Matt Hills Research Articles

Cobra Kai Never Dies! Generational seriality and revived legacies of The Karate Kid

AbstractThis article investigates the hallmarks of generational seriality—the term coined by Matt Hills—using Cobra Kai, and its predecessor, The Karate Kid trilogy, as case studies. It combines textual analysis of overarching themes of these texts, such as the portrayal of white masculinity, and aligned conceptualizations of class, with the examination of televisual nostalgia. It draws on existing scholarship on TV returns and revivals, exploring how Cobra Kai enters a dialogue with the fans of the franchise, and how that dialogue is articulated. While building upon the iconography familiar to The Karate Kid fans, Cobra Kai contains a great degree of self‐reflexivity, with dialogue or entire plot lines that parody regressive gender politics of the 1980s. The series brings together the generic conventions of the teen film and ample opportunities for nostalgia in its original fan base; thus, it significantly expands its appeal to two distinctive demographics.

The events before the event

This article demonstrates how the concept of paratexts can be employed in the analysis of unfolding sports events. Drawing on the work of Jonathan Gray and Matt Hills, it reflects on the “extended presence” of sports events across media, space, and time – how mean- ing is created before, during, and after their apparent conclusion, and how their mediated “centres” appear to move in the process. By way of illustration, it examines a boxing event in early 2023 involving the popular British boxers Chris Eubank Jr. and Liam Smith; how- ever, it focuses on the events before the event – namely, the preceding press conference and weigh-in – and suggests that these “entryway events” were paratextually significant in shaping expectations and attitudes towards the “main event”. The article also demon- strates how sports events feed into wider processes of social inclusion and exclusion, often acting as lightning rods for public discussions of socio-political issues, such as race, class, gender, and (in this case) sexual orientation.

Monstrous Masculinities: Characters' Reactions to Abjection Point to Conflicted Truths in Historical Memory and Gender in Insensibles (2012)

Abstract: Critics read the children with congenital insensitivity in Juan Carlos Medina's Insensibles (2012) as an allegory for Spaniards born into democracy. Just as the film's children cannot feel physical pain, later generations cannot comprehend the trauma of living through the civil war and/or ensuing dictatorship. This article expands this interpretation to note how the postmemory thriller's use of traditional gender markers and abjection offers further insight into the film's disputed ending. Feminine-presenting characters react to abjection (confrontations of the non-self) in ways that exemplify Matt Hills's pleasures of horror and reflect how Spain perpetually grapples with its fascist legacy. These characters react to abject's pain and violence with simultaneous attraction and repulsion, much like Spain's morbid fascination with reexamining its past. In contrast, masculine-presenting characters' disengagement speaks to politically conservative efforts to stymie historical memory campaigns. Protagonist David's "feminization" appears to support these efforts to recover memory. However, the final scene erases all affiliations between gender, abjection, and memory in a timeless, spaceless void, containing David's symbolic confrontation of the past to the hypothetical.

Red capes, dog gods and demon lords: Making historically plausible Inuyasha cosplay costumes

This article presents a close reading of two costume designs from Takahashi Rumiko’s Inuyasha series (manga 1996–2008), and details the methods used to create a pair of cosplay costumes. It will explore how character designs are imbued with identity and narrative foreshadowing. Throughout this article, reference will be made to fan scholarship in addition to more academic sources. As Matt Hills points out with his model of the ‘scholar-fan’, fans are often conducting research and work that academics have yet to address, and this is often the case with anime fandom. Further, my work on cosplay treats fan-constructed costumes as an act of fan translation akin to other activities such as ‘scanlations’, that is scanned translations of manga, comics or graphic novels.

Horror and Its Affects

AbstractIn this article, following a trajectory set out by Noël Carroll, Matt Hills, and Andrea Sauchelli, I propose a definition of horror, according to which something qualifies as a work of horror if and only if it centrally and demonstrably aims at provoking one or more of a particular set of negative affects. A catalog of characteristically negative affects is associated with horror—including terror, revulsion, the uncanny, and the abject—but which cannot be collapsed into any single affect. Further complicating matters is that the set appears to be constantly, if slowly, mutating, so that the affects aimed at in the horror of the 1920s do not entirely overlap with those aimed at horror today, or which we might expect horror to aim at a century from now. As such, while we use “horror” as a blanket term across eras, whether some work is a work of horror will always be time-indexed.

Wagner the gardener: Media as nature and the building of a cult

This article explores why composer Richard Wagner has such a passionate cult following, by employing the ‘family resemblances’ of cult texts identified by Matt Hills and, in the process, uncovers the elemental threads embedded into his work. Taking up John Durham Peters’s call for an elemental approach to media, I argue that Wagner’s treatment of art as nature allowed for the erasure of mediation. By insisting that his products were of an organic nature, he was thus able to keep the spectre of commercialization at bay. In turn, this encouraged the formation of a cult fandom. Finally, I make the case for further study of both fans of high culture and how we might trace the emergence of cultish modes of consumption to the nineteenth century.

A manifesto for metal studies: Or putting the ‘politics of metal’ in its place

Abstract This article proposes that metal studies can benefit from a knowledge of the struggles that have taken place in academia, between scholars and within and between different disciplines, over the issue of the role of the consecrated academic as mediator, critic, interpreter and advocate, in relation to popular cultural formations and the social and cultural groups identified with them. I explore how this dynamic is played-out in a number of periods identified with notable theorists and/or academic schools that give rise to a ‘politics’ that can inform a possible politics of metal studies. These include Gramsci’s account of the ‘traditional’ and the ‘organic’ intellectual; Stuart Hall and the ‘cultural politics’ of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) school; Simon Frith on the ‘political’ pleasures of the ‘fan-intellectual’; Charlotte Brunsdon on the ‘feminist, the housewife and the soap opera’; Richard Middleton on ‘vernacular practice’ and the Low-Other; Matt Hills on the ‘proper place’ (‘un lieu propre’) of theory according to the academic-fan and the fan-academic. Finally, how these conflicts of legitimation can be placed within a revised model of Bourdieu’s ‘cultural field’ as it applies to the academy and the habitus of ‘Homo Academicvs’. I conclude by suggesting that the role of the metallectual and the politics of metal studies needs to be tempered by an increased reflexive awareness of the metal-scholar in relation to their fandom and tested through a more explicit self-analysis of ‘class-habitus’, as both a guide to the limits of political judgments and possible interventions into metal music, metal fandom and the global metal scene.

The ‘Totoro Meme’ and the politics of transfandom pleasure

Abstract This article is an exploration of the ‘Totoro meme’ as a site of affective, transfandom pleasure. In the Totoro meme, Japanese and non-Japanese fans alike appropriate the now-iconic image of Satsuki, Mei and an umbrella-toting Totoro at a bus stop from Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 film, Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro), to their own fannish ends, creating fan art that inserts favourite characters from other media into the scene in ways that often have a doubled semiotic resonance. I argue that this meme is characteristic not of the global appropriation of a broad ‘Japanese anime style’, per se, but a specific, affectively appealing ‘Ghibli style’, one that is fully part of non-Japanese fans’ own popular cultural repertoires. In its cross-border merging of globally circulating Studio Ghibli aesthetics with other fan-favourite media, I contend that the Totoro meme and its associated fanworks are in fact wholly congruent with, and representative of, what Matt Hills has termed ‘trans-fandom’ (2015), contemporary practices of ‘navigating across and combining and fusing fandoms’ (Hills 2015: 159). I conclude with a consideration of the implications of what might be termed ‘corporate transfandom’ in the context of transfannish citations of Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind) (Miyazaki, 1984) in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015).

“Two Birds with One Stone”: Transmedia Serialisation in <em>Twin Peaks</em>

“Two Birds with One Stone”: Transmedia Serialisation in <em>Twin Peaks</em>

Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations

Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations

Love Me For A Reason: An Auto-ethnographic Account of Boyzone Fandom

Fan scholars such as Matt Hills have argued that fannish interests can become relevant and irrelevant at different times during a fan’s life. Combining insights from popular music and fan studies, in this article we use an auto-ethnographic approach to examine our changing levels of interest in Boyzone. Both of us encountered the Irish boy band at different times in our lives, and both of us experienced our fandom in different ways. In relation to the band’s fandom, Boyzone’s music can be considered a technology of “self” (DeNora 2000): a vehicle that people use to work through their biographies by recalling particular emotions and memories. We theorize this engagement with our fan object both by considering Cornel Sandvoss’ notion that media fandom is a partial extension of the teenage self, and Rebecca William’s concept of post-object fandom. Using our two experiences as a case study, we show how dormant music fandom can develop in different ways for fans in different circumstances. Keywords: music fandom, boy bands, Boyzone, post-object fandom, post-youth

‘I hate Beyoncé and I don’t care who knows it’: Towards an ethics of studying anti-fandom

Abstract The field of audience studies has undergone something of a change in the last twenty years. From considering film and television viewers to be passive consumers, scholars now recognize the active role that audiences play in the construction and reception of texts. Similarly, understandings of the need to look beyond the fan to the non-fan and anti-fan have also changed the ways we view the text and its audiences. This work has been fuelled, at least in part, by the development of fan studies, with academics like Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills and Jonathan Gray arguing that fans actively work with a text to change its meaning, or uncover hidden meanings, through fan cultural production. The emergence of Web 2.0 has further changed the nature of audience interaction, with fannish activities like fan fiction no longer the preserve of paper ‘zines. The growth of social media sites along with the shifting interest in analysing fans and their engagement with texts raises complex ethical questions about how scholars negotiate the study of fandom, but the ethics of how we engage with anti-fans and analyse anti-fannish response to a text has thus far been ignored. Fan studies, as a relatively new area of scholarship, has traditionally adopted two different means of dealing with fans. The first, drawing on the literary studies tradition, prioritizes the text. In this mode, texts are properly cited to ensure that others can find them and it may not occur to scholars to not point to the source. The second, however, arises from the social sciences in which human subjects are worked with and ethical considerations come above and beyond the research. In this mode, fans’ privacy is respected and permission obtained in order to cite fannish works. In this article I examine the ethics of approaching anti-fans. Is it enough to approach them in the same way as we approach fans or are there other factors to consider? Is it appropriate to use anti-fan texts without the authors’ consent? Where do the power structures lie in analysing anti-fans as opposed to fans? And should fan studies scholars even be asking for consent from anti-fans in an increasingly open media space?

Re-imagining the Literary Brand

This paper argues that the industrial contexts of re-imagining, or transforming, literary icons deploy the promotional strategies that are associated with what are usually seen as lesser, or purely commercial, genres. Promotional paratexts reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. Analysing Spielberg's film, The Adventures of Tintin (2011), and Andrew Motion's fictional continuation of Stevenson's Treasure Island, it argues that literary fiction and cinematic texts associated with celebrated authors or auteurist producer-directors share branding discourses characteristic of contemporary consumer culture.

Promotional alternate reality games – more than “just” marketing

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways in which players and producers of promotional alternate reality games (ARGs) negotiate their commercial status, similar to the way in which Matt Hills (2002) argues fan communities negotiate their position within a commercial media industry.Design/methodology/approach– In-depth interviews with game designers is combined with the results of an online player survey and qualitative analysis of discussion on player forums. This provides a strong platform from which to discuss player and producer attitudes towards the status of promotional ARGs as marketing materials.Findings– Both players and producers use various strategies which allow them to negotiate their relationship to the commercial nature of promotional ARGs. These include a focus on the immersive nature of the games (also known as the “This Is Not a Game” philosophy), defining their creative interests strongly against the perceived commercial interests of corporate media companies and an emphasis on the personal, emotional or affective impact of the games.Originality/value– In the very slim body of academic work on promotional ARGs, few scholars have considered the status of the games as marketing from the perspective of the audience. The paper provides original audience research which is of value and interest to scholars in a diverse variety of disciplines, and to anyone involved in the production or consumption of ARGs.

Doctor Who in Time and Space: Essays on Themes, Characters, History and Fandom, 1963‐2012Gillian I.Leitch, Editor. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013.

Doctor Who in Time and Space: Essays on Themes, Characters, History and Fandom, 1963-2012 Gillian I. Leitch, Editor. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013.In the introduction to this collection, Leitch states her desire for diverse reading of both the series and its influence, and, as a primer on Doctor Who, this book might be a good place to begin. Leitch tries to be all inclusive, and essays here certainly do cover history (in the form of an overview of fan activity over the run of the series), themes (time, national identity, genre conventions), and characters (predominantly the women). However, this inclusiveness contributes to an overall lack of cohesive ness. Given the sheer number of books published on Doctor Who, it seems incumbent on a new entry into this crowded field to set itself apart in some way, to present a new way of understanding the series. However, by trying to do everything, this collection winds up saying far too little.This diversity of aim also indicates a larger problem -the collection has no clear audience. By trying to touch all the bases and appeal to everyone, it runs the risk of alienating the several audiences who might be drawn to this work. Andrew O'Day's pieces, which open the collection, seem to state the obvious to those working within fan studies and to those who might be looking for something beyond an overview of fan activity across the run of the series. David Whitt's argument the use of Gothic horror tropes in the three episodes featuring the weeping angels will raise the eyebrows of those working in horror studies. Whitt approaches the genre as someone with a selfconfessed dislike of horror who has only recently been inspired to find out more about a genre that began centuries ago in literature and has evolved to include television... and film (214). In other words he brings enthusiasm but no expertise to bear on his analysis of the weeping angels.Of the two themes which this reviewer would argue do emerge here, one is handled significantly more satisfactorily than the other. The big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff is ably treated by several contributors, most notably Kieran Tranter, Paul Booth, and Andrew Crome. Tranter's thoughtful discussion of timeless ness vs. timefulness across the series is firmly grounded in his understanding of previous literature (John Tulloch, Matt Hills, et al.). Booth's approach to time travel as a narrative device similarly explores the complex shifts in the treatment and purposes of time travel between classic Who and new Who. Taken together, these essays satisfyingly explore the paradoxes of time travel (as a force that both situates and unmoors). Andrew Crome's essay Ready to Outsit Eternity in turn looks at one very specific timeful event-the end of time itself-developing and extending several of the issues raised by Tranter and Booth, not least of these being the Doctor's dual role as someone who is outside and above time and someone who can, when his own will to power prevails, affect the course of events. …

Fandom as an object and the objects of fandom

Matt Hills is a Professor of Film & TV Studies at Aberystwyth University, in Wales, and before that he was a Reader at Cardiff University. He holds a Master’s from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a PhD from the University of Sussex. Self-proclaimed fan of the British series Doctor Who, Hills has been writing about fans and fandom since his early career, especially about Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Sherlock more recently, alongside pieces on media audiences, cult film and TV, quality television and digital culture. His book Fan Cultures (2002) is among the most well known contributions to fan studies. Matt Hills spoke about the theoretical and empirical challenges in defining and studying fans, the complexity of the term, and the types of engagement and behavior of fandom online and offline.

‘What Would Sagan Do?’1: The fandom and anti-fandom of Carl Sagan

Abstract This article asks the question: in what ways can Carl Sagan fans and anti-fans be understood within a larger participatory science culture? To answer this question, I use Jonathan Gray’s theory of paratextuality to show how the study of Carl Sagan fandom can contribute to discussions on public participation in science. I draw from Matt Hills, to develop the term secular-religiosity. This term helps to describe how popular texts that feature Sagan allow room for audiences to access scientific knowledge and incorporate it into everyday belief systems. Next, I map a fan-generated Sagan-inspired group of paratexts onto Massimiano Bucchi and Federico Neresini’s public participation in science graph to show that Sagan fans who reproduce secular-religiosity engage in low-intensity but spontaneous forms of public participation in science. I explore these forms of participation by categorizing four types of paratextual routes that Sagan fans and anti-fans create for engaging secular-religiosity. I end with a discussion on how the study of Sagan fandom can help build bridges between public participation in science and fan studies.

My Little Pony, tolerance is magic: Gender policing and Brony anti-fandom

Abstract ‘Creepy and immature’; ‘paedophiles’; ‘a freaking embarrassment’; and ‘pathetic sissies [who] giggle like school girls’ are all phrases which have been used to describe fans of My Little Pony. More specifically, they are all phrases which have been used to describe Bronies, male fans of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (2010–) cartoon. Bronies are often a source of ridicule, both on forums like Reddit and 4chan, where scores of threads dedicated to ‘Brony hate’ have been posted, and within the more mainstream press which fails to understand why grown men might watch and engage with a children’s show. Furthermore, criticisms aimed at Bronies commonly resort to gendered stereotyping: My Little Pony is pink and sparkly, things that men are not supposed to like. That Bronies disrupt traditional notions of gender makes them both objects of ridicule and a means by which the gendered voice of anti-fandom can be complicated. Discussions on anti-fandom and gender often focus on ‘female’ texts like Twilight (Meyer, 2005) and Fifty Shades of Grey (James, 2012). As Matt Hills (2012) points out in his analysis of Twilight anti-fandom, girls’ desires are frequently attacked by cultural commentators and the mainstream media. However, in this article I argue that the realm of Brony fandom, and anti-fandom, is far more complex. I build upon the work of Jonathan Gray (2003) and Cornel Sandvoss (2005) by examining Brony anti-fandom, particularly in relation to its use of social media and its heavily gendered pathologizing of Bronies by both men and women.

“Cosplay Is Serious Business”: Gendering Material Fan Labor on Heroes of Cosplay

“Cosplay Is Serious Business”:Gendering Material Fan Labor on Heroes of Cosplay Suzanne Scott (bio) Cosplay, or costume play, the practice of constructing costumes and props inspired by fictional characters and embodying those characters in real-world spaces such as fan conventions, remains undertheorized within fan studies. Although scholars have considered cosplay as a mode of identity performance and geek culture bloggers are increasingly engaging the identity politics of convention culture for cosplayers, the labor and materiality of cosplay as a mode of fan production, as well as how that labor is gendered, is rarely addressed.1 This is perhaps because cosplay occupies a conflicted positioning within preexisting discourses around fan production and performance. Fan studies as a field has historically focused on female fans’ transformative textual production through the creation and circulation of fan fiction, fan vids, and fan art. Cosplay, by contrast, typically presents itself as a form of mimetic fan production. Mimetic modes of fan production—a term I borrow from Matt Hills—seek to replicate what is seen on screen, and thus do not “create radical mash-ups, or ‘read’ in provocative ways, nor transformatively rework the object of fandom.”2 Hills nonetheless makes a compelling case for a consideration of mimetic fan production, like replicating props, [End Page 146] as a transformative endeavor—one that has the capacity to deconstruct “the separation of supposedly female-centered transformational and male-centered affirmational fandoms.”3 Cosplay, as a form of mimetic fan production popular with both men and women, would thus seem to present an ideal site for navigating ongoing, and distinctly gendered, anxieties surrounding the professionalization and monetization of fan labor. Although, as Hills suggests, mimetic fan practices might allow us to complicate many of the gendered binaries of contemporary fan studies, I contend that these gendered binaries around fannish professionalization not only persist but also are often used to reentrench the notion that male fans are more adept at professionalizing their labor and discursively discipline female fans who make similar efforts to monetize their mimetic fan works.4 To revisit some of the core concerns of the 2009 “In Focus: Fandom and Feminism,” I consider how the SyFy Channel’s reality series Heroes of Cosplay (2013– ) genders professionalization and material fan labor, and how fans have responded to those representations via the Tumblr Heroes of Cosplay Confessions. Too often, labor is marked only when it aligns with the interests of capital. Compared to textual forms of fan production, cosplay is expensive, but it is precisely this expense (the purchasing of items such as fabrics, materials, and makeup), as well as the tactile nature of the product within material fan production, that allows it to be more culturally legible as a form of labor. This, coupled with the growing array of cosplay retailers online and burgeoning legal battles over licensing and the sale of fan crafts on sites like Etsy, creates a fertile space for revisiting and expanding on Abigail De Kosnik and Karen Hellekson’s 2009 “In Focus” exchange surrounding the future of fandom’s gift economy and the professionalization of fan fiction.5 Hellekson, framing fandom’s gift economy as a form of legal and social protection, argued that fandom constructs “a new, gendered space that relies on the circulation of gifts for its cohesion with no currency and little meaning outside the economy, and that deliberately repudiates a monetary model (because it is gendered male).”6 De Kosnik countered with concerns that female fans might be “waiting too long to decide to profit from their innovative art form,” contending that “women writing fanfic for free today risk institutionalizing a lack of compensation for all women that practice this art in the future.”7 I don’t intend [End Page 147] to take sides in this ongoing debate but rather to expose an additional layer to Hellekson and De Kosnik’s initial exchange. As both Heroes of Cosplay and submissions to the Heroes of Cosplay Confessions Tumblr reveal, the question isn’t merely whether women should or should not professionalize their fan labor, but how professionalized female fans are received and scrutinized differently from their fanboy counterparts, who are rarely interrogated about their capacity...

Bigger on the inside, or maybe on the outside

Bigger on the inside, or maybe on the outside Lindy Orthia (ed.), Doctor Who and Race. Bristol: Intellect, 2013. 308pp. £20.00 (pbk). Matt Hills (ed.), New Dimensions of Doctor Who: Adventures in Space, Time and Television. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. 240pp. £14.99 (pbk). Paul Booth (ed.), Doctor Who. Bristol: Intellect, 2013. 164pp. £15.50 (pbk). Iain MacRury and Michael Rustin, The Inner World of Doctor Who: Psychoanalytic Reflections in Time and Space. London: Karnac, 2014. xxvii + 339pp. £19.99 (pbk).It must have been a slow news week at the end of May last year, and a confusing time at the Daily Mail offices in London. A bunch of presumably lefty - and foreign! - academics and fans were criticising Doctor Who's racism.Although the Mail knows, just knows, that the BBC is a left-wing conspiracy and that the corporation's privatisation is the very key to the survival of civilisation (see, for example, Kelly), the tabloid put aside its fury at public service broadcasting, rallied all the small-minded jingoism for which it is renowned and leaped to the series' defence. Momentarily abandoning its anti-immigrant scare-mongering and Islamophobic harangues, the Mail, whose long track record of 'not being racist' is why it is so widely revered as the keenest arbiter of such matters, set the record straight. Under a long-winded headline and a couple of pretty meaningless bullet points, we were presented, really quite surprisingly, with a not-inaccurate summary of Lindy Orthia's Doctor Who and Race, outlining some of its perfectly reasonable criticisms of the show as if they were damning indictments of the book. If that and a quote from some bland piece of BBC PR were not enough to persuade us of the nobility and justice of the Mail's new crusade, then we should listen to the fans, who, the Mail assures us, 'dismiss such criticisms as groundless and ridiculous' (Hasting).1Three days later, after rearranging the same paragraphs under a different headline (see Hasting and Sheridan), the Mail, confident that it had won over all right-thinking Britons by so roundly defeating the fearsome dragon-of-notparticularly-radical-cultural-criticism, retired from the field of combat. There were other dragons to slay. There are always other dragons for the Mail to slay. Many of them not from around here, or very slightly different in some way.This peculiar episode in British journalism is every bit as intriguing as it was absurd. A television-series-turned-multimedia-franchise-turned-brand, that was long mocked by the tabloids for its wobbly sets and men-in-rubbersuit monsters but is now celebrated as quintessentially British and, especially in its revived version, as a global phenomenon, and that is aware of its public service commitment to a problematically construed and often only tissue-thin multiculturalism, suddenly finds itself being defended against charges of racism, on the grounds of its 'colour-blind' casting and other multiculturalisms, by the tabloid that elsewhere praised Prime Minister David Cameron for 'ending the failed multicultural era' (Forsyth). Here is a clear sense of Doctor Who as a British cultural institution, a sense so strong that a paper one would normally expect to deride fans as acne-ridden, anorak-wearing loners lacking social skills and female companionship actually identifies itself with them. Here also is a sense that the Mail, without this convenient stereotype to hand, cannot tell fans from a broader general audience - but then, who can any more?2The transvaluation of fandom is evident in Doctor Who and Race, which happily includes both fans and academics, each sometimes writing in modes more commonly associated with the other. This is not merely the outcome of some Internet-enabled detente between two groups which were always far from mutually exclusive anyway, but a consequence of (and contributor to) broader shifts in cultural politics. Academics no longer have to deny personal taste, or even claim - as so many were still doing as recently as a decade ago - that their love of and interest in mass cultural products was, by some strange alchemy, 'subversive' or 'transgressive'. …