Popular Culture Media Research Articles

“The Sense of Wonder”: Gaming Capital and Nostalgia for Inexperience in Magic: The Gathering

Popular culture media is a potent wellspring of nostalgia. From remakes and revivifications to perpetual production, aesthetics of nostalgia are commonplace among fan communities who continually encounter and experience both collective and personal pasts during engagement. Existing research has overlooked the role that fans’ gaming capital holds in the emergence of nostalgia, especially in leisure communities such as the trading card game, Magic: The Gathering. Drawing from qualitative interviews with Magic: The Gathering players in Australia, this paper applies the theory of gaming capital to illustrate how the continual acquisition of knowledge ultimately results in nostalgic attachment to times in which one knew very little. While the experience and knowledge gained by transitioning from novice to adept is seen positively, this paper argues it is nonetheless permeated by a pervading sense of loss. Paradoxically, gaming capital bifurcates into a parallel stream of value, specifically nostalgia for lost wonder and inexperience.

#MADRES. Parodic Motherhood Discourses on Peruvian TikTok

TikTok’s increasing cultural pervasiveness, leading to a myriad of practices and discourses, has turned the platform into a rich digital field site to interpret local dynamics. Here, we analyze visual and textual discourses on (urban) Peruvian TikTok as sociocultural processes to reflect on popular media cultures and contribute to media studies and anthropology. This study examines 80 videos and more than 10,000 user comments around the content of two young male Peruvian digital creators—@mikkele and @zagaladas, who upload humorous, parodic clips of themselves re-enacting their mothers—to better understand how motherhood is articulated, exposed, criticized, accepted, and contested. Filled with intergenerational tensions and gender differences, these videos and their comments are fruitful terrain to explore both legitimized and rejected maternal subjectivities. We focus here on three emerged themes: “the unfair, aggressive mother,” “technology in dispute,” and “madre latina vs. madre gringa.”

The New Seriality

Abstract Since at least the nineteenth century seriality and serialization have been among the most important formal and narrative strategies for popular media cultures and their negotiations with the radical changes brought on by industrialization and new communication technologies. Nothing less is at stake in popular seriality than the material and spatiotemporal ordering of the phenomenal world, with far-reaching political consequences. However, in an age of computation, predictive algorithms, and “personalized” media, the parameters of serialization are massively transformed. And because media forms and social formations are tightly intertwined, this transformation—or the shift from an “old” to a “new” form of seriality—brings with it crucial changes and uncertainties with respect to subjective and collective existence going forward. Centrally at stake in the new seriality is a set of techniques and technologies that aim to predictively “typify” subjects and preformat them vis-à-vis normative and statistically correlated categories of gender and race, among others. This article lays the groundwork for thinking seriality as a sociotechnics of typification, the scope and power of which is greatly expanded by algorithmic media.

Between Hegemonic Masculinity and New Man-ism: The Shift from ‘Owning’ the Gaze to Being the ‘Object’ of the Gaze in the Representation of the Western Male in Men’s Health Magazine

This essay discusses how the representation of the Western male has shifted from one of hegemonic masculinity to one of new man-ism by exploring the British edition of Men’s Health magazine (henceforth MH). Beginning with a brief definition of the key terms, the essay explores how such a change has occurred via cultural construction by borrowing a theoretical perspective from Judith Butler, of how all forms of identity are not ‘fixed’, but are rather discursively ‘produced’ by popular culture media: ‘There is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘‘expressions’’ that are said to be its results’ Butler (1988). After highlighting the relevant history of men’s liberation, the essay then discusses the conditions in which the representation of men has become fetishised in modern Britain by adopting MH as a case study. Such exploitative use of idealised depictions of men’s bodies in MH has resulted in men becoming the ‘object’ of the gaze rather than ‘owning’ the gaze. To clarify this sociologically, the essay begins by discussing the feminist movement’s rejection of the men’s patriarchal image and how men thereby began to embrace new man-ism. Next, it discusses two other causes of this shift to new man-ism: (i) economic changes, and (ii) the crisis of masculinity. My concern here is not to unquestioningly accept the concepts associated with these factors or their implications; rather, I discuss them as dynamic elements within the above-mentioned change in how men are represented by MH, which has led men to become the objects rather than the subjects of the gaze. However, despite the historical performativity-related changes to men and masculinity, no real changes to masculinity’s hegemonic and dominant characteristics appear to have occurred. No further detail is given on the content of MH (as this can be studied easily enough), nor will I defend the ‘dumb’ excesses of some men’s titles to avoid a burlesque analysis. Instead, I discuss the most prominent themes in relation to men’s appearances and bodies to provide a better understanding of the shift from hegemonic masculinity to the New Man depicted in MH.

Reading Media Culture Politically

Media culture can be read as a contest of representations and a contested terrain that reproduces existing social struggles. This study focuses on U.S. media culture in the 2000s, which has been a particularly turbulent and contested era of U.S. history and media culture reproduced its passionate polarization, intense political struggle, and often surprising and dramatic events. I am using the concept of transcoding to describe how specific political discourses and positions like liberalism or rightwing nationalism are translated, or encoded, into media texts. Specifically I take the television series A Handmaid´ s Tale as providing illuminating access to social and political realities of its period, which contributes to knowledge of the present age through contextualization, interpretations and critique of popular media culture artifacts. This form of political sociology and cultural studies provides theories and methods that situate media texts within the context of their production and reception, while deploying multiple perspectives to interpret the text and to show what popular media texts reveal about existing society, its modes of oppression and struggles to transform it.

‘It takes a long time to become young’: A critical feminist intersectional study ofVogue’s Non-Issue

Older female celebrities are increasingly visible in popular media culture, but what kinds of representations are being offered? By deploying a feminist intersectional perspective and adopting Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), this article interrogates how British Vogue’s Non-Issue communicates ideas and values about ageing and how the magazine constructs discourses through which women’s ageing is understood. The analysis shows that the Non-Issue represents older women as radical and empowered subjects. The rhetoric of freedom and choice, central to postfeminism, is prominent in the magazine and aligns with neoliberal discourses of successful ageing. Such discourses encourage women to confine themselves to never-ending, rigid forms of self-surveillance, self-monitoring and self-disciplining that ultimately subject the older female body to a ‘new’ set of bodily inscriptions and prescriptions that reinforce patriarchal standards of beauty. These standards of beauty are, however, challenged in the magazine through a recuperated do-it-yourself discourse of punk spirit rebellion that works to commodify women’s empowerment, yet still reduces women to how they look.

Flipping Tropes & Subverting Stereotype Priming in The Hunger Games Trilogy

This is a review paper on the apparent force of commercial success and social media presence being a key in the changes of female representation in popular culture using The Hunger Games dystopian trilogy’s global commercial success and its impact as case in point. It argues that the trilogy’s commercial success is valuable in helping normalise the flipped gender roles or subverting the stereotypical gender primes. While dystopian literature supposedly features worlds and societies beyond typical real-life rules, many parts of that fictional world will still exhibit traits and beliefs contemporary to its author and resonate with its audience. The normalisation of gender stereotypes can often be seen in characters and social dynamics portrayed repeatedly throughout other forms of media communication. These and other literary works carry within it these stereotypical traits or behaviours a shorthand frame of reference which are called tropes. In this paper, the tropes are viewed through the sociological lens called stereotype priming which is the perpetuation of stereotypes through systemic means targeting certain behaviours, traits or beliefs. This paper looks at instances of tropes exhibiting priming functions within the dystopian world of not just The Hunger Games trilogy and how the commercial success of the empowered female has paved the way for more positive female representation in popular media culture since then. This lens has been expanded to take into account how The Hunger Games trilogy continues to have relevance post-pandemic regarding issues that current facts have brought dangerously close to dystopian fiction. Keywords: Dystopian narrative, gender, popular media, popular culture, stereotypes.

Now It’s My Time! Black Girls Finding Space and Place in Comic Books

This essay examines how Black girl narratives are finding and making space and place in the arena of comic books and television. With the rise in Black girl (super)hero protagonists on the comic book pages and adapted television shows, it is essential to explore the significance of their rising inclusion, visibility, and popularity and understand how they contribute to the discourse surrounding the next generation of heroes. Guided by an Afrofuturist, Black feminist, and intersectional framework, I discuss the progressive possibilities of popular media culture in depicting Black girlhood and adolescence. In Marvel Comics’ “RiRi Williams/Ironheart”, DC Comics’ “Naomi McDuffie”, and Boom! Studios’ “Eve”, these possibilities are evident. Blending aspects of adventure, fantasy, sci-fi, and STEM, each character offers fictional insight into the lived experiences of Black girl youth from historical, aesthetic, and expressive perspectives. Moreover, as talented and adventurous characters, their storylines, whether on the comic book pages or the television screen, reveal a necessary change to the landscape of popular media culture.

SYMBOL OF WESTERN NEO-ORIENTALISM CRITICISM IN “MS. MARVEL”

The aim of this article is to construct a critique of Western neo-orientalism through the film medium. Film is a product of popular culture. After 9/11, the concept of neo-orientalism emerged in the West, especially in America, which considers everything that is not "Western" to be terrorists, and radicals. To criticize the concept of neo-orientalism in “Ms. Marvel” the researchers used the theory of identity from Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha to get the concept of identity in this series. The concept of identity found is a construction of a critique symbol of Western neo-orientalism. The source of data in this research was a television miniseries entitled “Ms. Marvel” which live on Disney+. The results of the analysis showed that there are Islamic symbols that appear in this series which are a construction of criticism of the concept of Western neo-orientalism. It can be implied from the result that "Ms.Marvel" is one of the examples of a construction of Neo-Orientalism criticism through the medium of Popular Culture.

김지선의 미디어 퍼포먼스 <슬픔의 집>에 나타난 메타연극성

The House of Sorrow is a digital game-based performance piece that stages a video game as the platform to stage themes of memory, thoughts, and their transformations through streaming. This piece is takes the form of a metagame that deals with game within a game, as it employs the artist-created game contents as its central narrative element and welcomes the audience to a virtual theater on a Minecraft map. Yet, from a different point of view, The House of Sorrow simulates stage and theater through the double structure of the game that stages both the diegetic narrative space and the non-diegetic empirical environment. In this context, the argument of this study is that the aesthetic dimension of this piece is noticeable through the apparatus and grammar of theater. This paper thus posits The House of Sorrow as a performing art and investigates the dramatic function of the game-narrative and the staging characteristics of the game-streaming in order to examine the heterogeneous space that unfolds between the performance and digital media. The game “The House of Sorrow” as dramatic text has a self-reflexive and self-referential nature, but the meta-usage of this game operates through its relationship with another world via game-streaming. The game-streaming that mediates the virtuality of the game and the reality of the performance generates the theatrical structure of the performer’s role-playing and the spectators’ game-watching, so creating an interplayable environment for game-playing. Thus, The House of Sorrow appropriates the most trend in popular media culture and registers it within the context of theater, overlapping game and theater ― and what emerges amidst the double would be theater, or play in the most original sense.

Poetry in Popular Culture: Instagram, Rupi Kaur, Feminism and the Utilitarian Value of Poetry

In order to explain the popularity of Instagram poetry, and of the Instapoet Rupi Kaur in particular, we have positioned it within the contemporary context of the changing poetic field, the context of popular media culture and the consumer society of late neoliberal capitalism. From a complex language construction requiring in its reception an educated reader, poetry has become simple, communicative and accessible to all. At a time when neoliberal capitalism appropriates, absorbs and alters every marginal practice, adjusting it to its needs, poetry has acquired a utilitarian value. The most interesting example of this utilitarian value can be found in the poems of Rupi Kaur, a Canadian poet with a South Asian background. Her poetry functions as self-help literature. Kaur defines herself as a feminist, which we have positioned within the context of neoliberal feminism, which has features in common with postfeminism and celebrity feminism. Postfeminism is a blend of feminist and antifeminist world views, and has contributed to the construction of new femininity. In the contemporary late neoliberal age it acquires a significant form in hyperfemininity as an unquestionable ideal omnipresent in the media, which all women must aspire to in order to be accepted by society. Kaur’s Instapoetry has appropriated feminist (intersectional) ideas for its (neoliberal) objectives. She provides advice on how to overcome painful relationship breakups, violence, racism, misogyny, the patriarchy and classism. This is realized through the use of formulas offered by New Age alternative spirituality. It is this spirituality that has been absorbed by neoliberal capitalism and incorporated into all aspects of services, in order to make the ruthless exploitation of workers in precarious jobs more bearable. Remediation is characteristic of Instapoetry. Poets use old and new media: drawings, handwriting or typewriting, photography, which is mediated by the digital technology of Instagram. In addition, they perform live in front of an audience, and an analysis of Rupi Kaur’s performances clearly shows that these are mass media events; thus Instapoetry can be understood as a specific form of popular media culture intended for a mass audience.

Conceptual Overview (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

Conceptual Overview (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

Sex Acts (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

Sex Acts (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

Performer Demographics (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

Performer Demographics (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

Mediating Girl Power: A Cognitive Approach to Enola Holmes on Page and Screen.

Children’s mystery and detective fiction has often reflected cultural and societal changes, introducing the concept of “girl power” as early as the first half of the twentieth century. This article compares the “girl sleuth” narrative in Nancy Springer’s The Case of the Missing Marquess (2006) and the “super-sleuth” schema in the film adaptation Enola Holmes (2020). Relying on cognitive criticism, the analysis focuses on the conceptual properties of mystery and detective narratives as well as the strategies of detection employed by the girl sleuth to distinguish between the synchronous/inclusive models of empowerment found in children’s mysteries and the transient/exclusive ones in super-sleuth action-adventure adaptations. As a modern retelling of Sherlock Holmes mysteries, the Enola Holmes story transforms the central schema in the great detective script by depicting the neo-Victorian girl sleuth’s transgression into the public sphere and the attainment of the feminine ideal of girl power. However, in popular media culture, the synchronous models of empowerment are often replaced by transient models, which are characterized by hyper-transgressions, the objectification of knowledge and cognition, and the affective engagement of viewers. Accordingly, the super-sleuth schema is the product of media discourses of empowerment and hyper-textual practices that often forgo the integration of body, mind and context found in mystery and detective stories. By embodying the contemporary treatment of knowledge and power as ephemerally shared commodities, the super-sleuth does not let the viewer into the game to the same degree as the girl sleuth does, providing a less empowering experience for its intended audience.

Trans persons on trans representations in popular media culture: A reception study

After having been largely ignored, people with a trans*gender identity are more represented in mainstream film and television, yet little research on the viewpoints of trans persons themselves exists (McInroy & Craig, 2015). Therefore, this article explores how Belgian transgender persons assess the recurring and contemporary media depictions of trans persons. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with transgender persons with ages ranging from eighteen to seventy years old (N=13), we found that the participants appreciated the increased visibility of trans persons and themes in media but noted that trans men and nonbinary persons are still rarely represented. Generally, respondents expressed fairly satisfied sentiments regarding representations that they perceived as realistic, especially in non-fictional and infotainment programs. Nevertheless, they also argued that media tend to focus too much on the physical body of a transgender person and depict a complete physical transition as a precondition to fully fit into society.

Shifting the dynamics in popular culture on Islamophobic media narratives

Prior to the Christchurch mosque massacres on 15 March 2019, studies on New Zealand media showed that representations of Islam and Muslims were largely negative. Muslims were depicted as terror-prone and a threat to democracy and free speech. This popular media culture of negative framing is not unique to New Zealand as global media studies show a consistent and disproportionately high negative labelling of Islam and Muslims compared with adherents of other faiths. This article focuses on the role of the government and media to shift the dynamics in popular culture in Islamophobic media narratives. A critical analysis of the actions of these powerful sectors at the Conference on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism (CTVE) in 2021 showed an opportunity to address issues management and culture competence that could change the way Muslims and Islam perceived and represented the media.

‘We may have bad days . . . that doesn’t make us killers’: How military veterans perceive contemporary British media representations of military and post-military life

Over the last two decades of long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the media’s attention on military veterans in the UK has been characterized by a series of shifts: from a focus on combat operations; to initiatives to support transition to civilian life; and finally to a largely invisible presence of veteran issues in the mediated public sphere. This article presents findings from an online qualitative survey conducted with British veterans in 2020. The authors’ primary focus is on how veterans express their concerns when asked about varied televised representations of military and post-military experience. How did the respondents perceive differences across television genres (drama, news, reality TV), and how did this affect their engagement? How do they see their veteran identity reflected back at them through popular media culture? There is a growing research interest in ‘veteran studies’ from a range of disciplines, but the relationship between veteran identity and perceptions of (post)-military representations remains largely under-researched, at least in the UK context. One concern is that negative or misleading stereotypes of veterans among publics could hinder their successful reintegration into society, but the authors are interested in how veterans make sense of such representations across popular media culture, how they imagine the ‘general public’ audience in their reflections, and the nature of veteran identity they project within the survey responses. This study finds that anxieties about ‘mad, bad or sad’ stereotypical representations of veterans continue, but the diversity within its findings also reaffirms the importance of not treating veterans as a homogeneous group in research.

“The Graying of the World”: Medical and Popular Expressions of Dementia

Unlike the biomedical account of illness, cultural/social/literary models investigate the central role of culture in mediating the lived experiences of the sufferers. As such, the meaning of illness is not shaped by biomedical factors alone, cultural artefacts also determine the social meanings of illness and suffering. Put differently, popular cultural media such as films, novels, television, and advertisements among others collectively generate and shape public attitudes toward illness. However, popular cultural media very often promote the prevailing stereotypes and normative concepts of illness and thus negatively contribute to the understanding of illness conditions. Along these lines, existing cultural and literary discourses on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia (ADRD) trivialize dementia and dehumanize the sufferers of dementia as zombies, empty shells, and non-persons. Taking these cues, the present paper close reads popular representations of dementia in movies, newspapers, novels, and comics in order to demonstrate how such representations of ADRD reinforce dominant stereotypes and even sustain them. Furthermore, the paper also investigates the negative implications of such representations in the context of illness and ADRD on personal and social lives.

From the Comics Strip to the Airwaves

Thought as a case study illustrating the connections between comics (bandes dessinées) and radio, this article analyses the short-lived radio show ‘Le Feu de camp du dimanche matin’ (Sunday Morning Campfire). It aired for 13 episodes in 1969 on the waves of Europe n°1 and was presented by members of the comics magazine Pilote. This article is based on the two surviving episodes and a few issues of the magazine to offer an analysis that reveals the links between two mass media of popular culture. Rather unknown, this show is a fascinating, although not so successful, experiment of ‘comics celebrities’ to transpose their culture, references and sense of humour, onto a different medium. These connections highlight the permeability between two highly popular media in the late 1960s, and the ways in which the norms of each medium were played with and, at times, transgressed.