were exacerbated by the arrival of European imperial forces. At the same time, activists in the region draw attention to prevailing racism against migrant laborers, marginalized indigenous populations, and others as the afterlives of colonialism, war, austerity, and revolution carry on. Together, this academic and activist work asks for attention by leaders, community members, and scholars of this region to the particularities of racecraft in the region: How are “Blackness” and “whiteness” constructed in the Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish speaking worlds? What are the obstacles to discussing and identifying race particular to the histories of this region, its peoples, and its histories? This forum uses close readings of popular culture and political discourse across the Middle East and North Africa / Southwest Asia and North Africa (MENA/SWANA) in pursuit of these questions and others.

The return of Rosie the Riveter: Contemporary popular reappropriations of the iconic World War II image

The iconic image of Rosie the Riveter played an important role in American patriotic ideological processes during World War II. Aimed at the recruitment of women for wartime work, particularly in factories and traditionally masculine occupations, this representation of a woman in overalls and head scarf, with sleeves rolled up, showing her bicep and balled fist, declaring 'We can do it', has been a contentious point of discussion for its significance in feminist agendas since its first appearance. While building on, and playing to, the suffrage agendas of first wave feminism, the popular image of Rosie was transcended by second wave concerns about depictions of women in the workplace, such as those in films like Norma Rae (Ritt 1979), Silkwood (Nichols 1983), North Country (Caro 2005) and Made in Dagenheim (Cole 2010). But Rosie is making a comeback. The image has recently been appropriated in various ways and for various purposes - naively, ironically, satirically, as bricolage, pastiche and in sexualised portrayals - to represent contemporary women's issues and concerns, as well as arguably forming part of a backlash culture against feminism. Contemporary depictions have, for example, ranged from Hilary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, Malala Yousafzai and Beyoncé. This paper considers the development and transformation of the image of Rosie the Riveter and its contradictory (re)-appropriations in various contemporary popular cultural discourses. Keywords: feminist expression, Michel Foucault, gender roles, popular culture, Rosie the Riveter.