Mainstream Popular Culture Research Articles

Negotiating girlhood in rock music: Nandi Bushell, prodigy discourse and adult mentor-fans

Abstract Nandi Bushell (b. 2010) is a British-Zulu drummer and multi-instrumentalist whose early career has garnered much attention from audiences and the international music press. In this article, we investigate the case of Bushell as a point of entry for understanding children's participation in mainstream popular music culture and the broader public sphere. We explore Bushell's social media presence, creative output and public reception in relation to three interrelated themes: (1) the functioning of social media and the music press as arenas for the (re)negotiation of ideas about child prodigy; (2) child musicians’ political activism; and (3) the role of adult ‘mentor-fans’ in sponsoring girls’ participation in rock culture. In grappling with the complexities of these themes, we place a particular emphasis on querying how dominant conceptions of girlhood inform the press coverage of Bushell's music and social media output, as well as on examining her highly visible relationships with established male rock artists serving as mentors, fans and industry brokers. Ultimately, the article sheds new light on how notions of girlhood as a cultural identity are negotiated by young artists and their (often adult) audiences in relation to musical genre boundaries.

From Grinder to Nipper: Opera, Music Technology and Italian American (Self-)Representation

AbstractIn this article I argue that the longstanding practice of depicting Italian Americans as opera lovers stems from a tradition associating Italian immigrants with mechanical music devices. As a growing number of Italian unskilled labourers entered the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were stereotyped as street musicians, and especially as organ grinders, in mainstream popular culture. Beginning in the 1900s, recording manufacturers strove to make home phonographs appealing to the middle class by breaking the chain of mechanical, social and racial associations that connected the phonograph with earlier musical devices such as the barrel organ, and with those who played them. Because of the prominent marketing role that record labels assigned to Italian opera, this commercial strategy had important consequences for the genre as well as for Italian immigrants, who leveraged opera's renewed visibility and audibility into an effective vessel for social and political empowerment.

“Their Time, Their Moment, Their City”: A Critique and Black Feminist Reading of Harlem

This article analyses Tracy Oliver’s comedy series Harlem (2021) through the lens of Black Feminism. Invoking combined traces of Living Single (1993-1998) and Sex and the City (1998-2004), I contend Harlem aims to fill in the representation void that has erased Black women from mainstream comedies that are reduced to the white experience as it also aims to transgress the stigmatizing image of Black women in mainstream popular culture. In this manner, Oliver’s Harlem addresses several aspects of the Black female experience and shows the gendered racism Black women endure, such as racial stereotypes, medical mistreatment, or white women’s tears, among many others, prioritizing social accuracy and racial sensibilities through comedy as it follows the lives of four Black women in the neighborhood of Harlem in the twenty-first century.

Esther Fernández. To Embody the Marvelous: The Making of Illusions in Early Modern Spain

Esther Fernández. <i>To Embody the Marvelous: The Making of Illusions in Early Modern Spain</i>

Bastard Theatres and Human Dregs: Cultures of Illegitimacy on 42nd Street

This article uses newspaper and trade press archives to chart the evolution of the phrase ‘legitimate theatre’ in relation to theatres on New York’s 42nd Street that were built by 1920 and converted to moving pictures by the early 1940s. Various surrounding industrial and social tensions – the transition from live performance to movies, the derided status of exploitation and adult films, the perceived degradation of the area in the post-war era, and the drive for its wholesale redevelopment that gathered pace in the 1970s – are examined. The shifting implications of the term ‘legitimate theatre’ in this context, from an established industry descriptor to a means of moral judgement on these venues’ output and audiences, are thereby shown to illuminate the broader cultural and economic histories of the 42nd Street area, revealing a process of differentiation and exclusion from perceptions of mainstream popular culture that would eventually become weaponised to justify the demolition of the area for the purposes of corporate capital.

Reflections on a year of kink

Until relatively recently, the topic of kink has not typically been encountered in either polite company or mainstream popular culture. In response to this reality, this editorial highlights ways by which one scholar/photographer intentionally endeavoured to highlight, demystify and destigmatize kinky activities, relationships and representations over the course of a twelve-month period.

Of wife guys and family defenders: Towards a typology of 21st century celebrity husbands

ABSTRACT This article considers the cultural emergence and ramifications of two linked masculine cultural types: the ‘wife guy’ and the ‘family defender’. A cultural figure defined by an avowedly uxorious disposition and the public celebration of his spouse, the wife guy is a prominent exemplar of 21st century celebrity masculinity. This article argues that the wife guy typifies the strenuous lengths mainstream popular culture goes to negotiate the intractable ‘problem’ of the ambitious and achieving woman and to ratify couplehood as a safe harbour in a post-#MeToo mediascape suffused with heteropessimistic affect. First emerging to identify a social media influencer subtype, the term has accrued a more expansive usage and is now routinely applied to men operating at higher echelons of stardom. Overlapping in many ways is what we term the family defender, which marks a point at which an association with one’s wife takes on attributes that converge with toxic masculinity, justified through rhetorical claims centred on defence of the family. We see the wife guy and family defender as marking different points in a spectrum of masculine performativity operating within the heterosexual marital union. This article uses several celebrity case studies to chart different points on this continuum.

“Remember to breathe (but don’t make a sound!)”: constructions of childbirth in post-apocalyptic narratives

ABSTRACT The United States continues to favor heavily medicalized childbirth, an approach that strips agency from birthing women and contains higher risks of complications and maternal death, especially for women of color. Mainstream popular culture has also misrepresented heavily medicalized birth as safer than deliveries with fewer interventions. The rise of post-apocalyptic narratives has introduced a new lens on mediated birthing experiences. In dystopic realities, women deliver without the existence of functioning hospitals or practicing physicians. This paper uses a narrative analysis of pregnancy, labor, and birth on The Walking Dead (2010-) A Quiet Place (2018), and Bird Box (2018). Findings suggest that these texts reinforce a narrow image of pregnant women and present a distorted picture of the birthing process. Moreover, even in a dystopia, these constructions reinforce the medical model of childbirth. Overall, such narrativesKatie.Foss@mtsu.edu

Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and TV

Critiquing stereotypical depictions of Latinxs in American media has been a foundational practice of Latinx media studies, as well as in animating Latinx political consciousness more generally. In Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and TV, Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González take up this project to cover Latinx media representation from the birth of cinema through shifts to television and digital media up to the 2010s, or, as they characterize the text, a “roadmap through the history of our misrepresentation” (p. x). While they argue that “reel” Latinidad (the mainstream yet deficient depiction of Latinx identity on screen) “nearly flatlines a simplistic and racist reconstruction of Latinx subjectivity and experience” (p. x), they also collect examples of “real” Latinidad (depictions of Latinx identity they see as more accurate). By juxtaposing the “reel” with the “real,” they can not only critique, but also provide examples of preferable depictions, allowing them to emerge with a sense of optimism for the future of Latinx media representation should it follow this path.Positioned as an entry-level primer on the history of Latinx representation in US film and television, Reel Latinxs is structured around loose, thematic chapters (gender, children, comedy, the speculative), but operates more fundamentally as a kind of encyclopedia, with each chapter comprised of short sub-sections on a range of media objects. For instance, within the comedy chapter, the section on Latinx buffoons covers Cheech and Chong, Three Amigos! (1986), Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite (2004), and Nacho Libre (2006), tracing this character trope across different eras as it was invoked for different creative purposes. While these short segmentations don't allow for incredibly in-depth analysis of any particular film, the authors are able to draw value through linking these divergent media objects along conceptual lines, which allows them to cover much more, if at times cursory, ground.Indeed, the sheer number of films, characters, actors, and filmmakers compiled within this text make it a valuable scholarly reference source for those venturing into Latinx media topics. As the authors note, the prospect of defining Latinidad—both in fiction and in reality—is a challenge, since, as a multiracial ethnicity, they have no singular appearance, and in media tend to “swing on an ethnoracial pendulum between exaggerated presence . . . to absence” (p. 30). Thus, the authors take a generous approach in defining the scope of Latinidad, including not only the works of Latinx filmmakers and actors—whose specific nationalities and family histories have valuably been researched and noted throughout—but also Latinx characters played by non-Latinx actors. Additionally, Aldama and González provide compelling reads of coded, allegorical Latinidad signified by plot—dance, farm work, street racing—rather than the character or actor's identity alone. The resulting collection, erring on the side of inclusion, thus seems assuredly comprehensive in terms of potential Latinx media representation, making it a useful database for a variety of scholarly work.In support of the heavily segmented, legible structure, Reel Latinxs is written in a conversational tone, in which the authors freely incorporate their own histories, personalities, and opinions into the text. The authors do an excellent job of condensing theoretical concepts into plain language, including Viet Nguyen's “narrative plentitude” and Isabel Molina-Guzman's “color blind/color conscious TV.” Overall, though, outside citations are kept to an “omnipresent whisper” (p. xi), mostly collected as “Further Reading” within each chapter's notes. Including more of a history of Latinx media studies—in the same accessible language—would have been appreciated, but the decision to keep the discussion focused on the media objects themselves is also understandable. These stylistic choices allow Aldama and González to produce a text that contains a valuable collection of research for scholars but in a package that is less dry academic text, more manifesto—making it more accessible to students, or even those outside academia. Fittingly, the book concludes with a call to action framed under the rallying cry, “We want our Wakanda!” (p. 159). Taking the lead from black media activism in this regard, the authors demonstrate a desire for the ground-shifting reaction that can occur when an audience sees themselves—and knows others are seeing them—in mainstream popular culture, for perhaps the first time, in a non-denigrative way.

Girl spaces: images of girlhood on the internet

ABSTRACT When Rookie, a now-defunct online magazine for teenage girls, launched in 2011, it created a safe space for young women and girls to express themselves through any medium they wanted and in a myriad of different ways. Thus images of girlhood ceased to be just a mystery for the male gaze/brain to solve or portray; they became eclectic, bountiful, contradictory even. Furthermore, since 2012 Instagram has played a vital role in the democratization of publishing one’s own art to a larger audience. It has combined the broad reach of an extremely popular social network with what were perceived as ‘niche’ interests – activities done privately (collage making, bullet journaling, diary keeping) or publicly (photography, poetry, music, art) by often self-taught or self-published teenage girls. Artists like Petra Collins and Ashley Armitage are entering mainstream popular culture and changing perspectives on what it means to be a girl, to feel like a girl or to look like a girl. They document girls’ bodies, bedrooms, emotions and material belongings, and offer to the consumer of their art these girl spaces for inspection, questioning and identification. Since the internet requires no (straight, white, cis, male) gatekeepers when it comes to creating an identity or curating art, girls’ voices are much easier to hear. This is why I chose to analyse a generation of artists who are gaining momentum because of the internet and subverting, as well as reimagining, the patterns and stereotypes created by centuries of men describing girls’ narratives as trivial, mundane and irrelevant.

Legal ink: an overview of copyright law and tattoos

In a not-too-distant past, tattoos were reserved for uncles who served in the Navy or hazy nights and mornings of regret on a spring break trip to Jamaica. Writer Jack London once mused, ‘Show me a man with a tattoo and I’ll show you a man with an interesting past’. All this said, the rise of tattoos into the mainstream has been a defining aspect of 21st century western culture. Tattoos have moved from ‘deviant’ and ‘alternative’ subcultures to popular culture, becoming a powerful element of self-identity. From Paramount Network’s Ink Master (not to be confused with the spin-off Ink Master: Angel) to tattooed film superheroes such as Harley Quinn and the extensively tattooed bodies of celebrities and athletes broadcasted across social media, tattoos are now not only inscribed into increasing numbers of Millennial and Gen Z bodies but also into mainstream popular culture. With the erosion of previously...

Belief Beyond Belief: On Fashwave’s Esoteric Future Past

This essay looks at the use of vernacular web culture by the new right. Specifically it focuses on how, in recent years, the new right appropriated a genre of web aesthetics known as ‘vapourwave’ to create the sub-genre of ‘fashwave’. Like vapourwave before it, fashwave taps into web cultural imaginary that is nostalgic for an imagined ‘cyberpunk’ past future — but while the former has been the subject of a monograph (Tanner 2016), very little has yet been written on the latter. Largely ignored within mainstream popular culture, these ‘—wave’ aesthetics flourish on the ‘deep vernacular web’ (de Zeeuw &amp; Tuters 2019) of imageboards and web fora. As trivial as many fashwave memes may appear, this paper argues that they can be understood as the aesthetic manifestations of a contemporary renaissance in esoteric “traditionalism” — a discourse that posits an alternative theory of western culture, and which was influential on 20th century ideologues. The essay argues that fashwave transposes traditionalism’s fantasy of imagined past glories into an imagined future — one that is informed by the vapourwave’s distinctly vernacular nostalgia for masculine cyberpunk aesthetics.

A Real Witcher—Slavic or Universal; from a Book, a Game or a TV Series? In the Circle of Multimedia Adaptations of a Fantasy Series of Novels “The Witcher” by A. Sapkowski

A series of novels about a witcher, written by Andrzej Sapkowski almost thirty years ago, has now become an inspiration for the creation of mass productions of mainstream popular culture—film and multimedia adaptations for use in computer games. It is one of the few examples of global messages of mass culture being based on Polish creativity. The recognition of “The Witcher”, due to the Netflix production, soon contributed to building the national pride of Polish people, and at the same time sparked a discussion in Central and Eastern European countries on the consequences of the multimedia adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s prose. Questions about the dissonance between the Slavic and universal dimensions of “The Witcher” in relation to the original novels and their adaptations are a part of the traditional discourse on the adaptability of literature and its consequences for the reception by the audience. This article tries to capture the specific character of the adaptations of Andrzej Sapkowski’s literature from the point of view of typology, known from the literature of the subject, as well as to answer the question about the consequences of the discrepancy between the original book and its adaptations in the form of a film, a TV series, and computer games. The considerations in the article were based on the literature analysis and the research based on the existing sources.

Going against the archival grain: case studies of pop culture archives of a music scene, regional zines, and local beer

ABSTRACT Popular culture collecting in academic special collections and archives is sometimes still viewed within the institution as a challenge to traditional collection development, which has tended to emphasize the mainstream and enshrine privilege and power. This is especially the case when the cultures and media emphasized in such collecting might be categorized as being counter-cultural, DIY (‘do-it-yourself’), or somehow ‘other.’ This article consists of three case studies that emphasize recently developed popular culture-based collections at Rutgers University’s Special Collections and University Archives that focus on voices and communities outside archival norms of collecting: the New Brunswick Music Scene Archive, the New Jersey Regional Zine Collection, and the New Jersey Beer Collection. An emphasis on how faculty and staff have developed these collections by working with participants and creators outside mainstream popular culture leads to examples of how faculty and staff have engaged in outreach, particularly among students. Woven throughout are examples of challenges faculty and staff have faced around institutional acceptance, inclusivity, and cultural sensitivities along with work to overcome the challenges. The article concludes by considering future popular culture collection-building endeavours and engagement among students and community members.

“I feel English as fuck”: translocality and the performance of alternative identities through rap

ABSTRACTThis article deploys the concept of translocality, in order to move beyond the transnational framework that underpins global hip hop studies. Over the last forty years rap music has become a vibrant and distinctive part of mainstream British life. Through rap young people construct identities that draw upon their local experiences while also connecting them with young people from other localities. These translocal identities affirm a multi-ethnic, urban experience of England in mainstream popular culture. Based on a year of ethnographic research in London and Bristol, we argue that a distinctive rap culture is produced through the performance, production, circulation, and reproduction of rap in and between English cities.

Fighting Talk: Martial Arts Discourse in Mainstream Films

This article examines conversations, dialogues and statements about martial arts in films that can by no stretch of the imagination be regarded as martial arts films. It takes this unusual focus in order to glean unique insights into the status of martial arts in mainstream popular culture. The work is interested in the ways that martial arts are understood, positioned and given value within the wider flows, circuits, networks or discourses of culture. Films examined include Vision Quest/Crazy for You (1985), Lolita (1962), Roustabout (1964), Napoleon Dynamite (2004), An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Rollerball (1975), Trading Places (1983), The Wanderers (1979), Once Were Warriors (1994) and Meet the Fockers (2004); and some discussion is given to ‘limit cases’ – action films such as The Matrix (1999) and Lethal Weapon (1987). The analysis suggests that martial arts tend to be represented in non-martial arts films audiovisually, and that on the rare occasions martial arts are discussed, they tend to emerge as improper or culturally unusual activities or practices. Because of their familiar, yet non-normal (unhomely/unheimlich, uncanny) status, along with their entwinement in senses of lack and related fantasies and desires, martial arts in these contexts are frequently related to matters of sexuality, insecurity and the desire for plenitude. Accordingly, although occasionally associated with higher cultural values such as dignity, martial arts are more often treated as comic, uncanny or perverse aberrations from the norm.

Deconstruction and reconstruction of identities: An interpretation on Chinese agriculture metal

After the advent of Black Sabbath in the late 1960s, metal has existed for nearly 50 years. With the trend of cultural globalization from the West and opening-up of China in the late 1980s, metal emerged in the country in 1990 and then became a genre around 2000. The forming of Chinese metal has been experiencing a tension of acculturation, in which background agriculture metal came about as an exclusively Chinese metal phenomenon around 2010. Instead of being merely a spoof, it refers to deeper implications and reflects the issues of Chinese identity in a cosmopolitanism context. This article explores the origin and formation of the phenomenon of “agriculture metal” (农业重金属) and argues that the illogicalness, absurdity, and modern cynicism produced by agriculture metal can be understood as a deconstruction of traditional Chinese culture, mainstream popular culture, and Western metal orthodox, through which a series of unique features of Chinese metal are possibly constructed or reconstructed. This study may enrich contemporary metal studies by focusing on Chinese metal, which has usually been absent in the academia. More significantly, it emphasizes the tension between Chinese metal (localization) and Western metal (globalization), especially the former’s identity struggle in the global metal scene. Meanwhile, this study might be of more universal application, illustrating one of the possible results in the cosmopolitan process of culture in the contemporary world.

Traumata on Screen: Cinematic Views from Southern Africa

ABSTRACTThis special themed issue of Communicatio explores the profound transformation of the political, cultural and intellectual contours of Africa from the vantage point of African film and grounded within the theoretical and epistemological discourses of trauma studies, memory studies, postcolonial studies, and decolonial studies. The contributors are particularly interested in exploring the relational flows between African cinematic works and the social and imaginary circumstances of their production, engagement and representation. Through an explication of the screen and viewing cultures from Africa, this themed issue wishes to make three contributions. The first is to the already established but on-going scholarly work of trauma studies, but specifically from an African, cinematic vantage point. The second contribution is to the theoretical body of work on African cinema (and in this context, “cinematic” includes both film/television). And the last contribution is to the emerging view that culture is a “two-way street,” to put it colloquially: a reversal of the dominant “Western” direction of culture, with an emphasis on different tones of social values and contexts, that have been marginalised in mainstream popular culture discourses.

Lalo Alcaraz: Political Cartooning in the Latino Community

Lalo Alcaraz: Political Cartooning in the Latino Community

The Power of Black Girl Magic Anthems: Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé, and “Feeling Myself” as Political Empowerment

Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé are two of the most successful Black women artists in today’s popular culture. They occupy a hypervisible and invisible position in Black and mainstream popular culture, and therefore exist as a crucial discursive site to understand Black girls’ self-articulation as “blackgirlmagic” at this moment. Faced with the rise of public feminist and postracial discourses presented in new digital media forms, Minaj and Beyoncé’s representations of sexualized Black femininity reimagined popular notions of race, gender, sexuality, and representation. Both women navigate sexuality and play, which allows them to promote claims to sexual autonomy, consent, and empowerment for girls. Together, they articulated blackness as arrogance, femininity as sexual confidence, and friendship as powerfully seductive in the song “Feeling Myself” (2015). We argue that the song became a #blackgirlmagic anthem for Black girls and women because of the ways Black girls and women engaged with the song on social media. They created a visual language to articulate the political stakes of #blackgirlmagic in an age of police brutality, anti-blackness, and misogyny. Through the use of focus group data with young Black women, we assess how this particular brand of “blackgirlmagic” impacts the political behavior and empowerment of Black college aged women.