Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid by Christina Meyer

This chapter explores a queer all-male dance lesson for partnered sailors in the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musical Follow the Fleet (1936), using archival research (scripts, Production Code Administration records) and comparative textual and contextual analysis. It raises the queerness of Rogers and Astaire before exploring two intersecting axes. The association of sailors with queer behavior and effeminate “pansies” occurs in military scandals, paintings, and Depression-era Hollywood films, including Sailor’s Luck and Son of a Sailor (both 1933). The queerness of male same-sex dancing arises in ballet and in film, including Suicide Fleet (1931). Various institutions criticized or attempted to censor such representations, but they also found acceptance. The US Navy, for example, wanted the comical dance lesson removed from Fleet; instead, it was only rewritten, suggesting the inability to remove queerness from culture and its essential role in mass entertainment.

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Richang: An Affect-Inflected Ethnography of Chinese Livestreams

Asiascape Digital Asia ◽

10.1163/22142312-12340130 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (1-2) ◽

pp. 15-42

Author(s):

Ge Zhang

Keyword(s):

Contact Zone ◽

Participant Observation ◽

Video On Demand ◽

Television Studies ◽

On Demand ◽

Ethnographic Writing ◽

Affective Events ◽

Mass Entertainment

Abstract I tracked one Chinese livestreaming platform Douyu from its emergence as experimental subsidiary of a Video on Demand platform in 2013 to its status as an ordinary medium of mass entertainment in 2018. This affect-inflected ethnography is written based on participant observation of three channels on Douyu as I exhibit the microcontexts of each channel in chronicles of affective events, long pauses of silence, repetitive and incoherent dialogues, asymmetrical debates, and sporadic moments of emotional meltdown. This ethnographic writing is a contact zone, a provocation, and, by proxy, a dialogue between academic theories (especially from television studies), user practices, and my informants’ own attempts at theorising how and what livestream feels and means for them.

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Cinema as mass entertainment: 1930–50

From silent screen to multi-screen ◽

10.7765/9781526141446.00012 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Stuart Hanson

Keyword(s):

Mass Entertainment

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Mass entertainment, popular culture and imperial societies, 1870–1939

Visions of empire ◽

10.7765/9781526117557.00015 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Brad Beaven

Keyword(s):

Popular Culture ◽

Mass Entertainment

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The sharing economy and livestreaming of terror: Co-production of terrorism on social media

Terrorism, Violent Radicalisation, and Mental Health ◽

10.1093/med/9780198845706.003.0006 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 65-78

Author(s):

Yasmin Ibrahim

Keyword(s):

Social Media ◽

Social Networking ◽

Social Networking Sites ◽

Terrorist Attack ◽

Sharing Economy ◽

Mass Murder ◽

Terrorist Attacks ◽

Recording Device ◽

Social Media Platforms ◽

Mass Entertainment

In the xenophobic attack on a mosque in New Zealand, the perpetrator filmed the mass murder through a GoPro recording device attached to his head. The attack was streamed live on social networking sites, including a notorious extremist alt-right forum. This livestreaming of the terrorist attack on social media platforms received global condemnation, but it brought renewed scrutiny to the ‘sharing economy’ online and how terrorist attacks can be made for sharing, reposting, and editing of content by users, circumnavigating the removal of such content. This phenomenon widens the co-production of terror through mass audiences’ interaction in real time, positioning terror as mass entertainment. This chapter examines the architecture of the ‘sharing economy’ online and its significance in the production of terror, as well as the moral and ethical considerations it poses for humanity.

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