Distributing Whiteness: Please Like Me and Global Television Circulation

2021 ◽  
pp. 152747642110528
Author(s):  
Melanie E. S. Kohnen

This essay examines the formal and informal distribution of Australian dramedy Please Like Me via the now-defunct American digital cable channel Pivot and via fan communities on Tumblr. I argue that structural whiteness operates as an invisible engine at the heart of Please Like Me’s distribution. My analysis unpacks how an unexamined narrative of white privilege forms the backbone of Please Like Me’s diegesis, fandom’s investment in circulating the show, and Pivot’s alignment of the show with its supposedly socially conscious brand. Examining trade press, promotional material, and fan discourse, I demonstrate how structural whiteness functions as point of intersection between industry and fan-driven distribution.

Author(s):  
Aviva Dove-Viebahn

While promoting recent seasons of supernatural Western horror series Wynonna Earp (2016), cable channel Syfy released several fan-style videos championing the show’s resident lesbian couple: the protagonist’s sister, Waverly, and police officer Nicole Haught (celebrated via the portmanteau “WayHaught”). In 2019, a network “shipping” its own queer characters in service of fans contrasts starkly with the televisual landscape twenty, or even ten, years prior, when viewers invested in lesbian characters and/or same-sex couples relied on subtext and fan paratexts to fuel their enthusiasm for mostly unacknowledged or thwarted relationships between female characters. In this article, I engage in a two-part interrogation of the representation of lesbian romance on cult television shows in the last twenty-five years, with a focus on Wynonna Earp and its historical antecedents—supernatural, sci-fi, and fantasy shows featuring women and their female companion(s) (whether close friends or lovers). This includes a historiography of the development of lesbian fan communities around certain shows from the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as an analysis of the narrative stakes and character development in both historical and contemporary shows, like Earp, in order to interrogate their representations of subtext or main text romantic pairings.


2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (s1) ◽  
pp. 139-153
Author(s):  
Saara Ratilainen

AbstractIn this article, I discuss the geopolitical underpinnings of Russophone fans’ response to the Norwegian hit teen series Skam [Shame]. Starting from the wide-spread distribution of Skam through informal horizontal networks, my article highlights the context specificity of fan participation in meaning-making around global television. Employing multimodal discourse analysis to the social media platform VKontakte, I examine how Russophone audiences of global television imagine the country of origin of their object of fandom, and how spatial imaginations embedded in this process contribute to popular geopolitics of Norden – that is, to geopolitical reasoning of narratives and representations of Nordic countries available through popular culture. My analysis shows how Norway and its positioning in the world provides an important symbolic resource for further discussions on identity and belonging. A close examination of mediated transnational cultural exchange through fan communities advances our understanding of the meaning of popular geopolitics in the age of global television.


2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 310-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
John G. Conway ◽  
Nikolette P. Lipsey ◽  
Gabrielle Pogge ◽  
Kate A. Ratliff

Abstract. White people often experience unpleasant emotions in response to learning about White privilege ( Phillips & Lowery, 2015 ; Pinterits, Poteat, & Spanierman, 2009 ). Two studies (total N = 1,310) examined how race attitudes relate to White people’s desires to avoid or learn information about White privilege. White participants completed measures of their race attitudes, desire to change White privilege, and their desire to avoid learning information about White privilege. Study 1 showed that participants who preferred their racial in-group reported less desire to change White privilege and greater desire to avoid learning information about White privilege. Inconsistent with expectations, Study 2 showed that participants who anticipated negative affective responses to learning about White privilege reported greater desire to change White privilege.


2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cyndi Kernahan ◽  
Heather Wolfgram ◽  
Shanthi Mirsberger
Keyword(s):  

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suthakaran Veerasamy ◽  
Jessica Goodell ◽  
Ashlee Feldman
Keyword(s):  

1979 ◽  
Vol 42 (04) ◽  
pp. 1073-1114 ◽  

SummaryIn collaborative experiments in 199 laboratories, nine commercial thromboplastins, four thromboplastins held by the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBS & C), London and the British Comparative Thromboplastin were tested on fresh normal and coumarin plasmas, and on three series of freeze-dried plasmas. One of these was made from coumarin plasmas and the other two were prepared from normal plasmas; in each series, one plasma was normal and the other two represented different degrees of coumarin defect.Each thromboplastin was calibrated against NIBS&C rabbit brain 70/178, from the slope of the line joining the origin to the point of intersection of the mean ratios of coumarin/normal prothrombin times when the ratios obtained with the two thromboplastins on the same fresh plasmas were plotted against each other. From previous evidence, the slopes were calculated which would have been obtained against the NIBS&C “research standard” thromboplastin 67/40, and termed the “calibration constant” of each thromboplastin. Values obtained from the freeze-dried coumarin plasmas gave generally similar results to those from fresh plasmas for all thromboplastins, whereas values from the artificial plasmas agreed with those from fresh plasmas only when similar thromboplastins were being compared.Taking into account the slopes of the calibration lines and the variation between laboratories, precision in obtaining a patient’s prothrombin time was similar for all thromboplastins.


2020 ◽  
pp. 316-328
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Susca

Contemporary communicative platforms welcome and accelerate a socio-anthropological mutation in which public opinion (Habermas, 1995) based on rational individuals and alphabetic culture gives way to a public emotion whose emotion, empathy and sociality are the bases, where it is no longer the reason that directs the senses but the senses that begin to think. The public spheres that are elaborated in this way can only be disjunctive (Appadurai, 2001), since they are motivated by the desire to transgress the identity, political and social boundaries where they have been elevated and restricted. The more the daily life, in its local intension and its global extension, rests on itself and frees itself from projections or infatuations towards transcendent and distant orders, the more the modern territory is shaken by the forces that cross it and pierce it. non-stop. The widespread disobedience characterizing a significant part of the cultural events that take place in cyberspace - dark web, web porn, copyright infringement, trolls, even irreverent ... - reveals the anomic nature of the societal subjectivity that emerges from the point of intersection between technology and naked life. Behind each of these offenses is the affirmation of the obsolescence of the principles on which much of the modern nation-states and their rights have been based. Each situation in which a tribe, cloud, group or network blends in a state of ecstasy or communion around shared communications, symbols and imaginations, all that surrounds it, in material, social or ideological terms, fades away. in the air, being isolated by the power of a bubble that in itself generates culture, rooting, identification: transpolitic to inhabit


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