Popular Culture and Knowledge of the Body: Infancy and the Medical Anthropologist *

Author(s):  
Françoise Loux
2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Dotun Ayobade

AbstractPopular dances encapsulate the aliveness of Africa's young. Radiating an Africanist aesthetic of the cool, these moves enflesh popular music, saturating mass media platforms and everyday spaces with imageries of joyful transcendence. This essay understands scriptive dance fads as textual and choreographic calls for public embodiment. I explore how three Nigerian musicians, and their dances, have wielded scriptive prompts to elicit specific moved responses from dispersed, heterogenous, and transnational publics. Dance fads of this kind productively complicate musicological approaches that insist on divorcing contemporary African music cultures from the dancing bodies that they often conjure. Taken together, these movements enlist popular culture as a domain marked by telling contestations over musical ownership and embodied citizenship.


Author(s):  
Richard Smith

Spike Jonze’s unusual career trajectory, from the outer edges of popular culture to the center of indiewood, has resulted in a distinctive body of work that spans several genres and forms. This chapter traces Jonze’s career to ground a stylistic reading of his fourth feature film, Her (2013). Presented in three parts—Jonze’s short works, Gilles Deleuze’s “implied dream” and the “sound-image,” the lonely social world of Her—the chapter argues that Jonze’s cinematic style is an elaboration of a very simple image of a body in motion. As his style develops the relation of body and world becomes more central and more uncertain. In Her, the world is replaced by media affect and the body experiences itself as an aesthetic form. Smith explores a terrain of loneliness that sits at the center of much of Jonze’s work.


2009 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Raphael

As host of NBC's General Electric Theater from 1954 to 1962, Ronald Reagan enacted a new relationship between popular culture, corporate capitalism, and electronic media. Through his affiliation with General Electric and the celebrity he achieved through television, Reagan played an instrumental role in promoting the re-branding of the imagined community of the American nation as a republic of consumption. This phase of Reagan's career was a crucible for the formation of his political persona and political base.


Author(s):  
Edward P. Comentale

This chapter shows how the very deadliness of the commodity form—its radical detachment from any traditional context—ultimately extends the affective range and reach of popular music. It argues that the rock counterculture was founded not against, but through technological manipulation, commercial standardization, and consumer desire, and thus provided fans with new, more thrilling ways of inhabiting a national scene defined by market identities and taste cultures. Somewhere between Marcel Duchamp's arty toss-off and Elvis Presley's tossed-off art, a certain indifference comes to infect popular culture at large. In the end, this chapter focuses on the experiences and emergent sites of fandom, arguing that, with each cut, the King presented his body as an affectively charged and fully mediated public body and that, with records, radio, television, and film, his revolt extended—from one savvy fan to the next—across the body politic at large.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 568
Author(s):  
Danang Salahuddin Aditya Lukmana ◽  
Shuri Mariasih Gietty Tambunan

Media sosial dan kreatifitas budaya penggemar dapat dianalisis dengan pendekatan multidisiplin untuk membongkar ideologi dominan yang melatarbelakangi praktik budaya tersebut. Selain itu, kajian terhadap media sosial juga dapat menunjukkan bagaimana ranah budaya populer seperti akun penggemar sepak bola ternyata tidak terlepas dari usaha afirmasi diskursus Keislaman dominan yang berkembang di Indonesia sejak beberapa tahun belakangan ini. Akan tetapi, apabila diskursus Keislaman terutama yang erat kaitannya dengan tubuh (atau yang berkaitan dengan aurat di media sosial) biasanya dikaitkan dengan perempuan, dalam penelitian ini justru dibicarakan dalam konteks budaya penggemar sepak bola yang didominasi penggemar laki-laki. Pergeseran atau pembalikan diskursus ini dilakukan akun @plesbol dengan cara menarik jumlah penggemar melalui representasi diri sebagai akun yang sarkastik ketika membahas persepakbolaan. Oleh karena itu, analisis dilakukan dengan metode kajian tekstual dan “observation ethnography” untuk melihat bagaimana akun ini melakukan ‘dakwah’ dengan strategi menggabungkan budaya populer fandom dengan ranah keseharian, yaitu diskursus agama, dalam ruang digital. Pertanyaan utama penelitian ini adalah bagaimana akun tersebut mengemas dan mengartikulasikan nilai-nilai Islami dalam kaitan dengan representasi akun tersebut sebagai akun sepak bola yang kerap menampilkan sarkasme. Berdasarkan hasil analisis ditemukan bahwa setelah mendapatkan pengikut (follower) cukup banyak, @plesbol juga mengunggah postingan yang mengartikulasikan Keislaman atau mengenai rekonseptualisasi aurat laki-laki dan ajakan ketaatan dalam praktik keIslaman. Social media and fanfare cultural creativity can be analyzed with a multidisciplinary approach to dismantle the dominant ideology that lies behind these cultural practices. In addition, studies on social media can also show how the realm of popular culture such as soccer fan accounts is apparently inseparable from the effort to affirm dominant Islamic discourses that have developed in Indonesia in recent years. However, if Islamic discourse, especially those closely related to the body (or relating to genitals on social media) is usually associated with women, in this study it is discussed in the context of the culture of football fans dominated by male fans. This shift or reversal of discourse is done by @plesbol account by attracting a number of fans through self-representation as a sarcastic account when discussing football. Therefore, the analysis was conducted using textual study method and observation ethnography to see how this account performs 'da'wah' by combining fandom popular culture with everyday realms, namely religious discourse, in the digital space. The main question of this research is how this account packs and articulates Islamic values in relation to the account's representation as a sarcastic football account. Based on the result of the analysis it was found that after getting quite a number of followers, @plesbol also uploaded posts that articulated Islam or regarding the reconceptualization of male genitalia and invitations to obedience in Islamic practices.


Author(s):  
Miles White

This multilayered study of the representation of black masculinity in musical and cultural performance takes aim at the reduction of African American male culture to stereotypes of deviance, misogyny, and excess. Broadening the significance of hip-hop culture by linking it to other expressive forms within popular culture, the book examines how these representations have both encouraged the demonization of young black males in the United States and abroad and contributed to the construction of their identities. The book traces black male representations to chattel slavery and American minstrelsy as early examples of fetishization and commodification of black male subjectivity. Continuing with diverse discussions including black action films, heavyweight prizefighting, Elvis Presley's performance of blackness, and white rappers such as Vanilla Ice and Eminem, the book establishes a sophisticated framework for interpreting and critiquing black masculinity in hip-hop music and culture. Arguing that black music has undeniably shaped American popular culture and that hip-hop tropes have exerted a defining influence on young male aspirations and behavior, the book draws a critical link between the body, musical sound, and the construction of identity.


2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 806-825
Author(s):  
Lara Karaian

This article explores the intimate relationship between the body, sexuality, technology, popular culture, and incest law. I examine the nature, meaning, and affective resonances of representations of consensual incest, “accidental incest,” and “technology facilitated accidental incest” in popular culture, pornography, and public service announcements. Drawing on a pastiche of affect theory; cultural and media studies theories of human-technological relations; queer, feminist and cultural posthumanist theories of embodiment, subjectivity and sexuality; and, Eve Sedgwick’s notion of a “reparative reading” I consider how these experiences and representations expand our emotional and erotic desires and alter our perceptions of our bodies’ parameters, their “proper” sexual objects and kinship relations, and their boundary violations. I argue that these affective residues pose a challenge to the “logic” underpinning the taboo’s intransigence, thus potentially contributing to the destigmatization and decriminalization of consensual adult incestuous relations.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (8) ◽  
pp. 692-707 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Hamad

In the aftermath of its initial broadcast run, iconic millennial sitcom Friends (NBC, 1994–2004) generated some quality scholarship interrogating its politics of gender. But as a site of analysis, it remains a curious, almost structuring absence from the central canon of the first wave of feminist criticism of postfeminist culture. This absence is curious not only considering the place of Friends at the forefront of millennial popular culture but also in light of its long-term syndication in countries across the world since that time. And it is structuring in the sense that Friends was the stage on which many of the familiar tropes of postfeminism interrogated across the body of work on it appear in retrospect to have been tried and tested. This article aims to contribute toward redressing this absence through interrogation and contextualization of the series’ negotiation of a range of structuring tropes of postfeminist media discourse, and it argues for Friends as an unacknowledged ur-text of millennial postfeminism.


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