Dissertations / Theses: 'Popular culture studies'

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Storey, John. "Hegemony and popular culture." Thesis, University of Sunderland, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.337210.

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au, LMcrae@westnet com, and Leanne Helen McRae. "Questions of Popular Cult(ure)." Murdoch University, 2003. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20040428.152619.

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Questions of Popular Cult(ure) works in the uncomfortable and unclear spaces of popular culture. This thesis demonstrates how cult cauterizes ambiguity and functions as a framing agent for unpopular politics in popular culture. In tracking the flows and hesitations in the postwar period through the rise of the New Right and identity politics, this thesis shows how cult contains moving and malleable meanings that maneuver through everyday life. It is a slippery and slight subject that denies coherent categorization in definitional frames. This thesis negotiates this liminality by tracking broad social shifts in race, class and gender through textualised traces. The complicated concept of cult is activated within a series of case studies. These chapters are linked together to demonstrate the volatile variance of the cult category. Section one contextualises the terrain of the intellectual work in this thesis. It paints broad brush-strokes of the postwar period, through an animated intersection of politics and popular culture. The first chapter defines the currency of cult in contemporary times. It is devoted to investigating the relationships between colonisation and popular culture. By pondering postcolonialism, this chapter prises open thirdspace to consider how writing and madness performs proximity in the pre and post-colonial world. The maddening of cargo cults by colonisers in Melanesia operates as a metonym for the regulation of marginal modalities of resistance. In popular culture, this trajectory of insane otherness has corroded, with the subversion of cult being appropriated by fan discourses, as worship has become accountable for the mainstream market. Chapter two unpacks The X-Files as a text tracking the broad changes in politics through popular culture. This innovative text has moved from marginality into the mainstream, mapping meanings through the social landscape. Consciousness and reflexivity in the popular embeds this text in a cult framework, as it demonstrates the movement in meanings and the hegemonic hesitations of the dominant in colonising (and rewriting) the interests of the subordinate as their own. Section two creates a dialogue between gendered politics and contemporary popular culture. The changes to the consciousness in masculinity and femininity are captured by Tank Girl, Tomb Raider, Henry Rollins and Spike (from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer). These texts perform the wavering popularity of feminism and the ascent of mens studies in intellectual inquiry. Tank Girl articulates unpopular feminist politics through the popular mode of film. The movement to more mainstream feminism is threaded through the third wave embraced by Tomb Raider that reinscribes the popular paradigms of femininity, via colonisation. The computer game discourse permits a pedagogy of power to punctuate Lara Crofts virtual surfaces and shimmer through the past into the present. Tracking this historical movement, two chapters on masculinity brew the boom in mens studies questioning of manhood. Henry Rollins is a metonym for an excessive and visible masculinity, in an era where men have remained an unmarked centre of society. His place within peripheral punk performance settles his inversionary identity. Spike from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer demonstrates the contradictions in manhood by moving through the masculine hierarchy to deprioritise men in the public sphere. This is a mobile masculinity in a time where changeability has caused a crisis for men. Both these men embody a challenging and confrontational gender politics. Cult contains these characters within different spaces, at varying times and through contradictory politics. Section three ponders the place and role of politics at its most persistent and relevant. It demonstrates the consequences for social justice in an era of New Right ideologies. The chapter on South Park mobilises Leftist concerns within an overtly Rightist context, and Trainspotting moves through youth politics and acceleration to articulate movement in resistive meanings. These case studies contemplate the journey of popular culture in the postwar period by returning to the present and to the dominant culture. The colonisation of identity politics by the New Right makes the place of cultural studies as a pedagogic formation - powerfully important. Colonisation of geographical peripheries is brought home to England as the colonisation of the Celtic fringe is interpreted through writing and resistance. This thesis tracks (and connects) two broad movements - the shifting of political formations and the commodification of popular culture. The disconnecting dialogue between these two streams opens the terrain for cult. In the hesitations that delay their connection, cult is activated to cauterize this disjuncture.

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Bergfeld, Sarah Elizabeth. "Hegemony at play four case studies in popular culture /." Pullman, Wash. : Washington State University, 2009. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Dissertations/Spring2009/s_bergfeld_042109.pdf.

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Berglund, Jeffrey Duane. "Cannibal fictions in U.S. popular culture and literature /." The Ohio State University, 1996. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487935573771863.

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Brigham, Ann Elizabeth. "Popular attractions: Tourism, heterosexuality, and sites of American culture." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/284560.

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"Popular Attractions: Tourism, Heterosexuality, and Sites of American Culture" investigates the serious business of pleasure, analyzing the circuits of desire that link stories of tourism and heterosexuality. I assert that the core impulses of tourism persistently shape American identity. Though the technology changes, the story perseveres: subjects leave the familiar behind in order to find themselves elsewhere. Quite simply, they ground themselves through movement. Tracing protagonists' upward and outward movements, I argue that the preservation of the American myth of mobility requires multiple conquests--geographical, cultural, sexual, ethno-racial, and economic. Examining literary narratives and tourist trends from the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, I suggest how a changing rhetoric of productivity anchors and threatens the parameters of pleasure. As the erotics of sightseeing dovetail with those of heterosexual romance, a twinned desire for defamiliarization and domestication emerges. The subject simultaneously yearns for mobility and placement. I conclude that the narrative patterns of fiction, film, and popular tourist sites generate and capitalize on the queasiness produced by this dual desire. As feminist geographer Doreen Massey has noted, social relations "necessarily have a spatial form" (120). The narratives of geographical movement I discuss romance the possibility of new social intimacies with ambivalent results, as indicated by the repeated erasure, revision, and defense of multiple boundaries. In the introduction I analyze Lynne Tillman's novel Motion Sickness to challenge the assumption that the objectives of tourism and heterosexuality are to produce and maintain a self different from an other. Indeed, while sightseeing and heterosexual seduction both promise the pleasures of inhabiting an other's locale, they also expose the impossibility of defining differences between familiar and foreign. Considering these issues in works by Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Spielberg, Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Silko, and Lynne Tillman, and the tourist destinations represented in them, succeeding chapters analyze the reassuring and continuous constructions of binaries like home/away, distance/intimacy, and familiar/strange, illuminating their instability by revealing how they become blurred, contradictory, or representative of seemingly disparate concerns.

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Rainey, James Edward. "Blurring Boundaries: The Rorschach Idea in Twentieth-Century American Popular Culture." W&M ScholarWorks, 2008. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626549.

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Lindell, Johan. "Japanization? - Japanese Popular Culture among Swedish Youth." Thesis, Karlstads universitet, Fakulteten för ekonomi, kommunikation och IT, 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-3861.

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Japanese presence on the global cultural market has steadily been increasing throughout the last decades. Fan-communities all over the world are celebrating the Japanese culture and cultural identity no longer seems bound to the local. This thesis is an empirical study which aims to examine the transnational flow of Japanese popular culture into Sweden. The author addresses the issue with three research questions; what unique dimensions could be ascribed to Swedish anime-fandom, what is appealing about Japanese popular culture and how is it influencing fan-audiences? To enable deeper understanding of the phenomenon, a qualitative research consisting of semi-structured telephone-interviews and questionnaires, was conducted with Swedish fans of Japanese popular culture. The results presented in this thesis indicate that the anime-community in Sweden possesses several unique dimensions, both in activities surrounding Japanese popular culture and consumption and habits. Japanese popular culture fills a void that seems to exist in domestic culture. It is different, and that is what is appealing to most fans. Anime and manga have inspired fans to learn about the Japanese culture, in some cases, Japanese popular culture has in a way “japanized” fans – making them wish they were born in Japan.

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Lea, Carolyn. "Beyond Celebration: A Call for Rethinking Cultural Studies." Bowling Green, Ohio : Bowling Green State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=bgsu1194285318.

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Curran, Kieran. "Cynic sensibility in British popular literature and culture, 1950 to 1987." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/9494.

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In my thesis, I focus on delineating 'The Cynic Sensibility' in British Popular Literature and Culture (1950-1987). Focusing primarily on literature and music (and, to a lesser extent, cinema/television), this works seeks to write a cultural history through analysing cultural texts. The sensibility has three key characteristics: I) it is a Bohemian sensibility; ii) it is apolitical, in that it does not endorse any political alternative to the status quo at any given time, and iii) it is popular, and exists across traditional high/low cultural lines. Connected to this last point is a tendency to oppose stylistic Modernism and its attendant obscurities. Underpinning my thesis are the work of the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on cynicism as a philosophical phenomenon, and the cultural theory of Raymond Williams. Using this approach, I seek to not only connect spheres of culture which hitherto have been kept separate, but to provide a different insight into 20th century British cultural history.

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Enstone, Zoe O. "Becoming goth : geographies of an (un)popular culture." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:13715ee9-d01d-4671-a8d1-0dd08bd616e5.

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Within this thesis I explore what can be achieved when culture is critically assessed through a series of theories that mobilise a spatial imaginary. I place the concepts of atmosphere, connection, site and encounter, and theories of emergence via terms such as movement, practice and embodiment, into tension with a single case study: Goth. Goth is a music based grouping, emerging from Punk, New Romantic, Indie and Glam Rock style and music cultures in the late 1970s, with a significant near-global presence in the popular culture industries and links to several salient media controversies; including the Columbine High School massacre, the murder of Sophie Lancaster, and fears over self-harm and suicide. I specifically draw on the vocabularies from within non-representational geographies of performance, relational materiality, affect and social anxiety to re-work understandings of this collectivity. I question what is involved in the material practices of Goth, explore how the practice and experience of Goth is articulated through specific sites, examine how Goth participates in the production and circulation of cultures of anxiety or (un)popularity; and reconsider the concept of ‘subculture’. To do so, I employ a range of methodologies, from guided walks to photo-diaries, within multi-site field research throughout the UK, Tokyo and New York City. I conclude that Goth and culture more generally can be theorised in a number of ways: it emerges as a performed series of embodied acts; it is co-produced in complex relations with non-humans; it can be thought of as a series of modulating affective atmospheres; it coalesces as a collectivity and circulates through events; and it is co-produced through sites and media events. None of these dominates over or diminishes the other; rather they are co-constitutive and interdependent.

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Call, Steven Charles. "A people's air force: Air power and American popular culture, 1945-1965 /." The Ohio State University, 1997. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487944660929528.

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Stuever-Williford, Marley Katherine. "Hex Appeal: The Body of the Witch in Popular Culture." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1610295587336417.

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Young, Michael A. "Cultural performances of German national identity| Popular music, body culture, and the 2006 FIFA World Cup." Thesis, Indiana University, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1535413.

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This thesis explores the intersection of nationalism, popular music, and sport as they collided with German identity politics and discourses of twentieth-century history. I contextualize public performances of German national identity during the 2006 World Cup within the broader historical context of national identity construction through music and sport in the last two hundred. I contextualize Germans' public performance of national pride and hospitality during the World Cup as the latest in a long line of cultural performances of German identity that have shaped and been shaped by historical circumstances and socially conditioned discourses of national identity. Taking a broad historical and conceptual perspective on cultural performance, I argue that cultural performances of German national identity—communicated in music, sport, and visual symbolism in the public landscape (i.e., through the use of posters, ads, popular press, etc)—have been tailored to and contingent on the social and discursive exigencies of particular historical and political junctures of the past two hundred years. Likewise, cultural performances during the 2006 World Cup must be seen as particular to twenty-first-century German society. Analyzing the Germans' public performance of national identity as well as popular songs and their audio-visual texts (i.e., music videos), I argue that some supposedly nationalist performances of German identity gained traction and popular support during the World Cup because of the strong role played by popular music and sport in framing the terms of their performance and interpretation.

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Sutcliffe, Paul J. C. "Contemporary art in Japan and cuteness in Japanese popular culture." Thesis, University of the Arts London, 2005. http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/5642/.

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This thesis is an art historical study focussing on contemporary Japan, and in particular the artists Murakami TakashL Mori Mariko, Aida Makoto, and Nara Yoshitomo. These artists represent a generation of artists born in the 1960s who use popular culture to their own ends. From the seminal exhibition 'Tokyo Pop' at Hiratsuka Museum of Art in 1996 which included all four artists, to Murakami's group exhibition 'Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture' which opened in April 2005, central to my research is an exploration of contemporary art's engagement with the pervasiveness of cuteness in Japanese culture. Including key secondary material, which recognises cuteness as not merely something trivial but involving power play and gender role issues, this thesis undertakes an interdisciplinary analysis of cuteness in contemporary Japanese popular culture, and examines howcontemporary Japanese artists have responded, providing original research through interviews with Aida Makoto, Mori Mariko and Murakami Takashi. Themes examined include the deconstruction of the high and low in contemporary art; sh6jo (girl) culture and cuteness; the relation of cuteness and the erotic; the transformation of cuteness into the grotesque; cuteness and nostalgia; and virtual cuteness in Japanese science fiction animation, and computer games.

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Faulkner, Julie Diane 1952. "The literacies of popular culture : a study of teenage reading practices." Monash University, Faculty of Education, 2002. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/8460.

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Palumbo, Allison P. "STRONG, INDEPENDENT, AND IN LOVE: FIGHTING FEMALE FANTASIES IN POPULAR CULTURE." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/35.

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During the late 1970s and 1980s, feminist critics like Janice Radway began to reconsider so-called women’s genres, like romance novels and soap operas and melodramas, in order to address the forms of subversion and expressions of agency they provided female audiences. However, in spite of greater willingness to consider the progressive potential in romance narratives, there has been little such consideration given to stories of romance for the fighting female character—defined as a protagonist who uses violence, via her body or weapons, to save herself and others. The fighting female has received a good deal of attention from critics like Yvonne Tasker, Sherrie Inness, Rikke Schubart, and Phillipa Gates because she enacts transgressive forms of femininity. However, the typical response has been to ignore the intimate or romantic relationships she has with men or to critique them based on the assumption that such hetero-relationships automatically limit her agency and attenuate her representation as a feminist-friendly heroine. This view presumes that female empowerment opposes or can only be imagined outside the dominant cultural narratives that generally organize women’s lives around their hetero-relationships—whether sexual or platonic, familial or vocational. As I argue, some fighting female relationship narratives merit our attention because they reveal a new cache of plausible empowered female identities that women negotiate through their intimacies and romances with men. These negotiations, in turn, enable innovative representations of male-female relationships that challenge long-standing cultural scripts about the nature of dominance and subordination in such relationships. Combining cultural analysis with close readings of key popular American film and television texts since the 1980s, my dissertation argues that certain fighting female relationship themes question regressive conventions in male-female intimacies and reveal potentially progressive ideologies regarding female agency in mass culture. In essence, certain fighting female relationship narratives project feminist-friendly love fantasies that reassure audiences of the desirability of empowered women while also imagining egalitarian intimacies that further empower women.

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Holdzkom, Marianne. "Parody and Pastiche: Images of the American Revolution in Popular Culture, 1765-1820." The Ohio State University, 1995. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1392116147.

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Rich, Danielle Leigh. "Global Fandom: The Circulation of Japanese Popular Culture in the U.S." Diss., University of Iowa, 2011. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4905.

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This dissertation is a case study of the dissemination and circulation of Japanese popular cultures in the U.S., specifically focusing on the collective reception practices of individuals who identify as fans of Japanese animation, comic books, and video games. The key questions driving this project are: what difference does it make that young Americans are consuming popular cultures that are 1) international in origin and 2) specifically Japanese in origin? To answer these questions I carried out ethnographic research - such as subject interviews, questionnaires, and participant observation - to understand the significance of young adults' interest in Japanese animation and comic book works (usually referred to as "anime" and "manga," respectively). In response to my ethnographic investigation of U.S. fans' practices and experiences, I argue that many young Americans use their practices of consuming and circulating these international popular cultures to transform their immediate social landscapes, and therefore, their social and national identities as well. I also draw on methodologies from a variety of disciplines, pairing ethnographic fieldwork practices with audience reception and fandom studies, transnational media studies, and book studies approaches in order make connections between the social, cultural, performative, and national dimensions of Japanese popular culture fandom in the U.S. In addition to exploring subjects' relationship to the texts they consume, I also target the embodied spaces and processes by which Japanese popular culture is actually circulated and experienced by local U.S. audience groups. In doing so, I strive to follow the "digital life" Japanese popular culture has taken in its jump to English-language translation world-wide and the significant role fans have played in facilitating unofficial flows of Japanese popular culture through specific translation practices. I examine the scholarly and fandom struggle over ideological questions of the "authenticity" and "Americanization" of adaptations of Japanese media in the North American marketplace, as well as the struggle between fans and official adapters to assert forms of ownership over these representations. Such struggles involve these groups' often conflicting practices of adaptation, translation, and circulation of these cultures. This research adds an important dimension to current scholarship on cultural manifestations of globalization and so-called "Americanization" processes as I show how commodities from outside the U.S. are first received by U.S. audiences and then transformed through this audience's participatory engagement with the production and circulation of these works in the English language. As such, this research engages with key issues of cultural transmission, translation, practices of media localization, transnational flows, and identity formation and fandom.

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Pratt, Marnie. "The L Word Menace: Envisioning Popular Culture as Political Tool." Bowling Green, Ohio : Bowling Green State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=bgsu1213737135.

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McGee, Adam Michael. "Imagined Voodoo: Terror, Sex, and Racism in American Popular Culture." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11350.

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I analyze the historical and cultural processes by which American racism is reproduced, approaching the issue through the lens of "imagined voodoo" (as distinct from Haitian Vodou). I posit that the American Marine occupation of Haiti (1915-34) was crucial in shaping the American racial imaginary. In film, television, and literature, imagined voodoo continues to serve as an outlet for white racist anxieties. Because it is usually found in low-brow entertainment (like horror) and rarely mentions race explicitly, voodoo is able to evade critique, disseminating racism within a culture that is now largely--albeit superficially--intolerant of overt racism.
African and African American Studies

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Rossie, Amanda Marie. "New Media, New Maternities: Representations of Maternal Femininity in Postfeminist Popular Culture." The Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1397597413.

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Flournoy, Ellen L. "Powerful submission : popular texts and the subjectivity of Christian right women." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2006. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0001796.

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Gervin, Kelly J. "Music and Environmentalism in Twenty-First Century American Popular Culture." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1494162797534902.

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Hübinette, Tobias. "Comforting an orphaned nation : Representations of international adoption and adopted Koreans in Korean popular culture." Doctoral thesis, Stockholm University, Division of Korean Studies, 2005. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-696.

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This is a study of popular cultural representations of international adoption and adopted Koreans in Western countries. The study is carried out from a postcolonial perspective and uses a cultural studies reading of four feature films and four popular songs as primary sources. The aim is to examine how nationalism is articulated in various ways in light of the colonial experiences in modern Korean history and recent postcolonial developments within contemporary Korean society. The principal question addressed is: What are the implications for a nation depicting itself as one extended family and which has sent away so many of its own children, and what are the reactions from a culture emphasising homogeneity when encountering and dealing with the adopted Koreans? After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 gives the history of international adoption from Korea, and Chapter 3 is an account of the development of the adoption issue in the political discussion. Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 analyse the cinematic and lyrical representations of adopted Koreans in four feature films and popular songs respectively. Chapter 4 considers the gendering of the colonised nation and the maternalisation of roots, drawing on theories of nationalism as a gendered discourse. Chapter 5 examines the issue of hybridity and the relationship between Koreanness and Whiteness, which are related to the notions of third space, mimicry and passing. Linked to studies of national division, reunification and family separation, Chapter 6 looks at the adopted Koreans as symbols of a fractured and fragmented nation. Chapter 7 focuses on the emergence of a global Korean community, with regards to theories of globalisation, diasporas and transnationalism. In the concluding chapter, the study argues that the Korean adoption issue can be conceptualised as an attempt at overcoming a difficult past and imagining a common future for all ethnic Koreans at a transnational level.

Avhandlingen är även utgiven på Jimoondang Publishing Company (Seoul, 2006) och ingår där i Korean Studies Series No.32, isbn 8988095952. The thesis is also published at Jimoondang Publishing Company (Seoul, 2006) in Korean Studies Series No. 32, isbn 8988095952.

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Thomas, Quincy D. "Lycra, Legs, and Legitimacy: Performances of Feminine Power in Twentieth Century American Popular Culture." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1521852471021414.

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Murphy, JoAnna R. "Living the Fat Body: Women's Experiences and Relationships with Their Bodies and Popular Culture." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1515055091898279.

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Taylor, Tomaro I. "Longshoremen's Negotiation of Masculinity and the Middle Class in 1950s Popular Culture." Scholar Commons, 2016. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6592.

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This thesis considers mid-20th century portrayals of working-class longshoremen’s masculinity within the context of emerging middle-class gender constructions. I argue that although popular culture presents a roughly standardized depiction of longshoremen as “manly men,” these portrayals are significantly nuanced to demonstrate the difficulties working-class men faced as they attempted to navigate socio-cultural and socio-economic shifts related to class and the performance of their male gender. Specifically, I consider depictions of longshoremen’s disruptive masculinity, male identity formation, and masculine-male growth as reactions to paradigmatic shifts in American masculinity. Using three aspects of longshoremen’s non-work lives presented in A View from the Bridge, “Edge of the City,” and “On the Waterfront”—the house, the home, and leisure/recreational activity—I ground discussions of the longshoremen’s negotiation of masculinity within a conceptual framework based in masculinity studies, social construction, and psychoanalytic criticism. To both complement and supplement the core literary and cultural analyses presented in this text, oral history interviews have been included to provide a contextual basis for understanding longshoremen culture in the 1950s.

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Poulson-Bryant, Scott. "Everybody Is a Star!: Uplift, Citizenship, and the Cross-Racial Politics of 1970s U.S. Popular Culture." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493340.

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“Everybody is a Star: Uplift, Citizenship and the Cross-Racial Politics of 1970s U.S. Popular Culture,” examines the ways in which popular culture in the mid-1970s operated as a site of citizenship formation for marginalized subjects, particularly African Americans, in the decade after the Civil Rights advances of the 1960s. Historically, the cultural production of black people in the United States has occupied a curious position, cohering as both a foundation of and marginal to the larger narrative of American popular culture. As a result of that positioning, African American popular culture often strikes a balance between expressing both “national” and “racial” identities. My dissertation looks at the tensions inherent in such a balancing act, and contemplates what roles history, cultural appropriation and citizenship formation as a process of “cultural adaptation” play in the production, dissemination and maintenance of African American cultural production. I first analyze this work—popular music, Hollywood film and Broadway theater aimed at mainstream audiences—as cultural citizenship work, broadly defined as the production of and interaction with culture by marginalized individuals as a way to negotiate the terms of citizenship alongside the more formal, political arenas in which citizenship is enacted. In the first chapter, I use a case study of the 1976 musical Bubbling Brown Sugar to argue that the aesthetic labor of this cultural citizenship work was used by African American culture producers to align the divergent strands of the “national” and the “racial.” Through analysis of The Wiz and Saturday Night Fever my second and third chapters ask a similar question yet from different, perhaps opposing textual vantage points: how does cross-racial cultural sharing enhance yet critique the American project? How can we theorize what I call the “usability” of race across the “color line” to critique embodied practices of cultural belonging?
American Studies

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Glover, Stuart. "Literature and cultural policy studies /." [St. Lucia, Qld.], 2006. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe19342.pdf.

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Di, Franco Manuela. "Popular magazines in Fascist Italy, 1934-1943." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/286061.

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The dissertation examines the field of popular magazines in 1930s Italy, by first examining the broad field of magazine production under Fascism and then undertaking three case studies of individual magazines - L'Avventuroso (1934 - 1943), Omnibus (1937 - 1939), and Grazia (1938 -) - in order to build an in-depth analysis of the production, format and reception of the popular press in this period. In the interwar years, and in particular from 1934 onwards, innovative printing techniques and production methods transformed the periodical press worldwide. The emergence of new forms of illustrated magazines expanded the readership and started a process of standardisation and mass production of periodicals. The dissemination in Italy of the rotocalco, a new product aimed at the masses that was developed in the 1930s, offers a particularly interesting starting point for analysing the development of a modern Italian mass press and culture within the peculiar dynamics of a controlling Fascist regime and the mixed national and international forces that shaped it. Modern Italian magazines developed in dialogue with foreign industries, imitating models from abroad and adapting them to the Italian culture. The development of popular press in the 1930s represented a challenge for the Fascist regime, which approached it both as a threat and an opportunity to shape Italian popular culture. Through the analysis of three case studies, each from a key sector of popular press - comics, general cultural magazines, and women's magazines - and each produced by one of the three main publishing companies in the field - Nerbini, Rizzoli, and Mondadori - the dissertation aims to provide a detailed picture of the development of mass print culture in Italy during Fascism. The analysis provides examples of the impact of and cracks in Fascist censorship and cultural autarchy on the periodical press and argues that the Italian popular press developed in dialogue with European and American culture, which influenced both the form and content of rotocalchi, reinterpreting and adapting these models to Italian standards and to the constrictions of Fascist control.

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Hopkins, Susan. "Pop heroines and female icons : youthful femininity and popular culture." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 1999.

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The thesis suggests much feminist theorising on girls' and young women's relationship to popular culture is limited by a 'moral-political' approach which searches for moral and political problems and solutions in the consumption of popular images of femininity. The thesis offers a critique of such 'moral-political' interpretations of the relationship between youthful femininity and popular culture. Following thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean Baudrillard, the thesis opposes the political preoccupation with 'reality' and 'truth'. The study follows Nietzsche's and Baudrillard's notion of the 'Eternal-Feminine' which accepts the necessity of illusion, deception and appearances. Through a close textual analysis of magazines, films, television and music video, this study offers an aesthetic appreciation of popular culture representations of femininity. The thesis comprises six essays, the first of which explains my Nietzschean inspired aesthetic approach in more detail. The second essay looks at images and discourses of supermodels and model femininity in women's magazines. The third looks at image-based forms of 'girl power' from Madonna to the Spice Girls. The fourth essay examines the 'Cool Chics' of the pay TV channel TVJ,from Wonder Woman to Xena: Warrior Princess. The fifth essay, 'Gangster Girls: From Goodfellas to Pulp Fiction' considers the 1990s model of the femme fatale, the bad girl who thrives on moral chaos. The final essay 'Celebrity Skin: From Courtney Love to Kylie Minogue' suggests some of the most powerful feminine role models of our time have built their careers not on notions of authenticity and truth but rather on the successful management of illusion and fantasy. The essay argues that our social world has outgrown the traditional moral-political approach which aims to lead girls and young women from 'deceptive''immoral' appearances to moral, 'authentic' 'reality'. The pleasures of popular culture, Isuggest, cannot always be linked to deep meanings but may be drawn from superficial appearances and beautiful surfaces.

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Liu, Menghan. "Rephrasing Mainstream And Alternatives: An Ideological Analysis Of The Birth Of Chinese Indie Music." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1351367197.

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Watkins, Sean Edward. "Media Literacy and the Digital Age." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1242223666.

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Tam, Pui-yim Jenifer. "Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong : case studies of youth consumption of cute products and fashion magazines /." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 2002. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B25017585.

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Orent, Shayna L. "Fetuses Are People, Too?: How Images of Sonograms in Popular Culture Affect Our Conception of Fetal Personhood." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2012. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/101.

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This thesis explores the way popular culture imitates and reinforces a sentimentalized reading of sonogram images that has been established by the conservative Right as the proper way to view this image. It analyzes several popular culture texts to expose the way their use of sonogram images personifies the fetus. It aims to problematize the way this image has become a symbol of fetal personhood and initiate a discussion about our roles as consumers of popular culture and images. Finally, it connects the use of this image to recent legislation surrounding mandatory ultrasounds and personhood initiatives, and argues that the public’s acceptance of fetal personhood is dangerous for women’s personhood and citizenship.

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Vermorel, Fred. "Biography & identity, celebrity & fanhood : researching intersections of avant-garde and popular culture." Thesis, Kingston University, 2011. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/22495/.

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This PhD by publication critically reviews the background, context, and reception of work published from 1978-2008. The work surveyed, comprises popular music biography, texts on art school influenced bohemia and counterculture, and on celebrity and fan culture. The social and cultural context of the work is mapped and methodological and stylistic issues addressed. The origins of the punk aesthetic through the Sex Pistols is charted. The turn in celebrity studies towards a "fan culture" based approach is demonstrated by the publication of 'Starlust' in 1985. Subsequent work on "fan culture" is discussed. Issues relating to researching and theorising popular culture and cultural and design history are debated. Extracts from the publications cited are provided.

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Johnson, Lakesia Denise. "The Iconography of the Black Female Revolutionary and New Narratives of Justice." The Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1213127495.

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Bonifacio, Peralta Ayendy José. "Poems in the U.S. Popular Press, 1855-1866." The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu155533852650219.

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de, los Reyes Vanessa. "I Love Ricky: How Desi Arnaz Challenged American Popular Culture." Oxford, Ohio : Miami University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=miami1209136075.

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au, m. jennings@murdoch edu, and Mark Jennings. "Realms: A Phenomenological, Socio-Cultural and Theological-Religious Studies exploration of Musical Space." Murdoch University, 2009. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20100421.135501.

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This thesis sets out to explore the ways people use and interpret experience of music, the divine and interaction with other people within discrete musical spaces. This exploration takes place in two sites: a Pentecostal church in suburban Perth, Western Australia, and the West Coast Blues & Roots festival, a well known music festival held annually in Fremantle, Western Australia. I have nominated these two sites as realms because they are spaces set up for the performance and experience of music. My primary questions about these sites relate to how people interact with music, each other and the divine within these realms. This study combines socio-cultural and theological-religious studies theories to illuminate the processes, experiences and interpretations occurring within these musical realms. This has important implications for understanding how people use and interpret music in relation to the world outside the musical realm. People use these experiences to dream and imagine the shape of ideal relationships and communities with each other and the divine presence, and to escape and transform the world outside the musical realm. In this thesis I compile data from participant observation and in-depth interviews at both sites, as well as published interviews with performers. I construct two case studies of the sites, portraying a day in the life of a participant in both realms. For each case study I outline ten different interpretive paradigms, five from socio-cultural theorists and five from theology and religious studies. I analyse the data using the phenomenological method, taking a component of data from the fieldwork and comparing and contrasting it with theory. At the end of each chapter I summarise the process and make some remarks relating to the implications of the study. The resulting work makes important contributions to understanding how socio-cultural studies and theological-religious studies can work together in an interdisciplinary fashion to illuminate phenomena. The study sheds light on the nature of musical realms, as well as proto-religious phenomena and methodological agnosticism. Further, this work presents useful contributions into the ways churches may understand and interact with spiritual experience that occurs outside of religious settings. Finally, performers and artists and community workers will benefit from the conclusions of this study on the ways in which people use music and realms to escape, transform and imagine community and society.

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Tait, Lisa Olsen. "Mormon Culture Meets Popular Fiction: Susa Young Gates and the Cultural Work of Home Literature." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 1998. http://patriot.lib.byu.edu/u?/MTNZ,25499.

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Lindenberg, Cooperman Bruria. "Negotiating the divides: How adult children of Holocaust survivors remember their engagement with the popular culture of the 1950s." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/6432.

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This dissertation examines how Jewish children of Holocaust survivors (COS), growing up in the 1950s in a small city in Ontario engaged with popular culture. Set within the context of a predominantly English-speaking Christian environment, this culture frequently did not represent them. It often excluded their knowledge and lived experiences and thus forced them to be silent. Utilizing an oral history approach, nine children of survivors were interviewed about their elementary school years and growing up in the fifties. The history of postwar Canada serves as the framework for how adults remember the meanings they made of their childhood experiences and how they incorporated these stories into the personal scripts of their lives. Their memories of childhood reflect the discourses that shaped them, discourses that are situated in the language and the images of a society and within the wider historical and social structure of that society. Individuals, however, do not fit into neat categories. Positioning their stories within the larger context of postwar Canada, while also accommodating the diverse meanings they made from their historical positions required a multi-disciplinary orientation. Therefore, a historical framework anchors the narratives and serves as a backdrop for the personal childhood memories of children of survivors. Specifically, the thesis draws on four areas of literature: the literature on children of survivors; cultural studies, which helps make sense of the variety of experiences, their relational character and the discourses through which they operate; various historical literatures which establish the historical context for the remembered accounts; and anti-racist education which provides some of the tools for analysis. Through their oral testimonies, we begin to see how, as children, they entered, mediated and often transformed the representations of television and the movies to create their own subjective and social possibilities. Their "narratives of redemption" enabled them to negotiate the divides between the representations of themselves and the representations of the popular culture around them.

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Herrmann, Andrew F. ""Saving People. Hunting Things. The Family Business": Organizational Communication Approaches to Popular Culture." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2016. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/439.

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Book Summary: Popular culture helps construct, define, and impact our everyday realities and must be taken seriously because popular culture is, simply, popular. Communication Perspectives on Popular Culture brings together communication experts with diverse backgrounds, from interpersonal communication, business and organizational communication, mass communication, media studies, narrative, rhetoric, gender studies, autoethnography, popular culture studies, and journalism. The contributors tackle such topics as music, broadcast and Netflix television shows, movies, the Internet, video games, and more, as they connect popular culture to personal concerns as well as larger political and societal issues. The variety of approaches in these chapters are simultaneously situated in the present while building a foundation for the future, as contributors explore new and emerging ways to approach popular culture. From case studies to emerging theories, the contributors examine how popular culture, media, and communication influence our everyday lives.

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Choyke, Kelly L. "The Power of Popular Romance Culture: Community, Fandom, and Sexual Politics." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1573739424523163.

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Levitt, Linda. "Hollywood Forever: Culture, Celebrity, and the Cemetery." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2008. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0002416.

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Zheng, Yu. ""The Screaming Successor": Exploring the Chinese Metal Scene in Contemporary Chinese Society (1996-2015)." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1479453595002855.

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Harry, Shannon A. "Whose Fantasy Is This: Postfeminist America." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1385983884.

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Sibielski, Rosalind. "What Are Little (Empowered) Girls Made Of?: The Discourse of Girl Power in Contemporary U.S. Popular Culture." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1277091634.

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Basham, Cortney S. "Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth and the Rise of Popular Premillennialism in the 1970s." TopSCHOLAR®, 2012. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1205.

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How people think about the end of the world greatly affects how they live in the present. This thesis examines how popular American thought about “the end of the world” has been greatly affected by Hal Lindsey’s 1970 popular prophecy book The Late, Great Planet Earth. LGPE sold more copies than any other non-fiction book in the 1970s and greatly aided the mainstreaming of “end-times” ideas like the Antichrist, nuclear holocaust, the Rapture, and various other concepts connected with popular end-times thought. These ideas stem from a specific strain of late-nineteenth century Biblical interpretation known as dispensational premillennialism, which has manifested in various schools of premillennial thought over the last 150 years. However, Lindsey translated this complicated system into modern language and connected it with contemporary geopolitics in powerful ways which helped make LGPE incredibly popular and influential in the 1970s and beyond. This paper includes an introduction to some essential concepts and terms related to popular premillennialism followed by a brief history of popular prophecy in America. The second half of this thesis examines the social, religious, and political climate of the 1970s and how Lindsey’s success connects to the culture of the Seventies, specifically conservative reactions to the various social movements of the 1960s. The last major section discusses Lindsey’s malleable theology and the power of interpreting the Bible “literally.” In the 1970s, conservative theologians and denominations won the battle to define certain concepts within Christianity including terms like “literal,” “inerrant,” and related terms, and Lindsey’s treatment of “the end times” reflects these definitions and how they affect Biblical interpretation. Finally, the conclusion fleshes out the appeal of popular premillennialism in the 1970s and into the present day.

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Whitehead, Aaron T. "The “Fatty” Arbuckle Scandal, Will Hays, and Negotiated Morality in 1920s America." TopSCHOLAR®, 2015. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1469.

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In the autumn of 1921, silent film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was arrested for the rape and murder of a model and actress named Virginia Rappé. The ensuing scandal created a firestorm of controversy not just around Arbuckle but the entire motion picture industry. Religious and moral reformers seized upon the scandal to decry the decline of “traditional” moral values taking place throughout American society in the aftermath of World War I. The scandal created a common objective for an anti-film coalition representing diverse social and religious groups, all dedicated to bringing about change in the motion picture industry through public pressure, boycotts, and censorship legislation. In the face of this threat, the film industry created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, with Republican strategist Will Hays as its president. Hays worked to incorporate moral reformers into his new organization, giving them an outlet for their complaints while simultaneously co-opting and defusing their reform agenda. Hays’ use of public relations as the means to institute self-regulation within the motion picture industry enabled Hollywood to survive the Arbuckle scandal and continue to thrive. It also set up the mechanism by which the industry has effectively negotiated public discontent ever since.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Popular culture studies'

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