Unpopularity and cultural power in the age of Netflix: New questions for cultural studies’ approaches to television texts

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942199457
Author(s):  
Amanda Lotz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Audience Fragmentation ◽  
Streaming Services ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
Contextual Change

Although Internet-distributed television bears much in common with the television long studied and theorized using cultural studies-based approaches to analysis, several of its features profoundly deviate from earlier television norms and require reassessment and adaptation of theoretical frames. This article focuses on the issue of textual popularity in relation to these services and identifies key challenges to using the same frames of cultural power that have been used for studying television in the past. The underlying problem of audience fragmentation does not originate with streaming services, but this profound contextual change, in concert with industrial aspects that further distinguish internet-distributed television from television’s past norms, must be addressed. The article concludes by identifying several ways the cultural power of streaming services can be investigated despite the challenges that emerging norms of Internet-distributed video provide.

Derrida on Pornography: Putting (It) Up for Sale

Derrida Today ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Morris
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
English Translation ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Past ◽  
French Original ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Critical Discourses ◽  
Academic Debate

Over the past thirty years, academic debate over pornography in the discourses of feminism and cultural studies has foundered on questions of the performative and of the word's definition. In the polylogue of Droit de regards, pornography is defined as la mise en vente that is taking place in the act of exegesis in progress. (Wills's idiomatic English translation includes an ‘it’ that is absent in the French original). The definition in Droit de regards alludes to the word's etymology (writing by or about prostitutes) but leaves the referent of the ‘sale’ suspended. Pornography as la mise en vente boldly restates the necessary iterability of the sign and anticipates two of Derrida's late arguments: that there is no ‘the’ body and that performatives may be powerless. Deriving a definition of pornography from a truncated etymology exemplifies the prosthesis of origin and challenges other critical discourses to explain how pornography can be understood as anything more than ‘putting (it) up for sale’.

Surviving The Jungle Book: Trans-temporal Ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Mendes
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Temporal Ventriloquism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Film Maker ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Political Intervention

The process of screen adaptation is an act of ventriloquism insofar as it gives voice to contemporary anxieties and desires through its trans-temporal use of a source text. Screen adaptations that propose to negotiate meanings about the past, particularly a conflicted past, are acts of ‘trans-temporal ventriloquism’: they adapt and reinscribe pre-existing source texts to animate contemporary concerns and anxieties. I focus on the acts of trans-temporal ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu (1998), a postcolonial, turn-of-the-twenty-first century short film that adapts Zoltan and Alexander Korda's film The Jungle Book (1942), itself an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's collection of short stories by the same name. Surviving Sabu is about the survival and appropriation of orientalist films as a means of self-expression in a postcolonial present. Inherent in this is the idea of cinema as a potentially redemptive force that can help to balance global power inequalities. Surviving Sabu's return to The Jungle Book becomes a means both of tracing the genealogy of specific orientalist discourses and for ventriloquising contemporary concerns. This article demonstrates how trans-temporal ventriloquism becomes a strategy of political intervention that enables the film-maker to take ownership over existing media and narratives. My argument examines Surviving Sabu as an exemplar of cultural studies of the 1980s and 1990s: a postcolonial remediation built on fantasy and desire, used as a strategy of writing within rather than back to empire.

The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Of Color ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Free Women

The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History boldly interprets the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In twenty-nine chapters, the Handbook showcases women’s and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people’s lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Organized chronologically and thematically, the Handbook’s six sections allow readers to consider historical continuities of gendered power as well as individual innovations and ruptures in gender systems. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter bursts with fascinating historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, to Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, to working-class activists mobilizing international movements, to transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars from multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women’s opinions to the suppression of Indian women’s involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. They demonstrate a way to extend this more capacious vision of history forward, setting an intellectual agenda informed by intersectionality and transnationalism, and new understandings of sexuality.

scholarly journals Chinese Aesthetics in the Past Two Decades

2002 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gao Jianping
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Narrow Sense ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Development ◽  
Chinese Aesthetics

This paper is devoted to the discussion of Chinese aesthetics in the last two decades. In the early 1980s, there was an “aesthetic craze” in China, which endeavoured to develop the autonomy of art by breaking away from the art in the service of politics during the period of Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). This “craze” declined in the late 1980s, when people switched to the study of classic Chinese aesthetics in order to find their own cultural identity. During the early 1990s, when some scholars are interested in cultural studies, aesthetics in its narrow sense disappeared in China. In the late 1990s and the turn of the centuries, there was a sign of the revival of aesthetics. Many aestheticians tried hard to develop their studies in various fields, such as to combine aesthetics with contemporary cultural studies and to follow the new development of Western aesthetics, but, more importantly, to establish a Chinese aesthetics in the context of the development of world aesthetics.

Forming The Guild

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ellcessor ◽  
Sean C. Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
New Literacies ◽  
Media Production ◽  
Star Image ◽  
Affinity Spaces ◽  
Web Series ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
Affinity Space ◽  
Sense Of Mastery

This paper expands on Gee’s (2004) notion of “affinity spaces” by placing them in the context of games, media stars, and their fans and combining cultural studies and new literacies approaches. The Guild, a web series about the misadventures of MMO-players, written by and starring actor, writer, producer, and gamer Felicia Day, is examined. On WatchTheGuild.com, fans of The Guild enact literacy practices, particularly those that align with Day’s activities and star persona, such as media production and critique. These literacy practices are constrained by the limitations of projective identity in the context of star-based affinity spaces. Taking on projective identities within The Guild’s affinity space, individuals are faced with the impossibility of fully achieving the star’s – Day’s – successful identity as simultaneously gamer and media producer. The imbalance in cultural power allows the professionally manufactured star image to remain forever unattainable. This paper proposes reconsidering projective identity to move beyond the affinity space to develop one’s own sense of mastery outside the context of star-based fandom.

Gender and Public Religion in America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Y. Mitchem
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Religion ◽  
The Past

With rapid development, academically and socially, in the past sixty years, gender and public religion in the United States have become a separate field, even as it is integrated into others such as politics, biology, law, philosophy, and cultural studies. As ideas about gender have expanded, potential conflicts with established religions have sometimes occurred even as new theologies, ethical constructs, and even new strains of religion occur.

Contextual Change in Nigerian Sculpture

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-92
Author(s):  
Francis Ebunola Allan Oladugbagbe ◽  
Moses Akintunde Akintonde
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
Contemporary Sculpture ◽  
Art Production ◽  
Artistic Heritage ◽  
Contextual Change

In the past fifty years Nigeria has witnessed an almost unparalleled upsurge in three-dimensional art production significantly, sculpture in the round. The emergence of the latter can be traced to pioneer African sculptures whose pieces have been adjudged contribution to world artistic heritage. This paper, therefore, examines the continuity and change in sculpture practice as a result of contact with Western cultures and the artistic influence in form, style, theme and material of contemporary sculpture in Nigeria. Significantly, this paper hopefully serves as reference point for future scholarship on sculpture in Africa, while at the same time assist in formulating critical theories on sculpture practice in contemporary Africa, and Nigeria in particular.  

Racial Relations Theories and Sport: Suggestions for a More Critical Analysis

1989 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 212-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Birrell
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Comprehensive Model ◽  
Sport Sociology ◽  
Racial Relations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Deprivation ◽  
Bias And Discrimination

This paper suggests that sport sociology may be ready to move from a generally atheoretical approach to “race and sport“ to a critical analysis of racial relations and sport. Four theoretical groups are identified from the writing of racial relations scholars: bias and discrimination theories, assimilation and cultural deprivation theories, materialist and class-based theories, and culturalist or colonial theories. In the past, studies of race and sport have fit within the former two theories. A cultural studies approach that blends the latter theories is advocated in order to move toward the goal of critical theory and develop a comprehensive model for analyzing the complex of relations of dominance and subordination simultaneously structured along racial, gender, and class lines.

IN PRAISE OF THEORETICAL NOISE

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 473-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Glover
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Precise Relationship ◽  
The Many ◽  
Carolyn Steedman

ALTHOUGH IT IS NOW COMMONPLACE to find cultural studies invoked as one of the tributaries of Victorian studies — and the rubric for this journal is no exception — the precise relationship between these two interdiciplinary fields is still unsettled and seems likely to remain so. This is not, as is sometimes claimed, because cultural studies has felt able to dispense with the past, preferring to dwell in and upon the postmodernized present: to the contrary, some of the finest work currently linked to cultural studies has shown a keen awareness of the bankruptcy of contemporary posthistoire, insisting instead upon the continuing need to interrogate the historical record, to reexamine what was at stake both in the longues durées of culturally sedimented time and in the flashpoints and crises of yesteryear. Catherine Hall’s engagement with the changing configuration of “race” in the debates about the British empire between 1830 and 1870 has been exemplary in this regard, but she is far from being the only relevant exception that one might cite — Carolyn Steedman and Richard Johnson are among the many other names that immediately come to mind.

To stream or not to stream?

2016 ◽  
Vol 117 (7/8) ◽  
pp. 485-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara E. Morris ◽  
Lea H. Currie
Keyword(s):  
Development Policy ◽  
Academic Library ◽  
Collection Development ◽  
University Of Kansas ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Past ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Library Users ◽  
Streaming Services ◽  
The University

Purpose The University of Kansas (KU) libraries has faced increased requests for streaming video in the past five years. While we have provided access to many databases of films, feature films remained a problem. To write a collection development policy, the library undertook three investigations to ensure the outcome reflected the needs of the university. Design/methodology/approach Film titles included in Swank 300 and Criterion-on-Demand were checked against the CanIStream. it? website to check for availability through streaming, rental or purchase services. Student library users were surveyed to determine if they had streaming subscriptions and, if so, which ones. KU librarians also examined academic library collection development polices to understand how others have addressed this issue. Findings More than half of the feature films provided by the two vendors are available through subscriptions, renting or purchasing methods. A majority of students subscribe to one or more of these services. Many academic libraries are deciding not to provide streaming feature films. Originality/value There are no previous studies on students’ subscriptions to streaming services linked to availability of feature films offered from commercial vendors to libraries.

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