Popular Culture Texts Research Articles

Gender and nation in Meiji Japan: modernity, loss, and the doing of history

Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan is a historical analysis of_ the discourses of nostalgia in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan. Through an analysis of the experience of rapid social change in Japan's modernization, it argues that fads (ry?k?) and the desires they express are central to understanding Japanese modernity, conceptions of gender, and discourses of nationalism. In doing so, the author uncovers the myth of eternal return that lurks below the surface of Japanese history as an expression of the desire to find meaning amid the chaos and alienation of modern times. The Meiji period (1868-1912) was one of rapid change that hastened the process of forgetting: The state's aggressive program of modernization required the repression of history and memory. Rooted in the belief that the nation was a natural and organic entity that predated the rational, modern state, such conceptions often were responses to modernity that envisioned the nation in opposition to the modern state. What these visions of the nation shared was the ironic desire to overcome the modern condition by seeking the timeless past. While the condition of their repression was often linked to the modernizing policies of the Meiji state, the means for imagining the nation in opposition to the state required the construction of new symbols that claimed the authority of history and appealed to a rearticulated tradition. This book examines the intellectual, social, and cultural factors that contributed to the rapid spread of Western tastes and styles, along with the backlash against Westernization that was expressed as a longing for the past. By focusing on the expressions of these desires in popular culture and media texts, it reveals how the conflation of mother, countryside, everyday life, and history structured representations to naturalize ideologies of gender and nationalism.

Cultural Proximity and Reflexivity in Interpreting Transnational Media Texts: The Case of Malaysians Consuming Japanese Popular Culture

Television programs such as animation and drama series from Japan have become common transnational products in Malaysia. Since studies on Malaysians who consume Japanese popular culture are lacking even a decade after its substantial rise in popularity, this qualitative study was designed to explore the media consumption of Japanese popular culture in Malaysia. In this article I examined how Malaysians are interpreting their favorite media texts from Japan specifically revisiting the concepts of “cultural proximity” and “reflexivity” suggested in the other studies of Japanese popular culture and the audience. I conducted in-depth interviews with 12 participants who have been consuming various Japanese popular cultural products over the years, and thematically analyzed transcribed audio-recordings of the interviews. Individual proximity in the particular life stage was found in their favorite media texts, and that was a part of their pleasure in addition to enjoying encountering foreignness, which they did not find or accept in their real lives. Transnational media texts of Japanese popular culture are suggested to be potential materials to reflect upon and discuss the individual proximity in people, social issues, or phenomenon rather than essential “culture” which is often associated with national or ethnic origin.

Creating Digital Comics in Response to Literature: Aesthetics, Aesthetic Transactions, and Meaning Making

This article explores how eighth-grade students in a reading support class responded to the novel The Outsiders with the software program Comic Life. Rather than viewing this work from a new technologies or digital literacies perspective, we argue that unique insights can be gained by analyzing students’ digital compositions with lenses attuned to the arts, the aesthetic transaction, and student perspectives. In our presentation of four case studies, we are informed by two conceptualizations of aesthetics. First, we consider the aesthetic qualities of students’ comics by analyzing the presence and impact of image selection, color choice, and overall design on the meaning students make in their comics. Second, we draw from Rosenblatt’s discussion of the aesthetic transaction in both reading and writing as rooted in the senses, in perception, and within the students’ social worlds.We found that students worked within and across personal experiences, semiotic systems, and popular cultural texts in ways that reflected and often enriched their literary understanding. This article highlights how deliberate inquiry into students’ creative processes, products, and perspectives can provide insight into the potential of the digital arts to support meaning making and the aesthetic transaction.

For Geographies of Children, Young People and Popular Culture

AbstractThis paper calls for more direct, careful, sustained research on geographies of children, young people and popular culture. I present three sets of empirical and conceptual resources for researchers developing work in this area. Part 1 signposts classic work from cultural/media studies, marketing and sociology, which has been centrally concerned with meanings of popular culture designed for children and young people (e.g. via critiques of the gendered content of iconic popular cultural phenomena). Part 2 foregrounds nascent conceptualisations of social‐material geographies of childhood and youth. I argue that these conceptualisations can extend and unsettle classic work on popular culture, by questioning how popular cultural texts, objects and phenomena matter. Halfway through the paper is a ‘commercial break’. Here, I present some personal reflections on working at the intersection between the ideas discussed in Parts 1 and 2. With reference to a specific popular cultural artefact (the Toys ‘Я’ Us Christmas toy catalogue), I argue that both meanings and matterings are crucial for geographers engaging with children and young people's popular cultures. In conclusion, I argue that more geographers should engage with the literature and issues outlined in Part 1, but also that the geographical concepts discussed in Part 2 demand new modes of research, thinking and writing in relation to popular cultural texts, objects and phenomena.

The Use of Digital Texts as an Alternative Method of Determining Functional ICT Literacy Levels

The aim of this study was to determine ICT literacy levels using a situated approach, targeting the functional understanding of technical terms contained in digital everyday culture texts. A cohort of 70 first year undergraduate Education students participated in the study. The assessment task included writing definitions for 47 technical terms which were derived from a series of digital texts, such as songs and advertisements. Students' definitions were evaluated using a simple rating scale. Results indicated that for two-thirds of the terms examined students' understanding ranged from medium to high. On the other hand, students' understanding of the remaining one-third of the terms was either poor or minimal. Furthermore, the correlation of students' understanding of the terms with student's self-reported familiarity with software applications was low to moderate. The paper is concluded with a discussion of the potential of using popular cultural texts as an alternative approach for assessing levels of functional ICT literacy.

Fantasy and Belief: Alternative Religions, Popular Narratives and Digital Cultures (Danielle Kirby)

<i>Fantasy and Belief: Alternative Religions, Popular Narratives and Digital Cultures</i> (Danielle Kirby)

Coming Together and Apart While Reading Popular Cultural Texts: Identities in Media Reception

Although reading is popularly considered to be a solitary experience, in linguistics and literature studies the social nature of reading has been widely recognized. Accordingly, it is posited here that due to their inherently interactive and interpersonal character, media texts cannot be related to other than intersubjectively. Based on data gathered during research on teenage media reception, this article demonstrates that the ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991) constructed in media discourse provoke in readers a sense of belonging and sharing a specific identity, and that the trajectories of readers’ emotional involvement also includes alienation from the textually constituted communities. The same dynamic of coming closer and away concerns the recipients’ significant others to whom they relate intertextually in media discourse. In analyzing these issues, this study shows the social and psychological complexity of media consumption as well as the research value of exploring it for cultural and social studies.

Popular Geopolitics, Audiences and Identities: Reading the ‘War on Terror’ in the Philippines

Audience research has traditionally been neglected within the subfield of popular geopolitics. However in recent years, geographers are increasingly focusing on the making of geopolitical meanings by audiences as they consume popular culture and related texts. Drawing on recent assemblage thinking in geopolitics, this paper argues that audiences form part of the animators of a network that links the human body with places, environments, objects and discourses related to geopolitics. By investigating Filipinos’ critical readings of and engagements with the ‘war on terror’ in Mindanao as represented through the national newspaper, the Philippines Daily Inquirer, the agency and power of audiences in the creative enactments of geopolitics and geography are illuminated. As such, understanding the complex interactions between popular media and its audiences can prove useful in casting insights into the everyday, geopolitical ‘playing out’ of issues of terrorism, violence and peace in the Philippines context and beyond.

From ‘Madonna’ to ‘Whore’: Sexuality, pregnancy, and popular culture

Pregnant bodies are often perceived to be sites of reproductive beauty in American popular culture; however, the intersection of pregnancy and sexuality elicits reactions ranging from cultural disgust to fetishization. Using Foucauldian discourse theory, I look at how cultural ambivalence about pregnant women who have sex manifests in varied popular culture texts. Ambivalence, I argue, appears through the medicalization of pregnant sexuality (asexualizing), compulsory heterosexuality and pregnancy pornography (hypersexualizing). I also include feminist responses that disrupt the asexual/hypersexual binary.

Deciphering men: reading the masculine inModern Family

Purpose– The growing public anxiety towards the end of the twentieth century that men were “in crisis” was articulated in popular-cultural texts. The purpose of this paper is to examine the TV family sitcomModern Family, in order to explore the ways that it constructs the masculine post-9/11.Design/methodology/approach– The approach used is that of cultural studies, a field which draws together theorisation and analytical methods from a variety of disciplines.Findings– Despite the variety of family structures represented in the seriesModern Family, its narratives continue to foster traditional notions of patriarchal power. However, the presence of alternate versions of “family” and “masculinity” suggests an awareness of other possibilities.Practical implications– This paper may model to its readers a way of approaching and analysing other popular-cultural texts for their representations of masculinity.Social implications– An understanding of the dynamics of masculinity and its alternative forms of masculinity may be likely to have a material impact in the social sphere.Originality/value– By drawing together theory and analytical approaches from a variety of relevant disciplines, the paper demonstrates that, in the wake of the events of 9/11, there are twin impulses simultaneously to adhere to a familiar, dominant notion of masculinity, yet to propose alternate forms of the masculine.

Presidentialism, Political Fiction, and the Complex Presidencies ofFox's24

This article explores how theFox television network program24offers a compelling yet oddly ambivalent vision of theU.S. presidency. Specifically, I examine24's articulation of presidentialism in depictions of the nation's chief executive and reveal how those depictions are actually quite complex and layered. Ultimately, I suggest that as24continues to circulate as a meaningful popular culture text, it may also continue to influence howAmericans see the presidency, offering its audiences a sense of the presidency that is conflicted and complicated, yet strangely reassuring in its vision of presidentialism and presidential authority.

True Blood, a Critical Pedagogy of Conjuration, and Mediating Racial Histories in the Classroom

The Texas Board of Education's sweeping approval of roughly one hundred changes to the social studies and history curriculum, a ban on so-called ''interpretive history'' in Florida, and a vitriolic campaign of book-banning in Arizona, indicate the extent to which American education and curriculum is currently under assault by a forced historical amnesia (Giroux 2012, 2013). In particular, the historically formative role that racial discrimination and violence have played in shaping the contemporary economic, cultural, and political landscape is being suppressed by a postracial and dehistoricizing cultural pedagogy. In this article, author Tyler J. Pollard contends that it is absolutely imperative that youth learn to live historically and politically in the present, and wagers that this learning can be cultivated in the classroom through the practice of what he is calling a of conjuration. Given the recent haunting of vampires, zombies, and other undead corporeal figures within the scene of contemporary popular culture, Pollard argues that a pedagogy of conjuration ought attend to those cultural sites that not only complicate categories of life and death, but also actively negotiate and legitimate how and on what terms particular events of the past should be remembered or forgotten. By engaging some contemporary theoretical work this article begins by discussing the colorblind and privatized way in which racism operates in America today. Next, Piollard suggests that Jacques Derrida's (2004) injunction that doing justice requires learning to conjure and live with ''ghosts''--with the traces of difficult pasts--offers a model for conceiving of history in the classroom. Finally, he looks at how HBO's hit TV show True Blood could be used as a productive site of historical conjuration and remembrance in the classroom by considering the public pedagogy the show produces around questions of race, and the generational relations between the past as a force that persists in haunting the present. To this end, he takes up the degree to which addressing popular cultural texts in the classroom, and doing so in a critical and self-reflective way, might enable meaningful and transformative experiences for students who are more accustomed to devouring popular culture in thoughtless and utterly consumptive ways as pure entertainment. Language: en

What's Love Got to Do With It? Sex and the City's Comic Perspective on Sex

O N 28 JUNE, 1998, HBO BROADCAST THE FOURTH EPISODE OF A brand new series which was to become one of the most iconic popular culture texts of the turn of the millennium: Sex and the City. As its title suggested, the show did feature a great deal of sex, but as the series progressed, the “sex talk” became far more intriguing than the “sex action.” In the episode, “Valley of the Twenty-Something Guys,” the characters ponder the pros and cons of anal sex as they try to help Charlotte (Kristin Davis) in her decision to engage in it with her latest boyfriend. Different opinions on the subject are stated, but Samantha (Kim Cattrall) provides the most “matter-of-fact” perspective on the issue: “Front? Back? Who cares? A hole is a hole.” Samantha’s straightforward view of anal sex seems to shock the driver of the taxi in which the girls are riding, presumably mirroring the—possibly bewildered—viewer at home. Never before had a TV show portrayed women’s sexual desires, whims, doubts and fears in such an open manner. The high degree of success achieved by the series—which quickly crossed over the niche it was originally intended for—suggests that twentieth-century audiences were ready for more daring representations of female sexuality than mainstream television was willing to offer them. The turn of the millennium has witnessed a particularly quick pace in the “sexualization” of mainstream culture (McNair). Representations of sex in contemporary television have significantly raised the bar in their degree of “explicitness” in the last decade. This pushing of limits has been slow and steady, lacking especially conspicuous “historical” landmarks, which may account for the very effectiveness

Backstage performances: a third grader's embodiments of pop culture and literacy in a public school classroom

AbstractThis article examines the less visible ways in which popular culture enters the classroom and shapes children's embodied performances as students and literate subjects. Foregrounding snapshots from a case study of a low‐achieving, African American female student, I consider how popular culture is inscribed on students' bodies and becomes a means through which they perform their schooled selves, at the same time that school curricula are resources for constructing conceptualisations of popular culture images and texts. The examination of popular culture, literacy curricula and identities is informed by poststructural approaches to discourse, power and the body that allow the consideration of bodies as discursive means and as sites of inscription. This approach makes possible the examination of the politics of the curriculum, that is, the examination of the ways school curricula at their intersection with popular culture exert power onto students' bodies and produce norms and regularities that students take up, subvert and/or resist. From this perspective, I expose the ways in which the curriculum, popular culture and children's performances as gendered, literate and other types of subjects intertwine in the background of the official school space.

Science, society and the sea of fertility: new reproductive technologies in Japanese popular culture

Since the late twentieth century, assisted reproductive technologies have brought new challenges to our understanding of the family and gender relations. There are ever-widening gaps between medical practice, legal regulation and everyday understandings and practices. Some recent popular cultural texts in Japan have explored the issues raised by non-commercial surrogate motherhood. The background to these texts is a series of controversies concerning surrogacy and the use of assisted reproductive technologies and wider societal anxieties about family, reproduction and population management. In this article, I will focus on two novels by a medical practitioner and popular novelist who writes under the pseudonym Kaidō Takeru – Gene Waltz (Kaidō 2008) and Madonna Verde (Kaidō 2010) – and the associated film (Ōtani 2011) and television series (NHK 2011). The fact that it was the national broadcaster Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK) that dramatised Madonna Verde suggests that the discussion of these issues was thought to have wide social and cultural resonance. I will place these texts in their social and cultural context with reference to medical, legal and popular discourses on new reproductive technologies in contemporary Japan. These new reproductive technologies have the potential to force a rethinking of masculinity, femininity, parenthood, family and gender relations. The popular texts also, however, draw on pre-existing ways of thinking about masculinity, femininity, marriage, reproduction and the relationships among science, ‘nature’ and society.

Mapping the Terrains for Girlhood in Hong Kong

Identity politics in the everyday lives of girls is of continual global concern to gender studies. I argue that neither educational factors nor those pertaining to mass media can stand alone in accounting for what girlhood means in Hong Kong where the study of what it means to be a girl has not yet attracted much attention from academic scholars. Because of the promotion of a sexually repressive framework in the educational sector, the concept of girlhood remains confined by an already established notion of femininity. I argue that it is hence vital for us to use texts of popular culture in education to allow for a more appropriate concept of girlhood in contemporary Hong Kong given that this concept affects the ways in which girls identify themselves.

Exploring Family Discourses About Purity Pledges: Connecting Relationships and Popular Culture

This study explores connections between popular culture and family interaction. Multiadic interview data were collected from families who enacted purity pledges. Using contrapuntal analysis, results indicate how competing familial discourses about popular culture serve as both centrifugal and centripetal forces. Fathers rejected many sexual values in popular culture texts, but they also appreciated that popular culture makes purity rings intelligible to others. Mothers expressed frustration at portrayals of teenage pregnancy on television. Children indicated that their parents did not understand how they saw popular culture, in competition with the aforementioned parental discourses, but appreciated that their parents cared. They also articulated parental disapproval of a current generation's popular culture choices as ongoing ritual, thus allowing the competing discourses to operate in a centripetal fashion. Overall, it is apparent that distal popular culture discourses inform proximal, constitutive family discourses about sex and sexuality.

A Politics of Imperceptibilities, Possibilities and Early Childhood Practice

A growing body of research suggests that a range of ‘hidden’ or ‘less tangible’ aspects of early childhood practice play an important part in early childhood practice. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this existing research literature by identifying some of the complex ways that less tangible aspects work. To do this, the authors focus on a data fragment describing ways that conceptualisations of ‘secret’ are at work in one educator's practice. To give readings of this data fragment, the authors use a strategy of ‘plugging in’ everyday and theoretical understandings of ‘the secret’, and, a popular culture text. The authors also use post-structural understandings of ‘being’ and ‘language’, and additional illustrative data fragments to illuminate these complex aspects of practice at work. The article concludes by considering some implications and cautions of the politics of possibility that the readings of imperceptibility and early childhood practice have opened. Participant: It almost is like a secret language of its own. Researcher: What is? P: Being an early childhood educator [1] we've got all the - we all know that you - I don't have to say to Mary Jane, ‘Go and stand over there because you need your back against the wall because you need to look at all the children’ … We automatically know that. We speak about pedagogy and speak about all these words that - these now little secret words. Or we bend down to look at the children so the children can look at us in our faces. It's almost like this little secret movement we've got going on. (Data fragment from an interview with an early childhood educator) Is the secret in the content or in the form? And the answer is already apparent: neither. (Deleuze &amp; Guattari, 1987, p. 289)

Rebranding Himiko, the Shaman Queen of Ancient History

Rebranding Himiko, the Shaman Queen of Ancient History Laura Miller (bio) While doing fieldwork on the divination industry in Tokyo, I discovered a place where a specialist offered tarot card readings using the famed 1889 Tarot de Marseille deck. In order to get an interview I went to her place of business, located in a decrepit office building in Shibuya. She greeted me at the entryway together with her officemate, a woman named Yasuko. Yasuko was also in the divination business and told me she was carrying on a tradition established by the first great Japanese shaman, Himiko, a third-century CE ruler described only briefly by Chinese historians. Why does a contemporary divination professional feel the need to link divination entrepreneurship to an ancient sovereign? Yasuko is not alone in her fascination with Himiko, and it is this interest in a historical figure about whom we know very little that I wish to explore in this essay. Other visions of Himiko’s persona are less inspiring than Yasuko’s. Some manga and anime creators portray Himiko as a presumptuous tyrant, promiscuous sorceress, or vain hag unworthy of power. At first glance these disparate perceptions seem to have no relationship to each other. Was Himiko a diabolical dictator, a talented witch, or an adorable shrine attendant? Do people see in Himiko a sexy manipulator or a spiritual mastermind? Interpretations [End Page 179] vary depending on the goals and attitudes held by creators of her image, particularly their ideas about female power. Women such as Yasuko view Himiko as a metaphor for female agency and innate occult abilities. Other popular culture producers see in Himiko an aberrant and unwise attribution of political authority to women. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich pointed out, the figure of Joan of Arc has been many things across the years, including witch, virgin, heretic, whore, transvestite, peasant, and saint.1 A woman demonized in one era might be venerated in another. Himiko also reflects this type of shifting assessment, often holding contrasting personas within the same time period. My aim is not to engage in recuperation of Himiko as a positive origin symbol but rather to survey the diversity in uses of her image. She is put to service for civic boosterism, national-identity construction, and to legitimize the divination enterprise. Some of the more interesting images of Himiko are also the most challenging to understand. Representations of Himiko are rarely neutral, as most entail encoding of selected assumptions about ancient history and female authority. This essay will review some ways she is depicted in literary treatments and in visual culture, where she appears as shaman priestess, alluring ruler, and dangerous witch. I draw on history and popular culture texts to trace how the hazy yet tantalizing aspects of her story make her an appealing icon easily available to serve a range of interests. The iconography depends on who is looking at Himiko and for what purposes they include her in their project. HIMIKO’S ORIGIN STORY Himiko might be the subject of more media than any other woman in Japanese history. She fascinates not only scholars but anyone interested in Japanese history and identity. She was described in ethnographic chronicles about Japan written by third-century Chinese, yet is not named in the earliest Japanese mythological histories, the Kojiki (712, Record of ancient matters) and the Nihongi (720, Chronicles of Japan, alternate title Nihon shoki). Because the Japanese compilers of these mytho-histories consulted much earlier Chinese sources that contained details about Himiko, it is clear they intentionally excised her name. No doubt, acknowledging Himiko’s role would have interfered with their ideological project to establish a patrilineal kinship group as the [End Page 180] divinely ordained rulers. One outcome of this discrepancy, however, is that Himiko’s biography has been the subject of extremely broad interpretation. In one of the early Chinese histories, the Wei zhi (Records of Wei) book of the Sanguozhi (Records of the Three Kingdoms), compiled by historian Chen Shou (233–97), there is a section on Japan entitled “Account of the Eastern Barbarians” that describes Himiko with some intriguing information.2 She was the ruler of a confederation of chiefdoms, was...

Gramsci and Games

The objective of this article is to highlight the relevance ideological debate plays in the study of popular culture texts and in particular in that of video games. Every text is a reflection of the ideological forces (cultural, economic, social, individual, etc.) generating it. Thus, ideology is essentially an omnipresent entity, which knows no boundaries of class, race, or cultural background. As a matter of fact, games are capable of reflecting ideological stances in a variety of ways. Throughout the first part of this article, we will revisit ideology from a Marxist perspective, that is, as a form of deception, manipulation, and enslavement and subsequently by moving away from such a deterministic/fatalistic approach and discussing it in the light of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. By providing practical examples, this article will attempt to show how both ideological and hegemonic processes operate in the video game medium.