“Reinas unidas jamás serán vencidas”: Drag queens in the Iberian Spanish voice-over of RuPaul’s Drag Race

RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009 – present) is an American reality television programme launched by RuPaul Charles, which has turned drag queens into a mainstream phenomenon. After briefly analysing the controversial figure of the drag queen in the light of Judith Butler’s performative turn, as well as drag lingo following Keith Harvey’s framework for identifying camp talk, this research aims at investigating the European Spanish voice-over of Seasons 8 (2016), 9 (2017) and 10 (2018). This work seeks primarily to analyse the choices that are made in the target text to characterise drag queens in the localised European Spanish version available on Netflix. The translation procedures mentioned in this study are partly adapted from Ranzato’s (2015) classification for culture-specific references. The analysis focuses mainly on the creative rendering of (semi-)homophony, drag terms, references to pop culture and grammatical gender.

‘Europudding’ or European co-production? The archaeology of the television series Eurocops (1988–94)

This chapter examines the case of Eurocops, a crime TV show produced by the European Coproduction Association – composed by one private and six public service broadcasting (PSB) channels of seven European countries – from 1988 to 1994 (71 episodes). Although it is one of the first European co-productions of its kind, Eurocops was a critical and commercial fiasco: what were its faults? Following Ib Bondebjerg’s methodology, this article aims at exploring the failure of this ‘Europudding’. The first section places Eurocops in the media landscape of the late 1980s and explains why this series can be considered as a ‘Europudding’ trying to enforce Europe’s cultural sovereignty against the North American hegemony. The second section analyses how the decentralized PSB production of Eurocops implied the use of an inconsistent narrative structure making the single episodes appear as part of a loose ‘collection’ of crime fiction. This partly explains the lukewarm critical reception of this television programme. The third section examines the cultural meaning of the series and is based on the analysis of the 48 episodes we had access to (through the INA French archives). The lack of transnational ‘encounters’ or dialogues – compared to other more recent cop shows such as The Team, The Killing and The Bridge – reveals the absence of a strong European identity at the time of production.

The Ding in Itself

Based on an extended reading of John Cage’s composition Water Walk as performed on the US television programme I’ve Got a Secret, the matter of what makes sound art, sound art is presented in this chapter in theoretical terms. Specifically, sound art is work that poses the question—what is a thing?—using the expressive resources (words, sounds, images, gestures) at the artist’s disposal. Starting with two things presented in Water Walk—a pressure cooker that sounds, and radios that sound differently—this chapter suggests how this presentation invites comparison with the philosophical treatment of ‘things’ to be found in the work of Kant (especially his distinction between noumenal and phenomenal things) Heidegger and Agamben. The comparison is shown to establish that what could be called sound art effectively drowns out the difference between art and theory. Put differently, sound art obliges us to hearken to the question sound ‘itself’ presents.

Writing inclusive and diverse children’s television: Transgender representation in ABC Australia’s First Day

This article presents a case study of the Australian children’s television programme, First Day (ABC Australia 2020–present), which depicts a young transgender girl’s experiences beginning high school. The article explores the screenwriting process involved in creating inclusive and diverse children’s television, drawing on an original interview with Julie Kalceff, the show’s screenwriter and director. Kalceff discusses her screenwriting process writing for and about children who occupy liminal and marginal spaces and the research, writing and consultation processes undertaken to create her pioneering work with trans characters as lead protagonists. The resulting series explores the universal experience of starting the high school journey, while allowing for a normalizing of gender diversity on-screen – hopefully the first of many of its type in the future. By foregrounding historically marginalized characters, screenwriters can explore universal social, psychological and physical trials, and in the process, break down stigmas surrounding LGBTQ people.

NIGERIA: FACE ACTS IN ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION TELEVISION PROGRAM. THE CASE OF IGBIMO IPETU

The concept of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) has largely been under explored from the linguistic lens, particularly in the Nigerian context. This study thus provides a scholarly intervention in this regard. Drawing insights from Brown and Levinson’s face theory, four randomly sampled recordings of Ìgbìmo Ìpètù, an alternative dispute resolution television programme on the Ekiti State Television (EKTV) in southwestern Nigeria was analysed in this study. Focus was placed on the face acts as well as their pragmatic functions in the programme. Findings revealed that bald on-record face-threatening acts (FTA), bald off-record FTA and positive face acts characterized the discursive interaction of participants on the programme. While bald onrecord and off-record FTAs were deployed by the panel to criticize and condemn actions considered unsavory on the part of complainants and the accused, complainants and accused persons deployed on-record FTAs to protest/redress the panel’s decisions found unacceptable. The panel used positive face acts as a general principle in the interaction, particularly with cooperative accused persons, while accused persons deployed positive face acts to negotiate the discursive interaction and for face-damage repair. Keywords: Alternative dispute resolution, dispute and media, face acts.

Security and Religion: The Discursive Self-legitimation of the Chechen Authorities

This article analyses the official discourse of the Chechen authorities and posits that it reflects the government’s efforts as self-legitimation. This investigation seeks to identify the mechanisms exploited by the Chechen regime to boost self-legitimacy by examining the ‘News’ programme on the Chechen state television channel ‘Grozny’, which, in the authoritarian setting of Chechnya, became the government’s mouthpiece and a propagator of official discourse. To provide for the context and to boost findings, the study is complemented by a discursive analysis of one more historical-political television programme and a political advertisement that was broadcast by the same channel during the period in which the fieldwork took place. The collected data is processed using Critical Discourse Analysis.

Automatic Expansion of Domain-Specific Affective Models for Web Intelligence Applications

Sentic computing relies on well-defined affective models of different complexity—polarity to distinguish positive and negative sentiment, for example, or more nuanced models to capture expressions of human emotions. When used to measure communication success, even the most granular affective model combined with sophisticated machine learning approaches may not fully capture an organisation’s strategic positioning goals. Such goals often deviate from the assumptions of standardised affective models. While certain emotions such as Joy and Trust typically represent desirable brand associations, specific communication goals formulated by marketing professionals often go beyond such standard dimensions. For instance, the brand manager of a television show may consider fear or sadness to be desired emotions for its audience. This article introduces expansion techniques for affective models, combining common and commonsense knowledge available in knowledge graphs with language models and affective reasoning, improving coverage and consistency as well as supporting domain-specific interpretations of emotions. An extensive evaluation compares the performance of different expansion techniques: (i) a quantitative evaluation based on the revisited Hourglass of Emotions model to assess performance on complex models that cover multiple affective categories, using manually compiled gold standard data, and (ii) a qualitative evaluation of a domain-specific affective model for television programme brands. The results of these evaluations demonstrate that the introduced techniques support a variety of embeddings and pre-trained models. The paper concludes with a discussion on applying this approach to other scenarios where affective model resources are scarce.

TELEVISION CULTURES OF SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA

The aim of the paper is to compare television cultures of Yugoslav republics during socialism. The paper is drawing on the recent comparative studies of socialist television in South and East Europe (Perško et al. 2021; Mihelj and Huxtable 2018; Imre 2016). Following the categories developed by Mihelj and Huxtable (2018) and Imre (2016), Yugoslav television cultures are here analysed in terms of a) generic composition and share of program modes, b) the level of transnationalism, c) the level of openness of television to social critique (semi-publicness), c) focus of television on private life (privatization), d) the gendering patterns, e) temporal orientation, f) characteristics of factual, humorous and history genres. Analysis is based on the data collected for the recently published book by Peruško, Vozab and Čuvalo (2021) and original content analysis of the JRT 79 Television Programme booklet, with a short description and basic info about the program that was shared within the JRT network. The result discerns differences between republic televisions (especially TV Ljubljana, TV Zagreb and TV Novi Sad) in program development toward neo-television, such as the differences in transnational orientation, temporal orientation, gendering patterns.