Cultural and Critical Studies 2018 Abstracts
Objectified Yoga: Commodity, Identity, and Embodiment in US Women’s Magazines • nandini bhalla, University of South Carolina; David Moscowitz, University of South Carolina • Using framing analysis, this research examines the portrayal of yoga in the U.S. women’s magazines. Textual analysis of narrative and images from three popular women’s magazines demonstrates how the representation of yoga objectifies one type of female embodiment for the purpose of commodity. The majority of images featuring the bodies of slim, white, upper-class women perpetuate not only the commodification of yoga, but also media framing of its negotiation and appropriation to support a multi-million-dollar industry.
The Symbolic Annihilation of Wendy Davis in the 2014 Texas Gubernatorial Election • Jordon Brown • The 2014 Texas gubernatorial election was similar to the rest of that year’s election results. This race, however, was marred with misogynistic attacks leveled at Democratic candidate Wendy Davis. This research explores two incidents – her Republican opponent thanking a supporter who called her “Retard Barbie” and when protest posters identified her as “Abortion Barbie” – through the lens of symbolic annihilation, and how the top five Texas newspapers used omission, trivialization, and condemnation in their coverage.
“Without Women There Is No Revolution:” A Feminist CDA of Ni Una Menos’s Twitter Communications • Ayleen Cabas, University of Missouri • This paper examines the Twitter communications of the Argentine collective Ni Una Menos to assess its strategies to advance feminist politics and goals in the country. By means of a feminist critical discourse analysis, the study finds that the online discourse of Ni Una Menos was geared towards the transformation of awareness into collective action, and the creation of empowered identities for victims and allies.
A Theoretical Model on How the Media Play a Role in Celebrification Analyses: Based on Bourdieu (1986) and Driessens (2013) • Li Chen, Syracuse University • Beginning with the construction of public persona in the media, the current paper proposes a theoretical model on celebrification analyses addressing the accumulation of three capital forms: cultural, celebrity, and social capital. Once these capital forms are recognized by the audience via the media, they are converted to symbolic capital, exactly at that moment the individual achieves the celebrity status. This theoretical model aims to provide clarification for further empirical exploration on celebrification.
“For India is to be Redeemed!”: Reflections of an American Missionary in British India • Khadija Ejaz • This paper uses Orientalism to analyze a nineteenth century book by an American missionary – the founder of Indian Methodist Christianity – about colonial India. He conceives of two Orients in India, that is, Islam as a rival to Christianity and Hindus in need of Christian salvation. This enables a religious justification for colonization that, while unexpectedly is not revealed to be shared by all Europeans and Christians, mirrors previously studied gendered aspects of colonialism.
The end of ombudsmen? 21st-century journalism and reader representatives • Patrick Ferrucci, U of Colorado Boulder • In May of 2017, The New York Times announced it would eliminate its public editor position, something a growing number of news organizations have done in the 21st century. Using the theory of metajournalistic discourse as a framework and textual analysis as a methodology, this study examines how actors within or on the boundaries of the journalism industry reacted to the news and defined the ombudsman position. The data illustrated that today’s public editor should be a watchdog of the news organization, perform some public relations functions, be a conduit between readers and a newsroom, and build trust with readership. The coverage of the Times’ decision was unilaterally negative. Finally, the author then argues the merit of the position in today’s journalism industry.
Ignoring Our Own Cultural Imperialism: New York Times’ International Coverage of Birth Control 1960-2002. • Ana Garner; Christina Mazzeo, Marquette University • Ignoring Our Own Cultural Imperialism: New York Times’ International Coverage of Birth Control 1960-2002. The United States has spent decades and billions of dollars in reproductive aid to foreign countries in order to further its economic and political interests. Between 1960-2002 the New York Times covered U.S. efforts to regulate reproduction in non-U.S. countries. The newspaper reported on U.S. involvement in birth control and family planning abroad, but largely ignored non-U.S. citizen voices and failed to question U.S. policies and fiscal and cultural role in regulating reproduction abroad.”
Identity Formation and Voter Suppression: The Iconography of Fake Memes in the 2016 Presidential Election • Melissa Janoske, University of Memphis; Robert Byrd, University of Memphis; Dana Cooper, University of Memphis • This study offers a new methodological perspective on understanding visuals with iconography, which allows for analysis of both real and fake social media-based memes from the 2016 presidential election, visuals rich in social, political, and cultural history. Here, the iconographic approach uses description, analysis, and contextual interpretation, as well as the roles of identity formation and belongingness, in order to better understand the impact and future of memes in the American political process.
Resilience, Positive Psychology, and Subjectivity in K-pop Female Idols: Evolution of Girls’ Generation from “Into the New World” (2007) to “All Night” (2017) • Gooyong Kim, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania • This article examines how music videos of Korean popular music (K-pop) promote a discourse of resilience as a neoliberal ideal of female subjectivity. In a therapeutic narrative of overcoming obstacles and achieving goals, the videos provide audiences with a message that individuals have to be responsible for their success and well-being rather than complaining external, institutional hindrances. While ostensibly promoting female empowerment, the videos update and reinforce patriarchal gender norms and expectations.
Talking back: Journalists defending attacks against their profession in the Trump era • Michael Koliska, Georgetown University; Alison Burns; Kalyani Chadha, University of Maryland, College Park • The survival of the institution of journalism is dependent on a cultural discourse, which can be described as institutional myth. The recent attacks and accusations that equate journalism in the United States with being ‘fake news’ have led journalists and news organizations to defend this institutional myth. This research examines the various discursive strategies employed by journalists to uphold public legitimacy of journalism as an institution, through an analysis of their public responses.
Trash and Treasure TV • Sean Leavey, Rutgers University – School of Communication and Information • This paper focuses on a subgenre of reality television (RTV) that I call “Trash and Treasure TV.” I argue that Trash and Treasure TV surfaced after the Great Recession to promote neoliberal ideologies of risk-taking, self-reliance and entrepreneurship at precisely a time when well-paid jobs and the social safety net continued to erode. Although, as demonstrated by data gathered through interviews and observation, there are limits to the influence of RTV as technique of governmentality.
Between Emotion, Politics and the Law: Narrative Transformation and Authoritarian Deliberation in a Mediated Social Drama • Limin Liang • Through studying media discourses surrounding a land-disputes-triggered vengeful murder in China and its subsequent trial (the “Jia Jinglong Case”), the article examines “narrative transformation” in a contentious social drama and similar events’ deliberative potential for an authoritarian society. Previous studies adopting the social drama paradigm usually follow how events move from an instrumentality-driven “crisis” phase to a value-driven “ritual” phase. However, in this case, crisis was preceded by a verdict sentencing the accused to death that failed to be seen as fair, after scholars made concerted calls for leniency via social media. Henceforth, what ought to be a ritualized trial regressed into a political contest, as “a victim’s story” turned into “a revenge story” symbolizing larger social injustice. But “a strategic contest” does not exhaust the meaning of the case, which also produced a liminal moment inviting reflexivity on the norms governing social life. The paper proposes a model for authoritarian deliberation in which “events crystalize into issues”. It argues that while the alliance between state and media/intellectual elites in a Chinese society with declining ideological hegemony is sustained by instrumental interest, contentious events provide opportunities to bring elite dissent into sharp relief. In this case, media engaged other social institutions in a contentious public performance that ultimately affirmed the perpetuation of schism than consensus, but in its process also encouraged deliberation.
Imagining the Other: Transnational Documentaries & the Politics of Sexuality • Shehram Mokhtar • This paper focuses on recent transnational documentary films that address the question of non-normative sexuality in the non-Western world. These documentaries include festival-centered films produced independently and features commissioned by broadcasting organizations such as the UK’s BBC Three and U.S. based youth driven VICE Media. These films, directed towards and available online for transnational audiences, produce a popular discourse of universal sexuality. This discourse reifies Euro-American center and its teleological temporal schema imagines the sexuality of the other as lagging behind the center requiring the labor of catching up to its ideals. While these films make visible the center, they deploy tropes that devoid others of epistemological agency, historical specificity, and contextual complexity. In this paper, I closely read documentary films and features such as Oriented (2015), How Gay is Pakistan (2015), Dream Boat (2017), and Being LGBT in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (2017) and demonstrate how they function individually as well as in cohesion with one another to produce a discourse of sexuality within the frameworks of freedom and unfreedom, abundance and lack, and timeliness and belatedness.
The People Could Fly: (Re)Imagining the Slave Experience Through Afrofuturistic Readings of a Black Folktale • Taryn Myers • “They say the people could fly. Say that long ago in Africa, some of the people knew magic. And they would walk up on the air like climbin up on a gate. And they flew like blackbirds over the fields” (Hamilton, 1985, p. 166). This is the introduction to Black folktale, The People Could Fly, written by world-renowned children and young adult fiction writer, Virginia Hamilton. This introduction illustrates the purpose of this essay which is to demonstrate the traces of mythical Africa that exist in Black folktales. By theorizing Hamilton’s folktale through the framework of Afrofuturism, this essay will highlight the emancipatory potential prevalent in Afrofuturistic renderings of the Black American experience. This analysis will specifically focus on the folktale named for the title of the book, The People Could Fly.
Old Norms, New Platforms: Objectivity and U.S. Reporting About Race in a Digital Era • Carolyn Nielsen, Western Washington University • This study examined the journalism norm of objectivity as conceptualized by U.S. reporters who cover racial issues in Traditional and emerging, digitally enabled models of journalism called Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0. Data from interviews with journalists in each model show how Traditional journalists who cover racial issues are pushing back against objectivity as an outdated norm and how journalists working in the two emerging, digitally enabled models never subscribed to the concept of objectivity because it centers Whiteness, tells reporters to ignore their own identities, and serves to perpetuate racial stereotyping. These findings, interpreted through the lenses of new institutionalism and the Hierarchy of Influences Model, show a strong departure from a longitudinal body of scholarship documenting how Traditional journalists have strongly valued objectivity as a norm. Data also show how reporters in the new models did not bring objectivity into new journalism spaces.
The Discipline-Autonomy Paradox: How Journalism Textbooks Construct Reporters’ Freedom Just to Tear It Down • Perry Parks, Michigan State University • This study foregrounds the paradox in journalism culture whereby journalists are taught both that they have substantial freedom of judgment and that they must constrain such judgment to meet the narrow, often unspoken common-sense expectations of their peers. Through the lens of Foucault’s concept of discipline, I analyze this contradictory discourse in 75 journalism textbooks spanning the birth of formal journalism education at the turn of the 20th century through the present era.
Tsunamis on the U.S.-Mexico Border? Use of metaphors in news coverage of unaccompanied minors • Christa Reynolds, University of Arizona; Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante, University of Arizona • This study uses content analysis to examine newspaper coverage of unaccompanied Central American minors who crossed to the United States in 2014. The paper builds on previous research on immigration coverage that focuses on the use of metaphors and the sources that are included in news reports. Findings demonstrated that metaphors were used in more than half of all news reports, suggesting that this practice not changed much in the past 20 years.
Public Discourse at a Moment of Racial Reckoning in a Progressive City: An ideological analysis • Sue Robinson, University of Wisconsin-Madison • Applying racial formation theory, this research argues that when progressivism becomes the status quo, it loses its focus on reform and progress. A Critical Discourse Analysis reveals how the ideology evolves into a “racial project” perpetuating systems of oppression. When a moment of racial reckoning emerges, politicians, activists, journalists, and engaged citizens employ discursive strategies to uncover privileges, call out (dis)-trusting relationships, and reclaim the dominant narrative around what reform and progress really look like.
Democratizing Online Journalism Labor: Freelance Journalists’ International Battles Over Digital Rights • Errol Salamon, University of Pennsylvania • Grounded in a critical political economy of communication approach, this paper builds on the concept of alternative communication, examining the labor organizing efforts of freelance journalists at the international level and the digital media tools that they use to resist unfair freelance contracts. It relies on a digital labor standpoint methodology of documentary sources from a freelancers’ international labor organization and one media company.
Numinous Fortune and Holy Money: Dave Ramsey’s Cruel Optimism • John Sewell, The University of West Georgia • This essay is an ideological analysis of Dave Ramsey’s best-selling book, The Total Money Makeover, to parse how its messages implicitly and explicitly promote neoliberal ideology. It is argued that Ramsey persuades by melding the bootstrap narrative, the appeal of American “givens,” and a self-presentational style akin to Lakoff’s (2002) “strict father” model, delivering an oversimplified message to an audience desirous of “straight talk.” Ramsey’s rhetoric supports neoliberal ideology by overlapping popular American mythologies and motifs to deliver a message of virtuous independence that is attained, quite simply, by (first) paying one’s bills and (then) amassing wealth. Building wealth is a virtue, and the wealthy are the virtuous. Ramsey’s common sense worldview finds its basis in the amorphous religiosity of just plain folks and cruel optimism. Ramsey deftly straddles the tangible, lived world of economics and the intangible world of the spiritual by positioning himself as neither a prophet nor an expert, either a prophet or an expert, and as being both a prophet and an expert—whichever of these argumentative positions works best, given the exigencies of a particular utterance. Ramsey paints himself as a rebel who mounts his opposition from within the system: He is a rich capitalist who defies lenders and America’s culture of debt; he is suspicious of academics and avowedly anti-elitist; the personal finance strategies he advocates are framed as nonconformity, nevertheless yielding a contingent neoliberal Truth that is anything but emancipatory for the lower-middle class readers Ramsey claims as over half of his audience.
Teenagers, Terrorism, and Technopanic: How British Newspapers Framed Female ISIS Recruits as Victims of Social Media • Sara Shaban, University of Missouri • In 2015, three teenage girls from London were recruited by ISIS via social media. British news discourse focused on the role of gender and technology in ISIS recruitment. Through the lens of technopanic, a textual analysis of British newspapers revealed two dominant themes: 1) the victimization of female ISIS recruits and 2) the technological fetishism of social media focused on individualized solutions rather than engaging discourse on the appeal of anti-Western ideologies.
Othering by historicizing: The journalistic technique of locating foreign societies in the past • Miki Tanikawa • Drawing on cultural theories, this article probed the “myth” in the news (international) using a combined quantitative and qualitative framework for investigation. Three major newspapers in three different countries were content analyzed and found that most articles that pivot on well-known foreign cultural stereotypes or a mythical image invoke one of three types of theme/content: a well-known point of ancient history, a media myth built over decades or a “lived” experience of the audience.
Taxi Drivers as Reporters: Studying the Distinctive Journalism of the UTCC Voice Newsletter • Krishnan Vasudevan, Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park • In 2008, a group of immigrant taxi drivers in Chicago began publishing a monthly newsletter called the UTCC Voice. The newsletter blends elements of investigative journalism, community organizing and opinion writing. As the multimodal grounded analysis of this study found the UTCC Voice is a space for taxi drivers to report on human rights abuses against them, develop a cohesive voice and identity, and present themselves outside the realm of harmful stereotypes.
Anti-Establishment Voices: Tensions of Fascism and Postmodernity in Balkan Rock Music • Christian Vukasovich • Following the Balkan civil wars ethno-nationalism continues to impact identity both in the former Yugoslav republics and abroad among the diaspora. The rise of ethno-nationalism and far right populism in political discourse has been preceded and is presently accompanied by fascist discourse in popular culture throughout Europe. In this paper the author examines how a popular rock music group (Laibach) rearticulate fascist symbolism through their polarizing concert events. More specifically, the author conducts a rhetorical analysis of both groups’ music, images, pageantry and lyrics in order to interrogate the celebrations of fascism in their performances. The author examines the tensions reproduction and representation, as well as how the concerts discursively construct history, culture, nationhood, religion and belonging that undermine contemporary ideologies of fascism through extreme performance and deconstruction.
Glocal Television Possibilities: When Guyana Meets US Appeals • Carolyn Walcott, Georgia State University; Emeka Umejei, Wits, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa • This paper examines the responses of Guyanese audiences to the flow of cultural products from Hollywood through the lens of hybridity and homogenization. Building on the concept of Contra-flow of cultural artifacts, the study provides an audience reception analysis of 560 Guyanese. A total of 560 questionnaires were self-administered on 560 Guyanese in the capital city and its outskirts, based on a random sample of respondents’ representative of the demographics within those areas. The findings suggest a predominant local appeal for global content based on perceived superior production quality. The survey also reveals an appreciation for locally produced genres that meet international standards thus accounting for the hybridization that characterizes local productions that borrow from US formats. Homogenization also reveals itself through local films produced by CineGuyana film producers as Glocalized cultural artifacts capable of creating modest cultural contraflows.
Local Identity in a Global City: Social Media Discourse of Hong Kong Localist Movement • Yidong Wang • The discursive construction of a local identity was central to the Hong Kong localist movement. I investigated how this local identity was constructed in Facebook posts by localist groups. It was found that the colonial past was purified through the narrative of the “local youth” and was used to distance the local identity from the Chinese identity. However, the redemption of the local through the non-local failed to institutionalize the interests of local communities.
Making Sense of Tastemaking: How Music Journalists Interpret Culture — and Their Place in It • Kelsey Whipple, University of Texas at Austin • Through in-depth interviews with 10 music journalists at various American publications, this research applies critical cultural theory and the concepts of taste and high vs. low culture to lifestyle journalism and cultural criticism. It explores how music journalists interpret popular culture and situate music journalism within it. Although music journalists don’t like to be labeled “tastemakers,” they contribute to the development of taste while seeking to inform readers about music and create distinct authorial voices.
Examining Affordances of African Agency through Cultural Brokerage in Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown • Tewodros Workneh, Kent State University • An award-winning CNN prime time culinary adventure reality television show, Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown explores various global social groups and their cuisine. Drawing on postcolonial approaches and the intercultural contact notion of cultural brokerage, this study critically examines the portrayal of Africa and Africans in Parts Unknown. The study concludes, whereas immersed brokers in the show resurface outdated and clichéd images of Africa, hybrid brokers offer pathways of African agency.
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