Place In Popular Culture Research Articles

Rockin' out of the box: gender maneuvering in alternative hard rock

Schippers' account of the rock music subculture in Chicago between 1992 and 1995 is an ethnographic study based on casual interactions with a core group of rock fans, interviews with rock musicians, and field trips into bars and clubs of the Wicker Park area. The result provides fascinating, informative anecdotal information. Drawing from theorists Anthony Giddens, Candace West, Don Zimmerman, Judith Butler, and others, Schippers interprets performances, gestures, and language as well as values-both implied and explicitly stated-as maneuvers employed by members of that subculture to undermine expressions of (and attitudes reflecting) sexism and bigotry.-Choice An astute analysis of rock music's gender politics that manages to be both perceptive and fun to read-a rare feat.- Arlene Stein, author of Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation Given the long history of feminism and its contested place in popular culture, important, practical questions arise: What effect, if any, have feminist ideas and practices had on the lives of young men and women who grew up with them? How do these individuals negotiate the realities of gender in their daily lives? Employing the crucial feminist insight that gender is a constantly shifting performance and not an essential quality related to sex, Mimi Schippers explores the gender roles, assumptions, and transgressions of the men and women involved in the alternative hard rock scene. She uses the innovative term gender maneuvering to explain how gender and sexuality are negotiated and always changing features of social relations. This process operates as a cultural practice and as an individual strategy of resistance to socially prescribed gender roles. Schippers conducted extensive interviews with fans as well as musicians, including Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Kim Thayil of Soundgarden, Donita Sparks and Jennifer Finch of L7, Kat Bjelland and Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland, Rose Marshack of Poster Children, Louise Post and Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt, and Liz Davis and Valerie Agnew of 7 Year Bitch. As it documents the development of a rock music genre that has so far received little academic attention, Rockin' out of the Box also demonstrates how this musical culture contributes to our understanding of the daily practices of gender relations among young people. Mimi Schippers is an assistant professor of sociology and women's studies at Tulane University.

The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950

In this rich and fascinating history, Susan Schulten tells a story of Americans beginning to see the world around them, tracing U.S. attitudes toward world geography from the end of nineteenth-century exploration to the explosion of geographic interest before the dawn of the Cold War. Focusing her examination on four influential institutions - maps and atlases, the National Geographic Society, the American university, and public schools - Schulten provides an engaging study of geography, cartography, and their place in popular culture, politics, and education.

Welcome to the Worship Awakening

Since 1970, seeker services and praise-and-worship services have become increasingly influential among mainline churches. These services attract mainliners with their potential to stimulate evangelism and spiritual growth. The seeker-service strategy raises important questions about the relationship of worship and evangelism and about the place of popular culture, multimedia technology, and the arts in worship. Praise-and-worship services challenge mainliners to rethink the range of physical and emotional expression in worship and to think differently about the role of music in worship. We can already see the convergence of elements from these two approaches and from historic liturgy that are custom-fitted to meet the needs of individual congregations.

Is It Sick to Want to Live to 100? The Popular Culture of Health and Longevity

Is It Sick to Want to Live to 100? The Popular Culture of Health and Longevity

Bringing Culture Back In: Exploring the Cultural Dimensions of Disaster

This special issue is devoted to the popular culture of disaster. In virtually every type of society, human settlement patterns produce some kind of disaster, and every culture that lives through a major disaster produces some kind of cultural representation of it. The stories of a culture's experience with disaster are often passed on through folklore, remembered through permanent or occasional memorials, relived through dramatized portrayals, and embedded in a group's collective conscience as permanent markers of social time. In some societies, such as the United States, disasters occupy a central place in popular culture, appearing almost nightly on pseudo-scientific television programs and generating millions of dollars for movie makers. Because disasters and representations of them pervade so much of social life, we think it is important and worthwhile to begin paying systematic attention to the cultural dimensions of disasters. This special issue of the journal is an important step in that direction. We have tried to assemble papers that stimulate thought about various aspects of the popular culture of disaster-how it should be defined, what concepts should be used to study it, and why it is important to study. In no way is this single issue meant to be a definitive statement on the topic. In fact, if it is successful, this issue will raise more questions than it answers. By devoting an entire issue of the journal to this topic, we hope that scholars will build on what is presented here and begin thinking about alternative ways to approach the subject.

Rodeo Cowboys in the North American Imagination by Michael Allen

BOOK REVIEWS 3 3 3 repeatedly, thus implying that there are comparatively few westerners whose writings are truly significant. This undercuts an introduction that invites us to see the multiplicity of western American cultures and note the many writers whose work “begins to suggest a new western identity, something broader and more open than the simple ‘he’ of the traditional West” (18). Nevertheless, rather than turning in on its own completeness like some anthologies, The Literary West reaches outward. Well excerpted pieces from My Antonia, Refuge, The Land of Little Rain, and The Grapes of Wrath invite new readers into those works and provide pleasant reminders for others. The introduction and the “Guide to Further Reading” at the end of the volume provide a wealth of additional titles, helpful context, and advice on choosing useful critical and historical materials. Because of this open-endedness, the quality of the excerpts, the interesting connections among the selections, and the thoughtful commentaries, The Literary West serves several audiences well: it would be a good undergraduate literature text, an excellent introduction for readers new to or intrigued by the West, a nice surprise for folks who think “sense of place” can be found only in nature writing, and a thought-provoking resource for fans of western American literature. Rodeo Cowboys in the North American Imagination. By Michael Allen. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998. 270 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by R obert R oripaugh University of Wyoming, Laramie Rodeo and the men and women involved in it have been a significant but relatively neglected part of western American culture and literature for over a century. With Rodeo Cowboys in the North American Imagination, Michael Allen has written a fine study of the subject based on his own knowledge, the sources dealing factually with rodeo life and its history, and treatments in film, folklore and literature, art, and music. Allen describes himself as primarily a historian, but he is also involved in American studies and utilizes that inter­ disciplinary approach in an effective and interesting way. The initial chapter, “A BriefHistory ofRodeo,” gives an overview ofwhat becomes, in time, a professional sport rather than a rangeland contest and cel­ ebration by working cowboys. Allen discusses the evolution in origins, back­ grounds, and motivations of rodeo performers as related to cowboy history and his later consideration of their place in popular culture. His second chapter focuses on rodeo as a subject in film, with an emphasis on The Lusty Men, The Misfits, Stoney Burke (on television),junior Bonner, j. W. Coop, Electric Horseman, Urban Cowboy, 8 Seconds, and The Cowboy Way. A chapter on “The Rodeo Cowboy in Folklore and Literature” considers oral and written traditions, including tales, folk beliefs, superstitions, reminis­ 3 3 4 WAL 3 5 . 3 f a l l 2 0 0 0 cences, novels, and poetry from earlier figures such as Curley Fletcher and contemporary poets like Paul Zarzyski and Red Steagall. Novels discussed include Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By, and Moving On, William Crawford’s The Brone Rider, along with Cyra McFadden’s memoir, Rain or Shine. A perceptive chapter on rodeo art and artists is enhanced by eight pages of illustrations and photographs. “The Rodeo Cowboy in Country Music” discusses how older folk songs blend into the work of Ian and Sylvia, Chris LeDoux, Red Steagall, Garth Brooks, George Strait, and other singers and songwriters. In Allen’s view, their songs present “the rodeo-cowboy folk hero: his wanderlust, sto­ icism, courage, pride, humor, attitudes toward rodeo animals and the wild, and ambivalence toward women” (133). In “Rainbow Rodeo Riders and the Archetypal Anti-Archetype,” Allen deals with the question of whether racial, sexual, and cultural diversity exist within the cowboy way of life and among rodeo performers. He concludes that cowboy culture and its code of behavior, and the openness of rodeo as a sport, to a large degree have always worked against prejudice. He supports and illus­ trates this factually and through examples from film, art, music, and literature, including poetry and novels such as Ken Kesey’s Last Go Round written with Ken Babb, Hal Borland’s When the Legends Die, Craig Lesley’s Winterkill...

The social construction of menopause as risk

Menopause and postmenopause are increasingly defined as a period of health risks that require medical and pharmacological treatment. A social construction of menopause as risk is taking place in popular culture and in the medical field and implies a medicalization of women's lives.

The Cult of the DJ: A Symposium

Andrew Ross: With no shortage of literature devoted to most other kinds of popular music, it's astonishing that we don't yet have a proper book about dance music. There isn't even a credible history of the DJ. After all, the dance club has been one of the most important cultural institutions of the last two decades; a social rendezvous that is the crucible not only of musical progress but of fashion, courtship, performance, and sexual display. If and when such an account is written, it will carry an unseen weight because of all the unrecorded voices there; the people, mostly gay men, who died too young and who played a central role in that history. In retrospect, there are many undertones to the meaning of a club classic like Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. Among other things, the redemption vibe is an important element of a club culture which is para-religious in its loyalties and passions. Anyone who has been at a dance temple like New York's Sound Factory on a Sunday morning while the Christian nation is readying to go to church will know what it feels like to believe that the gods have ordained this pleasure especially for you, along with the people dancing within a five-yard radius. It's no surprise that people have come to talk of the cult of the DJ in terms that are not secular, and not always in a tongue-in-cheek way. And yet a decade ago, it would have been unthinkable that the DJ would occupy such a central place in popular culture, let alone be the object of such devotion in the underground club scene, and, in Europe at least, in the realm of superstar culture. The changing role of DJs in the history of popular music has been quite profound: from the heyday of hipster radio DJs like the jazz generation Daddy O'Daylie and Dr. Hep Cat; to seminal rock'n'roll radio DJs like Alan Freed and Wolfman Jack and, above all, John Peel in Britain, who has probably been the single most important shaper and mover of musical culture in Britain for almost three decades now; to the development of disco music and hip hop in the late 1970s, when DJs moved from the position of industry go-between, promoter, or midwife to the position of independent producers and creators in their own right. It's arguable that this redefinition of the role of the DJ has been one of the truly revolutionary developments in popular music. But DJ-generated

The Politics and Pedagogy of Popular Culture in Contemporary Textbooks

What is the place of popular culture in United States history textbooks? Inside these unified chronologies about the public exercise of political, military, and economic power, is there room for the ways that ordinary people make meaning for themselves in their everyday activities? Scholarly study of popular culture is not an exercise in comic relief from the more serious study of public power, but rather a process of discerning how power relations writ large throughout society manifest themselves in common experiences. Consequently, popular culture can present important opportunities for examining the lives of people who rarely appear directly in accounts of politics, economics, and war, that is, the overwhelming majority of the population, the people who do not leave their private papers to historical museums, who do not write memoirs, and who rarely if ever see their names in the newspaper. In the past decade the study of popular culture has emerged as one of the most important areas of research in United States social history. Blending an anthropological sensitivity to the uses and effects of culture with traditional historical concerns about change over time, innovative scholars have found answers to important historical questions in seemingly insignificant sites and practices, ranging from the dime novel to the dance hall, from pageants to parades, from museums to the movies, from the blues to the beer parlor.1

The Female Subject of Popular Culture

This essay discusses the place of popular culture, especially visual representation, in theories of female subjectivity and examines two recent works on women and popular culture as representative of two primary critical and methodological approaches to the female subject. The essay considers the limitations and implications of both qualitative communication research and text-based feminist criticism and the need to construct a dialogue between them.

Days of their lives?: Popular culture, femininity and education

Sandra Taylor explores aspects of the place of popular culture in the lives of teenage girls and young women, and the relevance of media in the social construction of femininity in contemporary Australia.