scholarly journals Novel Conversations: Connecting With Disability in Three Examples of Popular Fiction

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 52-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Rankin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Online Discussion ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Public Sphere

Examining how readers of popular fiction respond to characters with disabilities and characters immersed in the lives of characters with disabilities, this paper serves to contribute to understandings of the meanings that readers ascribe to disability in popular culture using the public sphere of online discussion. Specifically, I study online reader discussion of three characters, namely:  Trudi in Ursula Hegi’s (1996) Stones from the River, Icy in Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s (1998) Icy Sparks and Jewel in Brett Lott’s (1991) Jewel.  I present findings from my analysis of reader discussion using readers’ descriptions of their identified connections with characters with disabilities. While these connections challenge the othering frequently cited in presentations of disability through readers’ recognition and appreciation of the well-rounded characters beyond traditional disability tropes, the unmet potential of reader discussion to challenge the status quo is also demonstrated through readers’ failure to expand these connections beyond the pages of the novels.

State contestations in constructions of 1Malaysia

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-65
Author(s):  
Mary Varghese ◽  
Kamila Ghazali
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Public ◽  
Malaysian Population ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article seeks to contribute to the existing body of knowledge about the relationship between political discourse and national identity. 1Malaysia, introduced in 2009 by Malaysia’s then newly appointed 6th Prime Minister Najib Razak, was greeted with expectation and concern by various segments of the Malaysian population. For some, it signalled a new inclusiveness that was to change the discourse on belonging. For others, it raised concerns about changes to the status quo of ethnic issues. Given the varying responses of society to the concept of 1Malaysia, an examination of different texts through the critical paradigm of CDA provide useful insights into how the public sphere has attempted to construct this notion. Therefore, this paper critically examines the Prime Minister’s early speeches as well as relevant chapters of the socioeconomic agenda, the 10th Malaysia Plan, to identify the referential and predicational strategies employed in characterising 1Malaysia. The findings suggest a notion of unity that appears to address varying issues.

scholarly journals Conspicuous Invisibility: Votive Offerings from Female Dedicators on the Athenian Acropolis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Stacey Wellington
Keyword(s):  
Working Women ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
Significant Extent ◽  
The Public ◽  
Patriarchal Ideology ◽  
Essential Components ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Votive Offerings

<p>The mechanics of Athenian society in many ways empowered citizen women as essential components of their community. This reality, being at odds with Athens’ pervasive patriarchal ideology, was obscured by men anxious to affirm the status quo, but also by women who sought to represent themselves as ‘ideal’ examples of their sex. Using the votive offerings dedicated by women to Athena on the Athenian Acropolis in the Archaic and Classical periods as a basis, this thesis explores such tensions between the implicit value of Athenian women, which prompted them to engage meaningfully with their wider community, and the ideological edict for their invisibility. This discussion is based primarily on two points: firstly, that the naming of a male family member in votive inscriptions denotes female citizen status, thus articulating citizen women’s independent value and prestige within the polis; and secondly that the ubiquity of working women among the dedicators, and value of the offerings themselves, reveals women as controlling financial resources to a more significant extent than other sources would have us believe. In both cases, the actual value and authority of the female dedicators is concealed as the women aimed for a perception of conspicuous invisibility to legitimise their engagement with the public sphere.</p>

Chick Noir: Surveilling Femininity and the Affects of Loss in Gone Girl

Noir Affect ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 197-221
Author(s):  
Pamela Thoma
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Young Women ◽  
First Century ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Surveillance Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
A Site

This chapter explores a surprising shift that has occurred in postfeminist popular culture and more specifically “chick culture” in the wake of the global economic crisis. Chick noir forms itself in opposition to those two standbys of twenty-first-century U.S culture, chick lit and the chick flick. If these latter genres perform a humorous remodelling of romance as the “happy object” around which young women should orient self-making or self-improvement projects for the promise of a good life and future feelings of happiness, chick noir has emerged across popular culture to chronicle widespread economic hardship and social decline under neoliberalism. Chick noir narratives are driven by negative affect and deal in the dark side of relationships, domesticity, and the public sphere for women. The chapter takes Gone Girl as its focus. This chapter pays particular attention to ways in which both texts shine a light on modern surveillance culture to explore the textual production of empathy and coercion and the ways in which these texts imagine femininity as a site of surveillance. What emerges is a form of noir affect that dramatizes the absolute lack of a stable or noncontradictory space for the contemporary female subject.

scholarly journals Pluralism, Disagreement, and the Status of Argument in the Public Sphere

2005 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Asen
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Social Function ◽  
Responsibility Attribution ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Status ◽  
Democratic Societies ◽  
The Public Sphere

Argument teachers and scholars have frequently invoked external justification-impressing one's viewpoint upon another-as the primary social function of argument. Pluralism and fundamental disagreement in contemporary democratic societies raise questions regarding the status of argument, including the functions argument should serve. In this essay, I suggest alternatives of agenda expansion, responsibility attribution, and identity formation as important functions of argument in diverse societies. These alternative functions are especially important under conditions of social inequality, since they allow less powerful individuals and groups to confront more powerful actors in situations where decision making is not open to all.

Vengeance Culture Online

2016 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Shalin Hai-Jew
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Real World ◽  
The Public ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
And Behavior

Vengeance. Payback. Retribution. Just deserts. Evening up the score. Punishment. If there is an ever-replicating and recurring Internet meme, it is one of revenge. Intimate photos are shared online post-relationship and end up picked up by for-profit pornographic websites. Privy information is leaked into private (narrow-cast) or semi-public or public spaces (broadcast) with massive amplifications of messages into the public sphere. Violent attacks and beat-downs are videotaped and shared on video sharing sites. Flash or cyber mobs are brought together to clean-out stores and to exact vengeance on particular businesses. Information and Communication Technology (ICT), with its nexus of pseudo-anonymity, fast dissemination of information, long-term persistence of data, and mass reach, provides multiple affordances for the exacting of vengeance. The popular culture of anonymous hacktivism and cyber-vigilantism further contribute to the sense of the Internet as an ungoverned and extralegal place. Finally, a general imprudence has meant the easy activation of Internet mobs and individuals to harm-causing rumor-sharing and behavior against others—sparked by doubtful claims or loose storytelling. ICT has enabled the spillover of real-world antipathies and dark emotions into virtual spaces, which then slosh back into the real world. This chapter examines the research in the area of vengeance and how such very human impetuses manifest online. Further, this chapter examines the design features of various ICT platforms and socio-technical spaces that may support vengeance-based communications and actions and proposes ways to mitigate some of these dark affordances.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Dyonne Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Stereotypes ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Entertainment Culture

This book has explored the foundation and infiltration of racial stereotypes into the American entertainment culture. It has rejected the notion that African Americans should be used as scapegoats for the continuance of black stereotypes in popular culture, arguing that entertainment culture in the United States was largely founded and developed on negative racial imagery created and inserted into the public sphere by whites. While acknowledging that the African American community holds some responsibility for the continual proliferation of racist and sexist stereotypes in the mass media, the book contends that accountability must be placed within a larger cultural and historical context. This epilogue reflects on the continued proliferation of black stereotypes in popular culture, suggesting that it simply represents a continuation of an entertainment tradition that was created intentionally to express the antiblack, prowhite ideology of America's culture. Furthermore, the perceived inferiority of blackness was actively promoted through society's folk culture.

Dress and Gulf imagery in two Malayalam films: Pathemari and Marubhoomiyile Aana

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Musthafa Mubashir ◽  
M. Shuaib Mohamed Haneef
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
The Public ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
And Control

Malayalam films since the 1970s have captured the history of Gulf migration from Kerala, which occurs primarily due to the desperate need of its people for jobs and for money. Predominantly, the discourses of migrants in the films are embedded in various things, including dress from the Gulf, the insignia of opulence that depict the status of the migrants in the public sphere. Using thematic analysis of two Malayalam films, Pathemari and Marubhoomiyile Aana, this study argues that the motif of the Gulf is associated with power and control in the cultural discourse of Kerala. Drawing on the semiotic analysis of Barthes, we contend that the replacement of mundu, a traditional attire of Kerala men, by trousers, is one among several mythical markers of modernity, including perfumes and watches brought from the Gulf. The performativity and materiality of dress in these two films produce imageries of the Gulf by which the wearers, mostly male, accumulate social and symbolic capital and assert dominance in the film’s narration.

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