Boobie Miles: Failure and Friday Night Lights

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 319-340
Author(s):  
Samantha N. Sheppard
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Athletic Performance ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Rhetorical Agency ◽  
Nonfiction Book ◽  
Black Popular Culture ◽  
A Site ◽  
Night Lights ◽  
Friday Night

This essay examines the sporting failures and racial iconicity of James “Boobie” Miles, whose athletic performance of defeat on the gridiron is chronicled in H. G. Bissinger’s bestselling nonfiction book Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, A Dream (1990), Peter Berg’s film adaptation Friday Night Lights (2004), and Big K.R.I.T.’s songs and music videos “Hometown Hero” from his album K.R.I.T. Wuz Here (2010) and “Boobie Miles” from his album 4eva N a Day (2012). Examining how the film displaces defeat, locating its effects and affects in the injured running back, I unpack the ways (Black) popular culture reclaims Boobie’s embodied failures on screen as a site of rhetorical agency and oppositional theorizing.

Remixing Mixedness

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-214
Author(s):  
Jasmine Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Black Male ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
London 2012 ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
A Site ◽  
Bidding Process

Chapter 5 explores the transnational dimensions of racial imaginings through the vision of Brazil as a mixed-race tropical paradise in both U.S. and Brazilian productions. U.S. hip-hop music videos such as Snoop Dogg and Pharrell’s “Beautiful” (2003), will.i.am’s “I Got It from My Mama” (2007), and the Hollywood film Fast Five (2011) exploit Brazil’s image as a racial paradise and a site of black male independence, based on its reputation as a racial democracy with a large mixed-race population and the imagery of the Brazilian mulata. The chapter ends with how the Brazilian state presented the Rio 2016 Olympics bidding process and the London 2012 handover ceremony on a global stage through images of multiculturalism.

Southern Realism

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-98
Author(s):  
Charlotte E. Howell
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Southern Culture ◽  
Television Production ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
The American South ◽  
Night Lights ◽  
Characteristic Part ◽  
Friday Night

Friday Night Lights (NBC, 2006–2011) and Rectify (SundanceTV, 2013–2016) exemplified containing Christianity’s middlebrow appeal through displacement onto the cultural specificity of a realistically portrayed American South within a quality television drama. These two shows represent Christianity as both the dominant faith of their characters and as a characteristic part of Southern culture. Creatives used the milieu of an “authentic” American South to shift religion away from themselves and their quality-audience expectations, maintaining acceptability within the dominant non-Christian culture of television production. This displacement safely contained religion within the creatives’ production culture, allowing them to acknowledge Christianity’s religious content, but only within the peculiar particularity of the American South.

When ‘feminism’ becomes a genre: Alias Grace and ‘feminist’ television

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana Cattien
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
The Many ◽  
A Site ◽  
Popular Feminism ◽  
Privileged Site ◽  
Critical Movement ◽  
Alternative Reading

Alias Grace is just one of the many recent TV shows that was labelled ‘feminist’ so quickly and with such ease that one is left to wonder how much of a genre ‘feminism’ has already become. This article interrogates what is at stake for ‘feminist’ critique in labelling cultural phenomena as ‘feminist’. I argue that certain ways of reading Alias Grace as a ‘feminist’ show preclude an alternative reading in which Alias Grace emerges as a critique of ‘feminism’ itself. What is at stake in the debate on ‘feminism’ in popular culture is thus not only whether or not we can recognise the potential for ‘feminist’ critique that resides within popular culture, but also whether or not we can allow socio-cultural phenomena, like TV shows, to take ‘feminism’ as an object of critique: to generate the kind of critical movement that renders futile any attempt to stabilise, or reify, the signifier ‘feminism’ as an ahistorical object with fixed meanings – as a genre even. In so doing, I take it that there is no privileged site from which to engender such movement; and I do not take popular culture as a self-contained domain that could qualify for being such a site. The point, then, is not to treat Alias Grace as a representative case study in popular ‘feminism’; but rather, to demonstrate, by way of Alias Grace, the complex and contradictory readings that socio-cultural phenomena are amenable to, and which in turn give rise to critical possibilities that unfold from within these phenomena. Reading Alias Grace critically, as I understand it in this article, means allowing it to be, at one and the same time, a reflection on itself and a reflection on the world in which it so quickly comes to be labelled ‘feminist’.

scholarly journals A Dialogue on the Constructions of GLBT and Queer Ethos: “I Belong to a Culture That Includes …”

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Jane Hoogestraat ◽  
Hillery Glasby
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Community Level ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Normal Heart ◽  
Rhetorical Agency ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Critical Understanding ◽  
Yom Kippur ◽  
A Site

Invoking a dialogue between two scholars, authors Jane Hoogestraat and Hillery Glasby discuss the exigence for, construction of, and differentiation between LGBT and queer ethos. Drawing from Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and the construction of a gay identity, the text explores connections between queer theory, LGBT(Q) ethos, and queer futurity, ultimately arguing for a more nuanced and critical understanding of the undecidability and performativity of LGBT and queer ethos. In framing LGBT and queer ethos as being at the same time a self and socially constructed and mediated—legitimate and illegitimate—ethos can be understood not only as a site for rhetorical agency, but also as an orientation and a form of activism. Finally, the text offers a case study of Adrienne Rich’s “Yom Kippur,” which is a poem that offers a queer (and) Jewish perspective on identity—from an individual and community level—exhibiting both an LGBT and queer ethos.

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