Cultural and Critical Studies 2002 Abstracts
Cultural and Critical Studies Division
Change Your Life!: Confession And Conversion In Telemundo’s Cambia Tu Vida • Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, Georgia • In recent years no television genre has generated more discussion and public outcry in the United States than talk shows. The talk show genre also creates strong feelings in the academic world. Scholarly literature shows polarization between those who believe that the shows are damaging and scholars who argue that talk shows can be empowering for under represented societal sectors. These discussions, however, have not included talk shows broadcast in the Spanish-speaking networks Telemundo and Univision.
Global/National, Visual, And the Subjects of State-Run Television in India • Sanjay Asthana, Institute for Global Studies • This paper examines themes of globalization and nation on state-run television in India during the fiftieth independence anniversary in 1997. Representations of nation get complicated as commercial and corporate interests, such as celebration of capital in the name of globalization, begin to frame images of nation. A broader definition of nation will be outlined to explain the discourse of nation in the globalization context on state-run television in India.
The Grocer and the Chief: A Parable of Alterity or Otherness Discourse in the Modernization Paradigm of Development Communication Studies • Umara Bah, Morgan State University • This paper employs a proposed alterity framework of analysis to argue that the Grocer and the Chief — the genesis of the model on which the modernization paradigm of development communication is based exemplifies alterity or otherness discourse, one that misrepresents the Other and reflects and valorizes the Self. The paper concludes that precisely because of this discourse, the paradigm is viable, contrary to assertions by many scholars that it has passed away.
Ghost-Hunting as Transcendent Storytelling: Narrative Tradition and Innovation on the Internet • Warren Bareiss, Austin College • This paper examines ghost-hunting websites as a form of ritual. Ghosthunting rhetoric uses traditional narrative motifs to challenge day-to-day notions of reality. Also, ghost hunters use communication technology as an enabling factor through which reality is deconstructed and left “open.” This process results in a new mapping of communal space, re-signifying certain places as sites of paranormal activity, while elevating storytellers to the status of quasi-scientific experts.
If A Problem Cannot Be Solved, Enlarge It: An Ideological Critique Of The Other In Pearl Harbor And September 11 New York Times Coverage • Bonnie Brennen and Margaret Duffy, Missouri • This study uses the theoretical approach of cultural materialism and compares the rhetorical strategies used to frame Japanese Americans in the first four months following Pearl Harbor with those used to describe Muslim and Arab-Americans following September 11. It suggests that strategies used to frame these groups as the Other, encourage the emergence of a specific ideological vision in the news coverage.
Political Drama and News Narratives: Presidential Summits on Chinese and U.S. National Television • Tsan-Kuo Chang, Minnesota-Twin Cities • Presidential summit carries an imprint of personal involvement, public expectations and potential cross-national consequences. Against the backdrop of news as narratives, the purpose of this comparative study is to determine, within Edward Said’s perspective of “communities of interpretation,” the form and content of two presidential summits — Chinese President Jiang’s U.S. visit in 1997 and President Clinton’s China visit in 1998 — on the “ABC World News Report” and “China Central Television Network News.”
Media, Sexuality, And Identity Among “New Ethnic” Youth In A Midwestern Community • Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Iowa • This paper posits that adolescence, as experienced by girls of immigrant diaspora groups, is complicated by issues of race, culture and nation that intersect with discourses of sex and gender. In this study, a series of focus groups were conducted with South Asian American girls in order to uncover the role of media in their sexual identity constructions. The focus group data revealed radical rearticulations of sexual identity from an “interstitial” audience position that involved oppositional readings of various media texts.
Joseph Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness and The New York Times Narrative of HIV/AIDS in Africa: A Continuum of “Ideologeme of Imperial Contagion,” or A co – incidence? • Chinedu Eke, Penn State University • I critically argue in this paper based on the evidence of published materials that the style of reporting done by The New York Times on the issue of HIV/AIDS in Africa between 1985 and 1990 reflected an ongoing literary style in the West in general that can be attributed to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Within this construct, the centuries-old process of cross-cultural transmission of disease appears as the most recent site of struggle between nations of the West and those of the Third World.
Community Property: Digital Music and the Competing Economic Imperatives of Transmission and Ritual Modes of Communication • Mark Giese, Houston • Using the evolution of the digital music-sharing phenomenon as a springboard, this article explores the economic imperatives inherent in two different but not mutually exclusive theoretic constructs of communication advanced by James Carey. The first construct is the transmission mode of communication, which theorizes that communication is the transmission of information from one point to another. The second, and more novel construct is the ritual mode of communication that theorizes forms of communication whose primary purpose is to strengthen communal bonds by sharing communication/communal experiences rather than the transmission of instrumental information.
Complicating Communication: Revisiting And Revising Production/Consumption • James Hamilton and Tonya Couch, Georgia • This essay addresses the core assumption made in communication research of the division of the communication process into producers and consumers. It argues that the uncritical acceptance of “producers” and “consumers” as empirical, decontextualized descriptions of roles in a linear relationship disables efforts to theorize and explore more nuanced and ultimately more incisive accounts of communication in society.
Writing in the Wind: Recreating Oral Culture in an Online Community • Chuck Hays, Iowa • This study examines storytelling within a Usenet newsgroup for Harley-Davidson enthusiasts, arguing that the functions served by the posting of extensively detailed stories about membersÕ travels in this text-based group replicate the functions of storytelling within an oral culture: the inculcation and regulation of proper behavior in group members.
From Civil Rights to Environmental Rights: Constructions of Race, Community, and Identity In Three African-American Newspapers’ Coverage of the Environmental Justice Movement • Teresa Heinz, Indiana University • Environmental racism refers to the placement of health-threatening structures such as landfills in areas where the poor and ethnic minorities live. These issues are frequently ignored by the mainstream, largely white and middle-class, environmental movement. In response, environmental justice activists position disadvantaged communities against dominant socio-political groups. To examine how the environmental justice movement emphasizes community, identity, and race in its activism, this paper examines the coverage of environmental justice in three predominantly African-American newspapers.
Inequality of Resources: The Crisis of Media Conglomeration and the Case for Reform • Brian Houston, Oklahoma • When the media is owned and operated by corporate conglomerates the public is deprived of a diversity of viewpoints, and individual journalists feel pressured to conform to a corporate line. Attempts to reform the current trend in the American media originate most often from two theoretical camps: libertarianism and public journalism. This paper finds that neither of these approaches poses a satisfactory response to media conglomeration, and offers Ronald Dworkin’s “equality of resources” as a model of economic reform capable of rectifying the current situation.
Reframing Frame Analysis: Gaps and Opportunities in Framing Research • Sonora Jha-Nambiar, Louisiana State University • This paper examines how research into framing in the media remains largely one-sided by attributing the construction of the frame to the media. Current research views the audience merely through the lens of media effects and audience interpretation, thus limiting the growth of this valuable theory. By re-exploring Erving Goffman’s work and how it relates to the narrative element of stories and schema theory, this essay suggests links that would broaden the theoretical understanding of framing.
The Site of Coverage: The Impact of Internet-Mounted Social Movement Protests on JournalistÕs Coverage Decisions • Sonora Jha-Nambiar, Louisiana State University • Situated within the critical paradigm, this study uses quantitative and qualitative techniques to examine (a) the use of the Internet as a journalistic tool and (b) the impact of such use on journalists’ decisions in their coverage of social movement protests. This study analyzes these dynamics through in the context of the recent anti-globalization protests in U.S. cities and abroad, which are generally regarded as major success-stories in reference to the role of the Internet in their organization and propagation.
Race and Class in 1980s Hollywood • Chris Jordan, Penn State University • The strikingly different budgets and creative latitudes afforded Sylvester Stallone and Spike Lee illustrates how 1980s Hollywood’s agenda of reducing risk while maintaining volume resulted in a “bifurcated” industry that has since only become more polarized. Biracial buddy blockbusters such as “Rocky III” that trivialized race and class frictions proliferated at the most visible and lucrative level of moviemaking during the 1980s while low-budget specialty works such as “Do the Right Thing” (1989) that provoked reflection struggled to achieve minimal public visibility.
Goddess Worship: Commodifed Feminism and Spirituality on NIKEgoddess.com • Tara M. Kachgal, North Carolina at Chapel Hill • NIKEgoddess.com was textually analyzed to examine whether the website’s discursive strategies constitute a form of commodity feminism. Findings concur with analyses of earlier Nike marketing messages in that the potentially disruptive ideological challenges posed by feminism are constrained by a focus on individual consumption; self-objectification and heterosexuality; immediate gratification; and apoliticism. NIKEgoddess.com differs in its infusion of spiritual themes, which, it is argued, further defuses the feminist traces and, also, constitutes a form of commodity spirituality.
Listeners on Wheels: Automotive Radio, Mobility, and Suburbia • Matthew A. Killmeier, Iowa • This essay develops a cultural historical approach to the development of automotive radio and its widespread application in 1950s America. Drawing upon the theoretical conceptualization of mobile privatization and flow, the essay interprets automotive radio, changes in the political economy of 1950s radio, and suburban growth as mutually constitutive (Williams 1974). Furthermore, it argues shifts in quotidian forms of living in terms of mobility are bound up with mobile media and mobile content.
“Mourning in America”: Ritual, Redemption, and Recovery in News Narrative after September 11th • Carolyn Kitch, Temple University • This paper analyzes the construction of “the story of September 11th” in American newsmagazines. Drawing on anthropological as well as narrative theory, it argues that news coverage contained the elements of a funeral ritual, providing a forum for national mourning and creating a cohesive story in which vulnerability and fear became heroism and patriotic pride. It further contends that journalism plays a central role in American civil religion and in the articulation of national identity.
Nervous Women and Noble Savages: The Romanticized Other in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Patent Medicine Advertising • Jane Marcellus, Oregon • This paper compares images of women and Native Americans in nineteenth-century patent medicine advertising. Combining historical research and textual analysis, I explore the context in which these ads flourished. I argue that these two groups were exoticized and romanticized in ways that were similar to each other but different from other groups-not surprising since their lives became increasingly restricted during the course of the nineteenth century.
UPS Strike Coverage and the Future of Labor in the Corporate News • Christopher R. Martin, Northern Iowa • The United Parcel Service strike of August 1997 is now commonly cited as labor’s greatest success of the 1990s, where 185,000 Teamster workers brought the nation’s largest parcel delivery service to a standstill and won most of their demands, despite the fact that millions of consumers were touched by inconveniences. The strike was one of the top stories of 1997, with 77 USA Today reports, 139 New York Times stories, and 70 network news packages (ABC, CBS, NBC) during July-August 1997. This case study is based on a critical analysis of those reports.
But Where Are The Clothes? The Pornographic Stereotype in Mainstream American Fashion Advertising • Debra Merskin, Oregon • NO ABSTRACT
Representing Micro Radio: Newspaper Coverage of the Micro Radio Issue 1998-2000 • Andy Opel • Florida State University • This study examines newspaper coverage of the struggle over micro radio (low power FM) for the three years 1998-2000. This was a period of increased action for the micro radio issue, with activity taking place at the grassroots, institutional, academic and governmental levels. The newspaper coverage reveals a pattern of cultural acceptance for the activistsÕ discourse and the evolution of the cognitive space created by an emerging media reform movement.
Grappling with Gendered Modernity: The Spectacle of Miss World in the News • Radhika E. Parameswaran, Indiana • Hailed as a symbol of India’s enthusiasm for globalization, the 1996 Miss World beauty contest that was held in the city of Bangalore soon became the subject of intense controversy when right-wing political parties, feminist activists, and farmer’s groups launched public protests. Examining the intersections among discourses of gender, class mobility, tradition and modernity that were woven into Indian mediaÕs news narratives on Miss World, this paper brings to the foreground the ordering and framing practices of the Times of India, one of the nationÕs most reputable newspapers.
Viva Women: Dialogue between the lived Experience of Past Struggle and Present Hopes • Bongsoo Park • Minnesota • I argue that popular culture provides a site of struggle between a dominant and competing ideology by exposing — consciously or unconsciously — contradictions and ambiguities of Korean womanhood. Popular culture also embodies repressed ambitions that are far ahead of the social structure’s capacity to realize the dreams of feminism or reform. This paper looked at how symbolic fulfillment of repressed wish is realized in an example of popular culture, a television show, viva Women, in Korea.
Giving Labor the Business? Business and Labor Reporting from 1980-2000 • David J. Park and Larry M. Wright, Wisconsin-Madison • Academic research suggests there has been an increase in business and economic reporting at the expense of labor reporting. This paper examines the literature’s conclusions through a database content analysis of headlines from The New York Times, Washington Post, United Press International (UPI) and Associated Press (AP) during a twenty-year period. The results confirm a dramatic increase in business reporting and suggest labor reporting has experienced a subtle decrease.
Hands-on Communication: The Rituals Limitations of Web Publishing in the Alternative Zine Community • Jennifer Rauch, Indiana University • The Internet seems to promise independent producers of idiosyncratic and ephemeral “zines” an irresistible alternative to the medium of print. But this study finds that zine editors resisted migrating to the Web and that those publishing online remain ambivalent toward this technology. It argues, based on interviews, that interactivity is a mental and social characteristic of ritual communication. For these self-publishers, paper and xerography work better to achieve participation in an alternative cultural community.
Western Media Reporting of the Bombings of U.S. Embassies In East Africa: Coverage in The New York Times, A Case Study • Elizabeth Lester Roushanzamir, Georgia-Athens and Melinda B. Robins, Emerson College • This textual analysis of media coverage of the 1998 bombings of two US. embassies in East Africa questions the meaning of international news discourse within the present period of capital consolidation. It explores how the news stands for a hegemonic political economic order, and how tropes for Us and Other promote both stereotypes and products.
Natural Famine or Political Famine? Ideological Coverage of the North Korea Disaster in the New York Times and the Washington Post, 1995-2001 • Hoon Shim and Won-sik Hong, Texas at Austin • This study examined how the coverage of the New York Times and the Washington Post ideologically depicted the North Korea famine in 1995. Grounded in political economic theory, this study hypothesized that a natural disaster in a communist nation antagonistic toward the U.S. would be covered in a highly political way and focus on securing capitalistic ideology. Using content and textual analysis, the study investigated the famine coverage through three perspectives — representation, portrayal and ideological discourse.
“Deviance” & Discourse: How Readers Respond to One Man’s Editorial A Framing Analysis of E-Mails following the September 11th Attacks • Laura K. Smith, Texas at Austin • Following the September 11th attacks, critics came under fire for voicing concerns about U.S. foreign policy. In this paper, the author analyzes e-mail responses to one manÕs editorial – comparing the discourse of those who read his opinions in alternative news websites versus the mainstream media. Relying on rhetorical and media framing theory, this qualitative study finds, whether or incensed or supportive, e-mailers take similar rhetorical approaches in their response to critical views.
Buying Love: Sex on Television, Consumption, and Advanced Capitalism • Laramie Taylor, Michigan • Traditionally, Marxists have seen capitalist ideology as promoting monogamous, marital sexual relations in order to maintain a stable work force. Findings from a number of quantitative content analyses and critical viewings of a number of portrayals of sex on television reveal a system of messages that instead promotes individual sexual self-indulgence. It is speculated that this self-indulgence may generalize beyond the sexual to economic domains, serving to promote increased consumption, thereby serving the demands of advanced capitalism.
Shifting Identities, Creating New Paradigms: Analyzing the Narratives of Women Online Journalists • Shayla Thiel, Iowa • This study illustrates how in the shift from traditional journalism to online journalism, women online journalists’ identities have shifted and become renegotiated as women locate themselves both organizationally and culturally within this new journalistic paradigm. Using narrative analysis, this paper demonstrates how various patterns have emerged from the womenÕs stories and suggests that identity negotiation as a gendered process may shape and color the emerging field of online journalism in profound ways.
Rebel Mystic: An Aesthetic and Philosophical Exploration of Roots Reggae and Dub • James Tracy, Iowa • This paper examines some of the sociocultural dynamics and philosophical bearings of roots reggae and dub’s development in Jamaica in the 1970s through the interpretive analysis of musical and discursive form and insights of the music’s most seminal creators and innovators. This is an initial foray toward a more complex theorization of the 20th century’s authentic “rebel music” and its deeper meaning and representation the music suggests for the global postcolonial human social condition.
The Commander of Bodies: A Semiotic Analysis of Media Discourse about The Korean Female Body • Tae-Il Yoon, Missouri-Columbia • Looking at a controversy about Lee Young-Ja, a Korean female comedian who had dramatically lost weight in a suspicious manner, this study investigates how media discourse constructs the female human body by using a method of semiotic analysis within the constructivist framework. The result of the syntagmatic analysis suggested that a female body could be constructed as heroin, villain, and victim according to media framing.
She’s Gotta Have It But He Already Got It: Spike Lee and the Residual Masquerading as the Emergent • Bill Yousman, Massachusetts-Amherst • She’s Gotta Have It (1986) is analyzed through a close reading of how language, images, and sounds create a text that is structured by binary oppositions. These oppositions reinforce particular ideological positions on gender relations, sexuality, and feminism. Popular discourse revolved around a discussion of the radical or innovative aspects of the film, framing it as ideologically emergent. This paper suggests that frequent moments of patriarchal residualism overwhelm whatever progressive value the film might possess.
Transferring Media Professionalism: Transculturation, Semicolonialism, and Journalism Education in China, 1910s-1930s • Yong Zhang, Minnesota • Media professionalism was introduced from the United States into China through journalism education in the Republican period from the 1910s to the 1930s. While other third world countries imported the ideology of media professionalism through formal apparatuses of colonial administration, China’s introduction was largely through private non-official channels since it lacked a formalized institutional infrastructure under its unique semicolonial condition.
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