Cultural and Critical Studies 2000 Abstracts
Cultural and Critical Studies Division
This Mythical Place, El Pais de Las Mujeres: Representing Women in a Venezuelan Telenova • Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, Georgia • Latin American telenovelas stand out as a genre that has successfully challenged its U.S. counterpart — the soap opera — in a global media environment that is increasingly dominated by the U.S. Drawing on cultural studies, this report focuses on how women are represented in a Venezuelan telenovela, El Pais de las Mujeres (The Country of the Women). These representations are negative in themselves. However, the storylines reverse these negative constructions by ridiculing them (and the characters that voice them), providing, in this way, a vehicle of empowerment for Venezuelan women.
The First Amendment and the Doctrine of Corporate Personhood: Collapsing the Press-Corporation Distinction • David S. Allen, Illinois State • This paper examines the legal concept of corporate personhood, entitling corporations to protection under the Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights, as it applies to the press. Following that doctrine, the U.S. Supreme Court has struggled to differentiate the press from corporations, collapsing First Amendment distinctions. It is suggested that the Court’s actions hurt press freedom, but more importantly creates another opening for corporate domination of the public sphere.
Reconstructing the Concept of Public Trusteeship in the Digital Broadcasting Era: Public Trusteeship for a Deliberative Democracy • Misook Baek, Iowa • This paper attempts to construct the political-philosophical foundation of public trusteeship to realize the democratic potential of digital broadcasting, shifting away from the narrow debate of regulatory scheme and policy. Thus, this paper proposes the conceptualization of public trusteeship for a deliberative democracy emphasizing an informed citizen and civic participation in political processes. This paper relies on Dewey’s and Habermas’ theoretical discussion of the media, the community, and democracy, and the communitarian interpretation of the First Amendment.
Telemedicine in South Dakota: A Cultural Studies Approach • Warren Bareiss, South Dakota State • This study examines how socio-economic relationships are negotiated with regard to telemedicine in South Dakota — a state where telemedicine has rapidly developed in response to an ongoing crisis in health-care. An overview of economic conditions in South Dakota is followed by examinations of network structures through which telemedicine operates and an analysis of how telemedicine is rhetorically constructed. Concluding sections discuss the hegemonic nature of telemedicine in South Dakota and raise new questions about telemedicine.
Marginalized, Excluded and Invisible: The Portrayal of Labor in Journalism Textbooks • Jon Bekken • Journalism textbooks play a key role in not only training journalists in their craft, but also in inculcating professional ideology. This study examines 29 newswriting, media writing, and reporting textbooks, documenting their systematic marginalization and exclusion of labor. Even texts that address the need for labor coverage often undercut that message through examples and assignments, which rely exclusively upon management and government sources. This “hidden curriculum” simultaneously undercuts the textbooks’ stated intentions, and ideologically prepares journalists to serve as stenographers to power.
Cyberspace: The New Disney Universe • Jeffrey Layne Blevins • The Disney empire comprises one of the top media conglomerates in the world and their most notable move in Cyberspace has been the addition of an Internet search engine. The purpose of this study is to explore Disney’s expansion into Cyberspace and analyze the relationship between its Internet search engine and burgeoning media empire. This newest search engine will most likely power an effective vehicle for Disney to cross-promote its vast empire.
What’s Wrong with a Little Media Manipulation, Anyway?: Longing for Althusser • Bonnie Brennen, Missouri-Columbia • This convention paper focuses on the current one billion dollar anti-drug public service announcement deal, through which the United States government has been inserting propaganda into prime time television shows. It draws on the work of French philosopher Louis Althusser, specifically his contributions to the development of ideology, in an attempt to illustrate the continued relevance of his work to understanding the complex relationship between media and society.
A Tradition of Dissent: West Indians and Liberian Journalism, 1830 to 1970 • Carl Patrick Burrowes, Howard • West Indians immigrants were conspicuously present in the Liberian press, especially in forms of journalism that challenged the hegemonic order established by African-American repatriates. Notably among them were John B. Russwurm, founder of the first Black newspaper in America, and Edward Wilmot Blyden, a leading nineteenth-century Black intellectual. Their ideological challenges consistently evidenced a duality that is said to characterize Caribbean culture: a social conservatism coupled with a political radicalism.
Between Cultural and Social Identities: A Discourse Analysis of Web Diaries on Hong Kong’s Handover • Hong Cheng and Guofang Wan, Bradley • This paper is a discourse analysis of Web diaries concerning Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China. It pinpointed numerous dynamic and multifaceted interactions of language, culture, and ideology in Hong Kong people’s heart and soul searches for cultural and social identities during the territory’s sovereignty transfer. The paper also examined communication strategies used in Web diaries and analyzed this new communication genre’s potential for empowering mass audience as well as enlarging knowledge gap.
What Language Do Cyborgs Speak? • Mia Consalvo, Wisconsin-Milwaukee • This paper explores fan communication online, and how online communication in general is changing. This is due to two factors — the development of hypertext, and our vision of ourselves as cyborgs. I argue that hypertext changes the way we think about knowledge, it de-centers authority, and challenges the linear. As we move online, and learn how to exploit this new “language” we will develop new and revolutionary uses for it. However, we must use this new language and way of being to ensure that everyone has access to it, for it to be truly revolutionary.
The Reality of Virtual Hate: A Fantasy Theme Analysis of the Rhetorical Vision of Hate Groups Online • Margaret E. Duffy and Victoria A. Palmer, Austin Peay State University • The development and growth of the Internet and Worldwide Web have provided a new and persuasive medium for business, education, and social interaction. It has also provided a powerful new medium for hate groups seeking to disseminate their message and recruit new followers. This paper uses Ernest Bormann’s fantasy theme analysis to examine hate group websites as a means to understand the worldviews expressed and the resulting potential for persuasion.
Janet Malcolm: Constructing a Journalist’s Identity • Elizabeth Fakazis, Indiana • This article explores the role that Janet Malcolm played in defining the boundaries of legitimate journalism as she defended herself against charges that her journalistic methods and her identity as a professional journalist were suspect. Malcolm positioned herself as a journalist and metajournalist, defining her methods as representing the norms of the profession while challenging the dominant conception of journalism as an enterprise ideally involving disinterested, institutional voices rather than individual authors subjectively interacting with their subjects and texts.
Negotiating Consumption, Play and Masculinities through Role-Play/Trading Cards Games: An Exploratory Research on the Players of Magic: The Gathering¨ in Iowa City • Mirerza Gonzalez-Velez, Iowa • In an attempt to understand the relationship between the construction of cultural identities and the consumer culture, this paper explores role-play/trading cards games such as Magic: The Gathering¨. Using as evidence data of an exploratory qualitative research developed with non-participant observation and semi-informal interviews, the paper argues that games as Magic: The Gathering¨ represents both a commodity of the culture industry and a cultural space in which male identity is constructed.
The News of Inclusive Education: A Narrative Analysis • Beth A. Haller, Towson and Bruce Dorries, Radford • This paper investigates a nationally publicized case in the debate over the best method of educating millions of children with severe disabilities. Using Fisher’s narrative paradigm, this paper analyzes four years of the extensive media coverage of the legal battles of Mark Hartmann’s family. The 11-year-old’s parents took the Loudoun County, Va., Board of Education to court to reinstate their autistic son in a regular classroom. Much media attention focused on the story because it dramatized the issues concerning the national debate about inclusion.
The “Forgotten” 1918 Influenza Epidemic and Press Portrayal of Public Anxiety • Janice Hume, Kansas State • Journalists and scholars often use the idea of a shared “American anxiety” in their analyses of trends, yet no one has looked historically at how media depict public anxiety. This study examines magazine coverage of a domestic crisis that should have made Americans anxious, the 1918 influenza epidemic, to explore references to anxiety, and to try to understand why this epidemic, which killed more people than World War 1, is lost to American public memory.
Theorizing Automotive Radio: Prosthesis, Technology, and Cultural Form • Matthew A. Killmeier, Iowa • Automotive radio and broadcasting emerged in the 1950s as a unique cultural form of radio, rather than a particular manifestation of radio. As a mobile medium, it required a mobile society, audiences and content. This paper is a theoretical engagement with the meanings and significances of automotive radio, including mobility, space and over place, technology and information.
‘Grimm’ News Indeed: ‘Madstones,’ Clever Toads, and Killer Tarantulas (Fairy-Tale Briefs in Wild West Newspapers) • Paulette D. Kilmer, Toledo • Editors in Nevada, Texas, Arizona, or California sprinkled fanciful items among editorials boosting their new El Dorado and sober news accounts. Besides connecting East and West via the imagination, these fairy-tale briefs provided a respite from the harsh reality reported graphically in the news columns and too often experienced personally by readers in frontier communities during the late Nineteenth Century.
The Active Audience in a Panic: A Case Study of the Interaction between Media Discourse and Public Opinion prior to Labor Law Revision in December 1996, Korea • Nam-Doo Kim, Texas at Austin • This paper examines the interaction between mainstream media discourse and public opinion before labor law revision in 1996, Korea, and evaluates the nature of the public through the redefinition of “active audience.” While the media coverage of labor issue and background issue was unbalanced toward pro-employer side, there were some indicators that the public responded sensitively to the marginalized oppositional theme in the media discourse. The activeness in the general audience was motivated by the mass fear.
Examining the Problematic of Auteur Theory: The Case of David E. Kelley and Picket Fences • Karen E. Kline, Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania • This paper explores the contemporary critique of auteur theory in the realm of commercial television production, which has been asserted, from poststructuralist, materialist, and dialogic perspectives. Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted within the David E. Kelley production company, the author argues that Kelley is a television auteur, albeit one whose authorship is implemented in ways consistent with the auteurist critique. Thus, this paper offers a variegated view of television authorship, which incorporates that critique.
Polysemy, Resistance, and Hegemony: An Audience Research of a Korean Prime-Time Drama • Oh-Hyeon Lee, Massachusetts • While exploring the polysemic nature of a Korean prime-time drama, Bogo Ddo Bogo, and its viewers’ interpretations, this paper examines the hegemonic power of the show, the agency of the audience, and the power relations between them. This study finds that the viewers actively construct various meanings of the program, even resistant to the dominant ideological meanings and values articulated in the program. However, the hegemonic power of the program seems to overpower the agency of the audience.
Capote’s Legacy: The Challenge of Creativity and Credibility in Literary Journalism • Mark H. Masse, Ball State • Thirty-five years ago (1965), Truman Capote published his best-selling “nonfiction novel,” In Cold Blood. The book has been both praised for its compelling writing and criticized for its inaccurate and misleading reporting. The legacy of Capote reflects the enduring challenge facing authors of literary journalism in producing creative and credible works. This paper examines Capote’s historical contributions to the craft of narrative nonfiction writing and the critical response to In Cold Blood since the 1960s.
Rosa Luxemborg, The Thomas Paine of the Russian Revolution: A Pamphleteer, a Martyr and a Socialist with a Human Face • Beverly G. Merrick, New Mexico State • The purpose of this research into intellectual history is to explore the contributions of Rosa Luxemborg, as pamphleteer and political columnist. She predicted the fall of the Leninist-Marxist model, and proposed a kind of social democratic model that is a cousin to similar political and social movements in the United States. Although she became a martyr for her contributions to the thenradical thought of freedom of expression in Soviet Russia, more than 40 years before the sixties movement of the New Left, Luxemborg is the ideological founder of that movement.
The Symbolic Repertoires of Contention: The Rhetoric of California Latino Strikers and Media Framing • Young Min, Texas at Austin • The present paper explores the collective action frames of a Latino labor strike in California and probes the media’s framing of the walkout. By employing various polarizing frames and religious rhetorical markers, the strikers try to mobilize various audiences as supporters and invalidate the management’s new labor policies, but do not radically challenge capitalist law and order. Being dissonant with the strikers’ collective action frames, the news frames color the strike as a matter of conflicts between strikers and replacement workers and posit the company’s neo-liberal labor policies as reasonable business decisions.
Ideology and Manufactured Environments: An Analysis of the Disney Home Page • Randy Nichols, Oregon • This paper provides a critical analysis of the way in which the Disney web page is set up to enforce Disney’s ideological stance. By drawing on political economic studies of the Disney corporation as well as studies of how the Disney corporation controls space for its ideological ends, a better understanding of the implications of the company’s web page is gained.
Hemp in the Media: Social Struggles over a Controversial Plant • Andy Opel, North Carolina-Chapel Hill • This paper examines the recent effort to revitalize the hemp industry in the United States. Contrasting information from the hemp advocates websites and popular literature with newspaper coverage from three major dailies over a three-year period, this discourse analysis reveals a struggle over the definition of the hemp plant. The media discourse around hemp in the late 1990s is found to be more than a semantic debate, and includes connections to the larger cultural debates of the “drug war” and the “culture war.”
Discourse about Global Media in Postcolonial India: Beauty Contests, Gender, and Nationalism • Radhika E. Parameswaran, Indiana • The controversial Miss World beauty contest that was held in India in 1996 is the focus of the proposed project. The controversy arose from protests expressed against the pageant by factions such as religious leaders, political parties, and feminist activists. This study is based on intensive interviews with organizers and sponsors of the pageant, and with other informants who were involved in managing and supporting the pageant.
The Talk of Movers and Shakers: Class Conflict in the Making of a Community Disaster • Lana F. Rakow, North Dakota • Communities and disasters are both products of communication. Communities are created by interactions of residents and institutions; disasters are named and blame assigned. In 1997, Grand Forks, North Dakota experienced a serious flood, which altered communication processes and highlighted class conflicts. Two groups, “movers” and “shakers,” represent conflicts over definitions of the event, political ideologies, and control of material and symbolic activity. While both groups “talk,” only one has “voice,” further embedding class differences.
Myth of the Southern Box Office: Lining Domestic Coffers with Global Prejudices • Elaine Walls Reed, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania • In the first half of the 20th century, the foreign market for domestic motion pictures dictated screen content that helped to institutionalize a domestic version of British imperialism. The Southern box office became the scapegoat, and American race relations suffered because of it.
Veiled Promise: The Meaning of “Chador” as a Late 20th Century Signifler • Elizabeth Lester Roushanzamir, Georgia • This inquiry investigates U.S. media texts demonstrating how processes of articulation and negotiation help construct a strategic version of Iran, which promotes the goals of transnational capital and U.S. foreign policy. While at times the goals of capital and state diverge, the construction of a gendered Other complements media representations of ethnicity, “race,” nationality and class to further common goals. In particular, representations of Iranian women in the news media, flat simplistic, iconic and memorable form a discourse of power that differs significantly from 19th century Orientalist representations.
Chiapas and the New News: Internet and Newspaper Coverage of a Broken Cease-fire • Adrienne Russell, Indiana • Taking the norms of journalism as exhibited in newspaper coverage of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas as its starting point, this study analyzes online discourse centered around the rebel movement in order to reveal characteristics unique to computer mediated discourse. The paper focuses on the mechanisms by which traditional journalism and computer mediated communication each produces a particular truth about the Zapatista movement.
One of Those Shows: What Ally McBeal Tells Us about the Fate of Feminism • Camisha Ann Russell, American • Ally McBeal is a popular and fiercely debated show. The Ally character is simultaneously seen as feminist, postfeminist, and anti-feminist. The show was even used in Time magazine to ask: “Is Feminism Dead?” Such a question rests heavily on particular interpretations of the show and of feminism itself. Ally McBeal and the discussion surrounding it have more to tell us about the way our society views feminism than about feminism’s actual condition in that society.
Sunny Days on Sesame Street?: Multiculturalism and Resistance Postmodernism • Ute Sartorius, South Dakota • After thirty years of broadcasting, Sesame Street, which has been called one of the most influential children’s shows ever, plays an important role in shaping society’s construction of multiculturalism. This paper addresses the role of educational children’s television as a contributor to the forging of the notion of multiculturalism by analyzing Sesame Street’s suitability as an instrument for multicultural pedagogy.
Return of the Mummy: Hollywood Horror Revives Orientalism • Soon-Chul Shin, Georgia • Edward Said’s Orientalism explains how historical narrative have framed and distorted the images of the “Other.” The spectators are led to an exotic place, while watching Orientalistic films, where historical, spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts are totally fictitious, not just distorted; Imperialistic narrative rather “refract” the Others instead of “reflect” them. Tales of “the other” narrated by Orientalistic discourse boosted exploration of cinema’s particular capacity to reproduce an object in “verisimilitude” without truth.
Contradictory by Nature: The Dream of Attaining Nirvana through Materialism: A Critical Analysis of Silicon Valley Internet Start-ups and Entrepreneurs • Helga G. Tawil, Colorado • This is a preliminary research project based on in-depth interviews with individuals at Silicon Valley start-ups. From the Critical Theory approach, the aim is understanding and analyzing the forces in, and reasons for joining start-ups; attempting to understand the struggle and reconciliation between individuality and social pressures, looking at how the individual preserves his autonomy and individuality in the face of overwhelming social forces in Silicon Valley start-up culture, as well as addressing those socio-economic forces.
Dubuque’s First Political Prisoner: Violence, Class, and the ‘Frameup’ of Labor Journalist Archie Carter • James F. Tracy, Iowa • This paper is an analysis of the circumstances preceding and following the arrest and conviction of labor journalist, organizer, and political activist Archie Carter on a sodomy charge in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1938. Examination of newspapers, oral histories, court documents, and personal materials of Carter’s associates indicates that Carter was framed by powerful business interests and state authorities because of his activities as labor organizer and journalist.
Presidential Politics, the Emergence of Entertainment Journalism, and the Battle for Headlines: An Examination of the 1994-1995 Baseball Strike • Robert Trumpbour, Pennsylvania State • The capacity to inject ideology into sports-related content is explored, utilizing Presidential involvement with the 1994-1995 Major League Baseball strike. It is argued that entertainment-based media content may be perceived as culturally neutral by some citizens, but several media-related trends may serve to intensify the influence of these messages. President Clinton’s participation in the 1994-1995 baseball strike appeared to be a policy failure, but upon closer inspection, several successes were achieved.
Locating a Theoretical and Methodological Field for Contemporary Japanese TV Dramas: Discourse Hierarchy, Critical Ethnography and Radical Space of Television Writers • Eva Tsai, Iowa • This essay critiques various kinds of built-in theoretical hierarchies in television studies that have shaped the ways scholars position and evaluate television institutions, forms and workers in the Japanese context. I specifically address a much neglected and disciplined space of TV writers and argue that such a state is related to the theoretical and methodological perceptions of writers as marginalized media workers. Ultimately, I urge that researchers studying TV writers use critical ethnographic methods to deal with the issue of power relationship between the researcher and his or her subject.
The Use of Race as Political Strategy by Political Candidates: A Case Study of Opinions Expressed by Voters during a U.S. Presidential Campaign • Niranjala D. Weerakkody, Deakin University (Australia) • Taking the social constructionist position, this case study examines the opinions expressed on race by voters in depth and focus group interviews at different locations and different stages of the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign and what effect media messages shown as stimuli to the focus groups had on these opinions. It qualitatively analyzes the framing of these opinions by both whites and non-whites, under the themes “Candidates’ racial prejudice” and “Race is used as political strategy.”
Ideology and Race in California: The New York Times Coverage of Proposition 187 • Chris Williams, Texas at Austin • Using critical cultural and media sociology theories of ideology, race and the media, this study examines the New York Times’ coverage of Proposition 187, California’s plan to deny social services to undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom are non-white. It concludes that although the Times editorialized against the discriminatory nature of 187, its news coverage perpetuated the elite “blame the undocumented” discourse that diverted public attention from other important aspects of the immigration issue.
The Political Economy and Content of Television: The Soap Opera Paradigm • James H. Wittebols, Niagara • This paper seeks to show how television has responded to the increasing pressure to focus on market interests by appropriating elements from soap operas which have proven so successful in fulfilling market values. The techniques present in soaps which serve market interests are applied to an analysis of non-soap programming to present evidence that the political economy of television plays a significant role in how stories are told across fictional, sports and public affairs programming.
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