Mainstream Popular Culture Research Articles

Impact of sub cultural in fashion (A study of Jaipur region)

Youth subcultures have distinct clothing styles with combination of dress, ideology, music, technology and/or activities that differentiate them from mainstream popular culture. Jaipur has a vast history for subcultures based on traditional cultures, but now subcultures are changing and developing with the influence of the western and Asian subcultures style i.e. Euro-America and Japanese, Jaipur society. The aim of this research was to examine Jaipur youth subculture styles in terms of how they have evolved in a short period of time and how they have been affected by foreign and domestic elements focusing on their clothing styles, and interpret why the differences in styles exist, using aspects of their respective social circumstances, status of youths, and traditional values as indexes, and to ultimately help deepen understanding of the relationship between clothes and culture, youths today, and the issues and trends that most affect youths. It provides insight on the symbolization of Jaipur youth subculture styles and the changing styles reflection on the state of mind and society values of Jaipur youths today .

Baptism of Blood: Bodies Performing for the Law

This article undertakes an analysis of Ron Athey’s and Hermann Nitsch’s performance art and blood rituals to show how their radical artistic spectacles are necessary acts of defiance in contemporary art and society. They open up the possibilities for subjects to redefine their relationship to the big Other. The author argues that the use of blood is at the centre of both of these artists’ performances and has the potency to unsettle and attack the patriarchal system of social authorities. At the same time, the popularization of such artistic and bloody practices has led to the appropriation of blood in mainstream popular culture. By referring to popular artist Lady Gaga and her use of blood in recent performances, the article demonstrates that blood is divested of its symbolisms and becomes a mere commodified product. The comparison between performance artists and popular artists like Lady Gaga reveals how blood is used in different ways to facilitate each artist’s project. While Athey’s performances stress blood as the site of the reality of the body in pain, and Nitsch’s as a celebration of both Eros and Thanatos, Lady Gaga’s performances by using fake blood separate blood from the body and meaning.

V versus Hollywood: A discourse on polemic thievery

Given that textual narrative can be infinite and the filmic framework finite, a space is created between the source material and its possible reappropriation, where a choice is made. Do the film executives decide to be true to the original (where the auteur's true meaning possibly rests) or do they bow to fiscal policy and sociopolitically risk-free cinema? The adaptation of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta from the original source and how this process evolves through film as a cultural, political and diasporic text is examined, with particular focus on the differing geographic and cultural ideologies that underpin the graphic novel and the filmic representation. This article posits a celebration of the beauty, visceral power and freedom of the graphic novel set against the power and homogeneity of the Hollywood film industry. It is possible to say that graphic novels do not exist as Hollywood's occasional goldmine, but in fact exist as a site of narrative and visual freedom, in and of themselves. The audience or subject position of experiencing the 'altered' version of literature, from all its various forms and sources, can be seen to create a spoon-fed pre-existent narrative usage via Hollywoodized culture that somehow manages, in this instance, to defuse political vibrancy and vitality and potentially reformat the narrative as mainstream popular culture … or does it?

Mobilizing postfeminism: Young Australian women discuss Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives

In this paper I mobilize postfeminism as a framework for exploring the connections between popular culture and young women's lives. Postfeminism is developed and deployed as a critical tool for analysing the way feminist discourses are embedded within mainstream popular culture and for generating insights into the postfeminist cultural climate. Interviews with young Australian women are integrated with an analysis of two very popular television series, Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, in order to reveal how popular representations of gender and sexuality parallel some of the postfeminist pressures and anxieties being experienced by young women. This article proposes that postfeminism be considered a valuable analytical instrument and finds that not only are postfeminist themes entangled in these television series, but also that young women draw upon feminist discourses when engaging with the texts and when discussing their own concerns and aspirations.

The Birth of “Rok”: Cultural Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Glocalization of Rock Music in South Korea, 1964–1975

Like any other genre of Western popular music in the postwar period, rock was introduced to South Korea via the U.S. Armed Forces, a powerful symbol of postwar American hegemony. Until the late 1960s the U.S. military camp shows, clubs, and radio broadcast remained the main source of Western pop, providing opportunities for Korean musicians to hone their skills and enrich their repertoire. While this might be seen as a classic example of cultural imperialism, it actually developed a much more complex pattern of glocalization, especially in the case of rock music. The Korean appropriation of rock—which we refer to as “rok”—unfolded new sensibilities of the youth counterculture, mounting a considerable challenge to the conservative, militaristic nationalism of the Park Chung Hee regime. The supremely talented guitarist and composer Shin Joong Hyun and his band, the Add Four, led the way from the U.S. military base to the Korean audience in 1964, along with their rivals, the Key Boys. Other Korean rock bands, then known as the “group sounds,” followed suit. Group-sound rok flourished in the live music salons, outdoor festivals, and go-go dance clubs, captivating the youth in the 1960s and 1970s. As the authoritarian regime started noticing and clamping down on the “threat” of the youth culture, Shin Joong Hyun and other group-sound musicians were making a breakthrough in the mainstream popular culture. In 1975 the regime banned and censored Shin and other musicians, criminalizing the youth culture. In analyzing what sparked off this monumental culture clash, we find that rok's reimagination of nation as a community of peace and love caused the harsh reaction from the regime, whose doctrine of “national culture” was heavily influenced by the militaristic vision of the Japanese Empire.

Electronic Enlightenment or the Digital Dark Age? Anticipating Film in an Age Without Film

Film is not going to be a part of mainstream popular culture for much longer. I give it between five and ten years; some industry experts give it a lot less. Many will regard this as a startling as...

Masculine Moves: The Measure of a Man

This paper problematises embedded notions of masculine and feminine embodiment within the contexts of contemporary Australian mainstream popular culture. Drawing on Bourdieu's (1990: 56) theory of ‘habitus’ as non-consciously performed practices ‘… internalised as second nature and so forgotten’; personal reflections as artist, choreographer and teacher; and a brief analysis of the male body in the television program, So You Think You Can Dance Australia (TEN Network, 2008), the author questions and considers the development of habitual ways of perceiving particular forms of male embodiment as aesthetic and attractive, and other forms as un-aesthetic. Further, the impact of the author's own experiences as actor/ dancer and choreographer are considered in relation to his work as a director and choreographer of ‘the bodies of male and female students’ in school productions. Through this paper, the author conjectures about the potential for the drama classroom to be a site in which embodied gender inequities may be challenged and deconstructed.

‘Slambiguité’? Youth Culture and the Positioning of ‘Le Slam’ in France

Poetry slams—a revisiting of performance poetry with no specific agenda and no frills—were born in America and reached France over a decade ago. Such ‘slams’—and the pieces performed at them—were incorporated into mainstream popular culture with great rapidity. This article briefly presents le slam, before turning to the artist most representative of the genre in the eyes of the national media, Grand Corps Malade, and to characteristic themes and techniques in his work. It goes on to explore how le slam spin-off workshops (for example) ensure that it propounds a ‘youth-culture image’ while simultaneously allowing for its appropriation by an establishment eager to exploit what is seen as a new phenomenon of considerable educational/socio-political potential. It also highlights the equally vibrant counter-current that sees le slam as a democratising, community-orientated social movement, embracing contributors of all ages, social groups and ethnicities, allowing for a literal prise de parole for those otherwise denied a voice.

Struggling with Tradition

Despite growing acceptance of homosexuality in mainstream popular culture, debates about legalizing same-sex unions continue largely because they conflict with religious notions of heterosexual marriage and family. Marriage has become a symbol of status, making public weddings a sought-after goal for marginalized groups to gain greater social acceptance. Liberal Judaism particularly has responded to changing cultural circumstances and adapted tradition to meet the needs of diverse worshippers within a growing spiritual marketplace. These branches of the tradition contend with problematic textual and ritual elements that have obstructed the acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer Jews into their communities.Alternative understandings of Leviticus 18:22 and the Talmudic concept ofkiddushinmake room for same-sex weddings to occur in the synagogue. Because same-sex marriage challenges dominant attitudes about what constitutes a conventional family, wedding ceremonies performed in religious settings can transform communities that witness them, especially within Canada where same-sex marriage is legal.

ECONOMICS WITHOUT FRONTIERS

In the 1960s and 1970s Chicago School and public choice economics crossed the traditional boundaries separating economics from other academic disciplines by applying economic analysis to areas usually deemed beyond the scope of economics. Today, a new generation of pioneering economists are taking this development further by crossing the boundaries not only between academic disciplines, but also between academia and mainstream popular culture, by presenting their economic analyses of non‐standard topics in a format designed to be accessible to the general reader. Four recent books reviewed here are at the forefront of this new economics without frontiers.

Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (review)

Reviewed by: Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power Robin R. Means Coleman Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power. By Christine Acham. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004; pp ix + 238. $24.95. Newton Minow, FCC chair during the Kennedy administration, in 1961, responding to concerns over a lack of decency, decorum, and quality children's programming, dubbed television a "vast wasteland." Gil Scott-Heron in 1974 in his song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" similarly deemed television a wasteland of irrelevancy with its promptings to worry about "a tiger in your tank, or a giant in your toilet bowl." Moreover, according to Scott-Heron, television uniquely fails African Americans because "there will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay" nor any images of "Roy Wilkins strolling through Watts in a Red, Black, and Green liberation jumpsuit." Minow's and Scott-Heron's disappointment in the medium has been echoed and extended by numerous cultural critics and industry analysts. However, Christine Acham in Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power argues that Minow, Scott-Heron, and other analysts are shortsighted, assigning too much repressive power to the medium while overlooking the fact that there is agency to be found in TV and through its participants. Acham uses 1960s Black Power–era television as her springboard to argue that the last 40 years of television have witnessed a disruption of its narratives and industry practices, resulting in the medium becoming not a wasteland, but a significant site for resistance, and, ergo, (televised) revolution. In her attempt to "rehistoricize, reconsider, and recuperate arenas of black popular culture such as television" (2), Acham challenges the reader to consider [End Page 518] why many of the shows that focused on Blackness met with such disdain in the late 1960s and 1970s, and why, past or present, "televisual Blackness [can] be so easily reduced to kitsch or seen as negative representations" (3). Acham employs critical, cultural, historical, and discursive analyses to "reread" classic and contemporary television texts, such as Black Journal,Soul Train,The Flip Wilson Show,Sanford and Son,Julia,Good Times,TheRichard Pryor Show, and The Chris Rock Show. Acham's choice of television programs may prompt some readers to question why these shows were chosen over other important airings such as The Nat King Cole Show,Showtime at the Apollo,Arsenio, or the oft-studied The Cosby Show. Acham works to explain that her choices reflect those shows having national prominence but often ignored in scholarship. However, one may also point to the archives she relied on as also possibly informing her selections (USC School of Cinema-Television Library, UCLA Film and Television Archive, and the Museum of Radio and Television in Los Angeles). Revolution Televised sets itself apart from other works concerned with blacks in media by focusing on prime-time texts that cross genres and functions. For example, J. Fred McDonald's seminal Blacks and White TV (1992) crosses genres to examine shows such as The Cosby Show, Roots, and network news, but opts to attend largely to the "positive representations, negative stereotypes" debate. No less than six times over the first seven pages of her book does Acham reject studies that stay within a positive/negative binary. While this point becomes pedantic, Acham is more intellectually innovative when she asserts that analysts have misread the deployment of black vernacular, humor, and double-talk, failing to see them as a way to subvert dominant narratives around blackness. In chapter 1, Acham lays the groundwork for spying out blacks' potential for revolution while working in mainstream popular culture arenas. She documents how the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) and the "Chitlin" circuits of the early 1900s through World War II provided counter-revolutionary stage time for black performers such as Spo-Dee-O-Dee and Moms Mabley whose comedy offered "a thinly veiled portrayal of the relationship between black and white society" (12). In chapter 2, documentary TV such as 1965's CBS Reports' Watts: Riot or Revolt?, which asked if the uprising was riot, revolt, hoodlum lawlessness, or festering social illness, is juxtaposed against...

What Is This "Black" in Black Popular Culture?

I BEGIN WITH A QUESTION: WHAT SORT OF MOMENT IS THIS IN WHICH TO POSE THE question of black popular culture? These moments are always conjunctural. They have their historical specificity; and although they always exhibit similarities and continuities with other moments in which we pose a question like this, they are never same moment. And combination of what is similar and what is different defines not only specificity of moment, but specificity of question, and therefore strategies of cultural politics with which we attempt to intervene in popular culture, and form and style of cultural theory and criticizing that has to go along with such an intermatch. In his important essay, New Cultural Politics of Difference, Cornel West (1990: 19--36) offers a genealogy of what this moment is, a genealogy of present that I find brilliantly concise and insightful. His genealogy follows, to some extent, positions I tried to outline in an article that has become somewhat notorious (Hall, 1988: 27--31), but it also usefully maps moment into an American context and in relation to cognitive and intellectual philosophical traditions with which it engages. According to Cornel, moment, this moment, has three general coordinates. The first is displacement of European models of high culture, of Europe as universal subject of culture, and of culture itself in its old Arnoldian reading as last refuge.... I nearly said of scoundrels, but I won't say who it is of. At least we know who it was against -- culture against barbarians, against people rattling gates as deathless prose of anarchy flowed away from Arnold's pen. The second coordinate is emergence of United States as a world power and, consequently, as center of global cultural production and circulation. This emergence is both a displacement and a hegemonic shift in definition of culture -- a movement from high culture to American mainstream popular culture and its mass-cultural, image-mediated, technological forms. The third coordinate is decolonization of Third World, culturally marked by emergence of decolonized sensibilities. And I read decolonization of Third World in Frantz Fanon's sense: I include in it impact of civil rights and black struggles on decolonization of minds of peoples of black diaspora. Let me add some qualifications to that general picture, qualifications that, in my view, make this present moment a very distinctive one in which to ask question about black popular culture. First, I remind you of ambiguities of that shift from Europe to America, since it includes America's ambivalent relationship to European high culture and ambiguity of America's relationship to its own internal ethnic hierarchies. Western Europe did not have, until recently, any ethnicity at all. Or didn't recognize it had any. America has always had a series of ethnicities, and consequently, construction of ethnic hierarchies has always defined its cultural politics. And, of course, silenced and unacknowledged, fact of American popular culture itself, which has always contained within it, whether silenced or not, black American popular vernacular traditions. It may be hard to remember that, when viewed from outside United States, American mainstream popular culture has always involved certain traditions that could only be attributed to black cultural vernacular traditions. The second qualification concerns nature of period of cultural globalization in progress now. I hate term the global postmodern, so empty and sliding a signifier that it can be taken to mean virtually anything you like. And, certainly, blacks are as ambiguously placed in relation to postmodernism as they were in relation to high modernism: even when denuded of its wide-European, disenchanted Marxist, French intellectual provenance and scaled down to a more modest descriptive status, postmodernism remains extremely unevenly developed as a phenomenon in which old center/peripheries of high modernity consistently reappear. …

‘Creating My Own Cultural and Spiritual Bubble’: Case of Cultural Consumption by Spiritual Seeker Anime Fans

The distinctive quality of Japanese animation (anime) in its descriptions of religious and spiritual realms – integrating symbols, themes, doctrines, and mythologies from various religious traditions – is a cultural manifestation of the Japanese integrative spirituality. This article demonstrates how important the religious aspect of anime is in explaining why some younger generations in the USA, who are characterized as spiritual seekers, become a loyal fan of the cultural artifacts. Anime seems to provide them with a cultural resource out of which they create their own cultural and spiritual practice, which is, they claim, not provided by the US mainstream popular culture. This article argues that since the religious aspect of anime is one of the most distinctive qualities in distinguishing itself from US pop culture, it would contribute to the more generally accepted ‘cultural difference’ account in explaining the cross-cultural popularity of anime.

Strategies of Negotiation in Mainstream Media: Vernacular Discourse and Masculinity in The Full Monty

This article examines how vernacular discourses operate in mainstream popular culture. Taking the film The Full Monty as a case study, it argues that certain examples of vernacular discourse operate in tandem with official discourses. Specifically, by utilizing Bakhtin's notion of the spectacle and Burke's thinking on the comic frame, this film generates a discourse of economics and class that is in opposition to its discourse of White, male privilege. Ultimately, the two discourses illuminate the crisis in masculinity that resulted from Thatcherite economic policies and how this crisis was resolved through the privilege of race and gender. The implications for vernacular rhetoric lie in the nuances and complexities that emerge as a result of the interactions between vernacular and official discourses.

Drug Use within the Finnish Club Culture as Marks of Distinction

Drug use in the context of dance clubs and “raves” has established a permanent position in Western youth cultures during the past two decades. Although the phenomenon is global, the prevalence and local cultural forms vary significantly among countries. In this article we analyze how the Finnish drug users in the context of club culture distinguish themselves from other night-life subcultures and from mainstream popular culture. We also try to categorize the distinctions of this group into more general discursive structures that define their group identity. Drug use in the club cultural context is analyzed as modern symbolically significant consumption as a way to create and maintain social categories and distinctions. We conclude that Finnish club culture is quite a hidden context. Club cultural distinctions differ greatly from values of Finnish society. Even though the club culture expanded and interlocked with mainstream popular culture in the late 1990s, club culture and related drug use are still quite a marginal phenomenon.

What the public thinks it knows about science.

Popular culture probably does more than formal science education to shape most people's understanding of science and scientists. It is more pervasive, more eye‐catching, and (with rare exceptions) more memorable. No genetics textbook can hope to compete with Jurassic Park , and no lecture on biophysics can match the sight of Dr Frankenstein pulling lightning down from the stormy sky to animate his creature. What messages about science, then, is the public likely to draw from popular culture? This essay discusses some of the most common, but there are of course many others. Science is complex and multi‐faceted, and so is popular culture's portrayal of it. ![][1] The idea that natural laws are constant across space and time is the philosophical foundation of modern science. Mainstream popular culture takes a more relaxed approach, flexing the laws of nature when required. It creates exceptions to natural laws, or ignores them altogether, whenever they threaten to conflict with the story being told. Most suspensions of natural law in popular culture are casual and—except to audiences with scientific backgrounds—obscure. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but action heroes like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry (1971) and Sylvester Stallone's Rambo ( First Blood , 1982) barely flinch when they fire bullets that seconds later knock a villain off his feet. There is no air in space to carry sound waves, yet spaceships routinely blow up with a thunderous roar or make a ‘whoosh’ sound like an express train when they pass. Light travels at around 300,000 km s−1, but in a Star Wars ‐style gun battle, the heroes can dive away from a laser beam after it is fired. Ecosystems on Earth require large populations of prey to sustain even modest populations of predators, but the ecosystems of alien planets include abundant … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif

The Queering of Swan Lake

ABSTRACT This essay argues that, by re-gendering the ballet classic Swan Lake, choreographer Matthew Bourne has also queered it. He thrusts center stage an unstable relationship between two male characters, and in so doing, de-centers the conventionally fixed categories of sex, gender and sexual desire. He also forces a long-simmering relationship between homosexuality and dance out of the closet and into mainstream popular culture. Applying Mulvey's theory of spectatorship and Butler's theory of gendered performance, the essay describes how viewers may be intrigued, rather than repulsed, by the ambiguities surrounding Bourne's portrayal of sexual identity.

Sex

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The unfinished revolution: social movement theory and the gay and lesbian movement

The Unfinished Revolution compares the post-Second World War histories of the American and British gay and lesbian movements with an eye toward understanding how distinct political institutional environments affect the development, strategies, goals, and outcomes of a social movement. Stephen M. Engel utilizes an electic mix of source materials ranging from the theories of Mancur Olson and Michel Foucault to Supreme Court rulings and film and television dialogue. The two case study chapters function as brief historical sketches to elucidate further the conclusions on theory and whilst being politically-oriented, they also examine gay influence and expansion into mainstream popular culture. The book also includes an appendix that surveys and assesses the analytical potential of five critical understandings of social movements: the classical approach, rational choice, resource mobilization, new social movement theories, and political opportunity structures. It will be of value to academics and students of sociology, political science, and history.

The Twelve Tribes' Communities, the Anti-Cult Movement, and Government's Response

The Twelve Tribes Messianic Communities are approximately 25 communities ranging in size from 30 to 120, on four continents. Since their inception 25 years ago, they have been plagued by continual attacks of the Anti-Cult Movement (ACM), originally in North America, but in recent years also in Europe. These believers live a common life of sharing in Communities according to the pattern they perceive in Acts 2 and 4 in the Bible. Despite repeated vindication in the courts, Twelve Tribes' members continue to battle to maintain the right to parent their children according to their beliefs, outside the mainstream popular culture. Antireligionists have effectively influenced governments to act against these parents, based on information that has not proved to be trustworthy evidence in court.