Popular Culture Representations Research Articles

Apocalypses

This entry analyzes the notion of apocalypses in various socio-cultural contexts, highlighting the evolution of research and its diversification, from the field of religious science to that of socio-anthropology. It highlights the symbolic, social and political functions of social movements based on such perspectives, and the place they occupy in representations of contemporary popular culture. The latter uses them to give meaning to current events, pandemics and climate change, interpreted from hybrid apocalyptic matrices borrowing elements from religious, scientific and secular images and discourses.

HIV/AIDS, Disability, and Viral Masculinities

AbstractThis article explores the relationship between HIV/AIDS, disability, and masculinity, critically analysing how these elements intersect and influence societal norms and individual identities. It begins by examining the categorisation of HIV/AIDS as a disability, questioning the adequacy of traditional disability frameworks in capturing the complex realities of living with HIV/AIDS. The discussion extends to the implications of such categorisation, considering both the medical and social models of disability, and how these models interact with legal protections and social stigmas. The article also discusses how HIV/AIDS as disability impacts conceptions of masculinity, with a specific focus on how practices like bugchasing subvert traditional notions of health, risk, and masculinity, examining cultural constructions of masculinity in relation to HIV/AIDS and highlighting how societal expectations and popular culture representations often perpetuate certain masculine ideals while marginalising others. By examining these intersections, the article challenges established health paradigms and societal norms around disability, HIV/AIDS, and masculinity. Ultimately, it aims to broaden the dialogue around health, disability, and gender, advocating for policies that reflect the nuanced realities of people living with HIV/AIDS and encouraging a reassessment of entrenched perceptions.

Gender Through Media: Images of Contemporary Masculinity in Two Pakistani Movies

Gender and its media representations inform us about a specific culture. This research paper is an in-depth qualitative study of the representations of contemporary masculinity and queerness in the Pakistani media and popular culture. The paper analyzes two Pakistani movies: Sarmad Khoosat’s Zindagi Tamasha (Circus of Life) (2019) and Saim Sadiq’s Joyland (2022). The aim of the study is to explore the concept of masculinity in the Pakistani society and its media representations in popular culture and cinema. Masculinity is interlinked with physical appearance, social norms and religious values in the Pakistani society, whereas queer behaviour is generally condemned because of cultural stereotypes and religious injunctions. The study analyzes the impact of social customs and stereotypes on the perception of masculinity in the male characters with special focus on the queer inclinations manifested in their behaviour. The analysis of the two movies is conducted through contemporary masculinity theories to identify current manifestations of masculinity in the Pakistani society through the media representations. The findings of the research indicate that contemporary masculinities in the Pakistani society and media depict a wide range of variation from hegemonic masculinity to hybrid masculinity, inclusive masculinity and queer masculinity.

Wonder Woman on Screen: From Feminist Symbol to Stereotypical Figure

Wonder Woman, a founding female figure in superhero fiction, was initially celebrated as a symbol of women’s empowerment in the 1970s but faced criticism in the 2010s for embodying fetishized objectification. This article aims to explore the gender representation of the 1970s TV series Wonder Woman and the 2010s Wonder Woman movie through a feminist approach. The portrayal of Wonder Woman in the TV series challenged the traditional stereotypes of femininity and the subordinary roles of women under patriarchy at that time. The Wonder Woman movie, however, lacked diversity under an intersectional framework and signified the beauty myth for male pleasure, which undermined her validity as a feminist icon. Through close analysis, it is revealed that the white feminist privilege and fetish fashion of superheroines traditionally recognized as feminist icons are problematic, calling for more scholarly attention on discriminatory gender representation in contemporary popular culture.

MITIGATING THE STIGMA ASSOCIATED WITH TUBERCULOSIS

This article addresses the social stigma associated with tuberculosis (TB) and its influence on patients, their families, and communities, impacting the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease. It highlights the historical origins of stigma, stemming from a lack of understanding about the transmission and causes of the disease, associated with unfavorable socioeconomic conditions and representations in popular culture. Stigma manifests in various ways, including social isolation, discrimination, negative stereotypes, and delays in diagnosis and treatment. These manifestations have profound impacts on the quality of life and physical and emotional health of patients. To combat stigma, comprehensive strategies are proposed, such as public education, promotion of empathy, community engagement, universal access to healthcare, and psychosocial support. These approaches aim to challenge misconceptions, reduce social isolation, strengthen emotional support, and promote a more compassionate understanding of the disease. The article highlights the importance of treatment adherence and emotional support for patients, emphasizing that support from healthcare professionals, family, and the community is crucial in addressing treatment challenges and promoting better long-term health outcomes. It is concluded that mitigating tuberculosis stigma requires collective and ongoing effort, with an integrated, patient-centered approach. By promoting empathy, understanding, and support, it is possible to create a more inclusive and supportive environment, advancing towards a society where health and well-being are accessible to all.

Royalty and Its Representation in Popular Culture

Royalty and Its Representation in Popular Culture

The British Royals in Australia

The British Royals in Australia

Ms. Marvel: Marvel’s New Model of Islam’s Representation in Popular Culture

This research aims to examine the Ms. Marvel (2022) film series as Marvel's new model in representing Islam throughout popular culture's advancement. Ms. Marvel, known as Kamala Khan, is the first Muslim superheroine character to have her own series at Marvel. This research investigates how the creation and development of this character reflects an invention in the representation of religion and diversity in an entertainment industry that is generally dominated by Western narratives. The research method employed a descriptive qualitative analysis utilizing a cultural studies approach to discern Islam’s representation in Ms. Marvel (2022). Supported by representation and ideology theories, this research would not only examine the impact of Ms. Marvel's character on the general perception of Islam in popular culture but also analyze how the entertainment industry in its entirety may serve as a means to construct a more inclusive perception of religious diversity. The results of this research are intended to offer deeper insights into characters' roles such as Ms. Marvel in reimagining representations of Islam in popular culture and to contribute towards readers' comprehension of the entertainment industry's power through inclusive narratives. Therefore, Ms. Marvel as Marvel's new model in representing Islam may change the negative stereotypes and people's perceptions of Islam.

In Defense of the Effete Superhero: Theorizing the First Queer Latinx Superhero, Extraño/Gregorio de la Vega

ABSTRACT: Debuting in the 1987 eight-issue miniseries Millennium , Extraño/Gregorio de la Vega lays claim to being the first gay superhero in superhero comic history. He is also one of the first queer Latinx superheroes to be depicted in the genre. This article examines the mediations and transformations of Extraño/Gregorio de la Vega’s character across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, analyzing how his disruptive queer effete superheroics runs counter to representational agendas that seek to fix or erase gender transgression and nonnormative sexualities in superhero comics. In order to do so, this article proposes a critical reading practice called superheroic minorness. By looking to one-shot issues, double-page team spreads, back covers, letters to the editors, and splash pages, this article examines how his superheroic minorness entails sleuthing across a constellation of details, minutiae, and arrangements in order to compose a comprehensive sketch of an otherwise undervalued or underexamined character who, nonetheless, helps articulate repressed, negated, and/or erased aesthetic-political possibilities. Reading for superheroic minorness is a conceptual strategy for theorizing the importance of the effete superhero and the interpretive frameworks the effete opens up for interrogating the majoritarian sphere and minoritized representation in comics, superhero aesthetics, and popular culture. Rather than situating the minorness or stereotyping of Extraño/Gregorio de la Vega as a lack or a problem for critical inquiry, this essay positions it as a means of revaluing and imagining the effete superhero, the abject, peripheral queer Latinx character who overloads straightforward notions of respectability, assimilation, and conformity.

Remembering Yellowstone: Nature Conservation, Popular Culture and Belonging

Abstract Yellowstone is globally recognised as the world’s first national park, but the depth of its meaning goes beyond the history of nature conservation. This paper presents the park as an assemblage of landscapes, memories and popular environmental discourses. It interweaves the debate around Yellowstone as a landscape idea with an analysis of its representation in popular culture, from The Yogi Bear Show to the more recent Yellowstone television series. Coupled with personal and subjective memoryscapes, the Yellowstone assemblage is presented as capable to inform the global debate on the role of protected areas, especially in relation to climate change, tourism and recreation, as well as matters of natural heritage kinship and belonging.

Endemic Goiter and El Salvador’s Battle Against Cretinismo

Abstract One concern for Salvadoran and other Latin American public health researchers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the purported link between goiter (bocio) and cretinism (cretinismo). Goiter is empirical medical condition that is inseparable from scenes of social and political inequality, neocolonialism, development, and war, however effectively the tools that measured it often obfuscated these factors. This article draws on more than a century of goiter research and representation in popular culture to argue that goiter research was part of broader health discourse that focused on poor and rural women and girls in an attempt to improve the productive and reproductive potential of El Salvador. It discusses how goiter research positioned El Salvador as a site of knowledge production for global health. It also proposes that goiter is best understood as a disability and uses insights from critical disability studies to understand how certain groups of people were constructed as problem populations. Over time, understandings of goiter shifted and new explanations came to the fore, but the lingering association of goiter with inheritable disability proved difficult to shake.

„Poporul” despre „femeie”, la 1900. Stereotipuri și prejudecăți de gen în Gr.G. Tocilescu, Materialuri folkloristice

The article is an analysis of Romanian popular cultural representations and stereotypes about women, as they emerge from the versified materials collected in the period 1897-1900 by the team coordinated by the historian philologist Gr. Tocilescu. From the more than 4000 folklore pieces in the massive volumes, several anthropological categories stand out that mark the vision of a male and religious society on women. They are generally assigned negative roles. The texts contain reflections of some conceptions dating from the pre-modern Romanian world, according to which women are associated with the devil, being the instrument of temptation, deceptions and curses by which men feel permanently threatened. The article proposes a breakdown of the categories that make up the stereotypical image of women at the end of the 19th century. A certain complexity is reflected by opposite images that are both documented in these texts. Thus, we meet the maiden, but also the old spinster, the public woman and the ”dishonest” girl cheated on by her lover; the good wife, the unhappy fiancée or wife, the good daughter, sister or mother, but also the perverted mother, the unfaithful wife; women are more faithful as lovers than they are as wives; the mysterious nun may be opposed to the woman-man figure; wealth in women is seen as a trap, being usually accompanied by a poor mind and a very bad temperament. I have insisted on the examples, mainly because of the plasticity with which they render the underlying conceptions. In the light of such synthesis, we may ask ourselves, in the perspective of the long duration theorized by anthropologists, how much of these prejudices are still active today.

Politics and Popular Culture: Stretching Imaginaries and Filling in Holes

Abstract Popular culture artifacts are often places and spaces where societal expectations can be exercised, pushed on, prodded, to see how audiences and consumers react, and what they are willing to accept and perhaps what they will not abide. This is one of the prime values of studying popular culture – to see the ways that narratives and characters can provide audiences with paths towards experimentation in their thinking, to reconceptualize ideas and expectations. Much of this is often pegged to different representation, and that is certainly valuable. But the research on narrative and its impact indicates the importance of what is communicated by way of storyline and how this also contributes to the shaping of ideas and conceptions. This essay explores three narrative spaces that demonstrate how popular culture contributes to our thinking about different ideas and dimensions of political life. Imaginaries of women and power, abortion, and the 25th Amendment provide examples of the toggling between real life and fictional presentations. In two of these examples, popular culture has not necessarily provided a space for priming and imagining so much as it has filled in gaps of our general knowledge with misrepresentation and incorrect data, which undermines the value that popular culture can otherwise provide. This is one side of the dynamic. The other side of the dynamic is that we, as citizen audiences, get to try on different ideas and become accustomed to new ways of thinking, which is equally important to consider within politics, and points to the value and importance of popular culture narratives and representations within the body politic.

Crime has a PR component: Public relations in U.S. mystery novels

Qualitative content analysis of 74 novels featuring public relations characters distributed in the United States demonstrates that, rather than attempting to replicate reality, the mystery genre reflects debates about such issues as honesty, confidentiality, and the relative value of negative publicity. PR practitioners fit into all of the conventional mystery character roles, but particularly the role of sleuth, where access to information and powerful people allows them to solve the mystery but also sometimes forces them to choose between the client/employer and the public interest. The study confirms Fitch’s (2015) contention that popular culture representations of public relations are best understood in their narrative and generic context.

Green Book Revisited: Unpacking the Complexities of Race and Friendship

This study intends to investigate how friendship and race are portrayed in Peter Farrelly's Green Book movie. The study inquires whether the film depicts racism simplistically or accurately depicts the relationship between individuals from different racial backgrounds. This study's importance rests in its potential to advance the current dialogue regarding race and representation in popular culture. To respond to the research question, the researchers gathered primary sources of information from the screenplay and reviews of the movie Green Book, which were then analyzed qualitatively to identify and explore themes and characters related to race and friendship. In addition, the researchers gathered secondary data from online journals of English literature, e-books, and other sources. The information was then categorized, examined, debated, and presented to the readers. In this paper, the researchers include the historical and sociological contexts of the movie, the lives of Dr. Shirley and Tony Lip, and racism in America. The application of Critical Race Theory enriches the discussion of the movie. The study found that Green Book depicts the gradual close relationship between two different individuals from different racial backgrounds and the simplified portrayal of racism.

Representation of Popular Korean Culture (K-Pop) Industrial Identity through A Virtual Ethnographic Approach

The popularity of Korean pop (K-Pop) culture can be seen through the growth of a massive fan base without age restrictions, and is currently the largest in the music and entertainment industry. K-Pop fans who occupy a fandom are known as K-Popers. This present study explains the representation of identity in essence, as according to Hall - is related to the use of language, and represents a “blurring” of meaning by a cultural industry aiming for commercialisation. The result of this research shows the process of blurring meaning by talent agencies that produce K-Pop idols as the main product that represent them by carrying important values that will be adapted and consumed by fans with strong loyalty and emotional connection. The agency is a cultural business industry that sells its “products” such as K-Pop idols that they have introduced to fans, and refers to their “existence” that is consumed by fans. This study used a virtual ethnographic approach with data collection techniques through participant observation and interviews. Each of these main products has its own unique concept as every fan will feel special and exclusive as K-Pop music is a sense of "individuality" developed by the K-Pop culture and industry. Based on the results of observations on Instagram, we can find various types of fans to describe how they adapt the meaning that is sold by the agency through the products they sell. Keywords: Popular culture, K-Pop idol, identity, culture industry, identity representation.

Experience of menstruation with the use of reusable menstrual products: a qualitative study among menstruators in Israel

Menstruation is an embodied experience that influences menstruators’ perceptions of the self and body. The stigma surrounding menstruation and its negative representation in popular culture has consequences for women’s sexual and reproductive health. In this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with forty 18–50 year old participants who used reusable menstrual products to examine their experience of menstruation and how their use of these products shaped their self-body image. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Participants commonly reported physical, medical and emotional improvement in menstrual experience and improved acceptance of the menstrual body alongside changes in feeling towards menstrual products and related issues. The participants described menstruation, menstrual blood, and the menstrual body more positively than before, reported a high comfort level with and in their bodies, and rejected common representations of menstruation. Findings suggest that using reusable menstrual products can contribute to body appreciation. Given these benefits, further research is needed to assess how knowledge of alternative menstrual products can stimulate positive views about the menstruating body and contribute to menstrual health.

Modernity and the Pony Express Western

The telegraph and the railroad have remained among the most iconic technologies associated with the impending modernization of the United States as represented in the Western genre. However, the lesser-known but still iconic Pony Express – a short lived, horse-and-rider messenger service from the mid-nineteenth century which has enjoyed significant popular cultural representation – provides an alternative, anachronistic iconography for the same transitionary period that suggests a different path for American modernity through western expansion. Focusing on the Western as it appears in Hollywood and non-commercial film, as well as television shows, I consider how the Pony Express as a subject or character challenges antagonistic narratives and iconographies of American modernity in the Western that usually pit older modes of living against the encroachment of newer, mechanized modes of modernity. Appearing both old and new at the same time, I argue that Pony Express narratives instead emphasize and endorse co-operation between tradition on the one hand and innovation on the other hand.

‘Papa, I am gay, please, love me’: Politics of censorship and queer representation in Bollywood

The article explores the problematic issues that arise between Bollywood films projecting homosexual relationships and the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) filtering their contents. Queer popular cultural representations in India face challenges to get release certification because of their inherently debatable contents including ‘non-normative’ sexual relationships which are largely identified as a potential threat to the existing heteronormative, majoritarian culture. By giving reference to two queer films, Unfreedom and Angry Indian Goddesses, this article explores the politics of censorship in the light of Foucauldian power relations and the discourse of knowledge production. I argue that by proscribing representations of queer sexualities in films, the CBFC has acted on behalf of the state in decelerating the formation and proliferation of a counter cultural movement to balance homophobia discursively and to peddle majoritarian power politics, and thus the notion of heterosexuality as compulsory form of sexual behaviour is popularized and consolidated in Indian society.

Stiff upper lips: British affect and habitus in It’s a Sin

Popular culture representations of the outbreak, impact of and responses to HIV/AIDS have tended to focus on America. British responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic have been scarce, and when they have been present, have only occurred fleetingly. It’s a Sin (2021) is an unusual portrayal of HIV/AIDS in popular culture in its quintessential Britishness. Using the concept of stiff upper lip, as a stereotype of British affect, this article explores the ways in which different social classes in the series deal with the fact of homosexuality, and the growing threat of HIV/AIDS in the ten years between 1981 and 1991. The higher the social class, the more repressed and colder the characters are. This is further expressed through affect, and through the mise en scène of the family’s homes. The 1980s is often represented in popular culture as a decade of economic decline and poverty. Yet, It’s a Sin is a unique portrayal of life in 1980s London, which begins with confidence and freedom, and ends with a new strata of people who go on to transcend the social class exigencies of their families.