Essay Abstracts:

Conceptualizing Resistance: Women’s Leisure as Political Practice

The idea of leisure as resistance focuses attention on the political nature of leisure, and specifically on the potential for leisure to enhance individual empowerment and to bring about positive social change. In this paper, the different theoretical perspectives that have led researchers to the idea of leisure asresistance, including structuralism, post-structuralism, and interactionism are discussed. Using insights from these perspectives, three issues related to the conceptualization of resistance are examined: the collective versus individual nature of resistance; the question of outcomes of resistance; and the issue ofintentionality It is argued that resistance is, by definition, both individual and collective, and that research on resistance needs to focus on the specific types of oppression and constraint being resisted through leisure. However, while intentionality and outcome are also important aspects of resistance, they should not be seen as defining characteristics. Intentional acts to resist may be more or less successful, and successful resistance may occur without prior intent. Although the focus of this analysis is on women’s leisure, the framework developed here can be applied to all forms of resistance, and hopefully can be used to enhance our understanding of leisure as political practice.

Not Necessarily Not the News: Gatekeeping, Remediation, and The Daily Show

The Daily Show is the most prominent news parody and was awarded a Peabody for its coverage of the 2000 election, two Emmys for comedy writing, a Television Critics Association nomination (alongside Nightline and 60 Minutes) for outstanding achievement in news and information, and Newsweek crowned “fake host” Jon Stewart one of the twenty-five biggest influencers of the 2004 election. Here, McKain discusses the differentiation of fake news and conventional news, ascertaining the precise nature of the relationship between the two.

Fox News and the Performance of Ideology

For the first half of the 1990s, success in television programming eluded Roger Ailes, media consultant to several Republican presidents and later the president of Fox News Corporation. First as executive producer of The Rush Limbaugh Show (1992-1996), a syndicated television talk-show program featuring the right-wing talk radio icon, then as creator and president of NBC’s conservative vox-pop cable channel, America’s Talking (1994-1996), Ailes attempted to feature overtly ideological programming to attract conservative audiences, and in both instances he failed. With Limbaugh, he had the star power and the ideology but the wrong format; the visibly uncomfortable Limbaugh made for bad TV. With America’s Talking, he had the populist-conservative ideology but few stars and weak formats.

“Peeping Toms on History”: Barry Hannah’s Never Die as Postmodern Western

In his thoughtful essay “Home by Way of California: TheSoutherner as the Last European,” Lewis P Simpson explores what seemto him basic differences between the mind of the South and its western”other.” The latter, contends Simpson, has corollaries in the artistic visionof northeasterners-Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper,and the “father” of the popular western, Owen Wister-who createfictions in which a hero transcends history amid the pristine, naturallydemocratic vistas of the American landscape. In contrast, the formerextends a tragic European outlook that sees the individual as a creaturetrapped, the hapless victim of history. Simpson’s paradigm has been veryinfluential in southern studies, and one can indeed see how the tragicethos he identifies informs to grand effect the body of southern writingproduced during the fabled Renaissance, a literature acutely concernedwith the past in the present (to paraphrase Allen Tate’s famous formulation)and the doomed yet heroic efforts to cope with or survive history,not escape it-reflected in Faulkner’s famous proclamation in the Nobelspeech that humanity will not merely “endure,” but “prevail.”

The End of the Road: David Cronenberg’sCrashand theFading of the West

In Crash, David Cronenberg negotiates our ambivalent attitudes toward death and destructionon the roads, as well as the attractions of car crashes, using the car and thearchitecture of contemporary road systems as symbols of the convergence between humanity’sunconscious desires and its technological artifacts. Cronenberg’s film, like Ballard’s novel, is anexploration of the ambiguous fascination and excitement of the car crash and the latent identityof the machine. This exploration re-examines the contentions of some basic genres. It is a “roadfilm” in the sense that it’s an eccentric examination of the cult of adventure, journey, and discoverythat has animated that form. Ballard is British and Cronenberg Canadian, but Crash seemspeculiarly American since its narrative deals with the exhaustion of the civilizing process, and ofthe final expenditures of the horizontal, forward-moving momentum that drove this enterprise. Itis energy incipient to the western, the biker film, and all manner of male-oriented identity thataffirms the potency of a burgeoning society. In Crash, the traditional journey of discovery becomesa downward spiral, a frustrated, ever-circling implosion of the defeated bourgeois self atthe end of the millennium.

Stereo Types: The Operation of Sound in the Production of Racial Identity.

Discussions of race and identity have often privileged the visual field and its representations as a site of cultural identity. In contrast, this paper examines how sound and its organization have been implicated in the constructions of “whiteness” as a normative category during the colonial epoch. Using a set of case studies, it examines the network formed between sound and vision through what the author calls a harmonic system of representation. After mapping this dominant system, the paper describes tactics that have been used to disrupt it. The possibility of heterogeneous subjectivity, often called the cyborg, is explored as an alternative, in relation to different organizations of sound.

Black Metropolis and Mental Life: Beyond the “Burdenof ‘Acting White’ ” Toward a Third Wave of CriticalRacial Studies

In this article, I reflect on Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu’s classic research on the “burdenof ‘acting White’ ” to develop a long overdue dialogue between Africana studies and criticalwhite studies. It highlights the dialectical nature of Fordham and Ogbu’s philosophy of raceand critical race theory by locating the origins of the “burden of ‘acting White’ “in the workof W.E.B. Du Bois, who provides some of the intellectualfoundationsfor this work. Followingthe work ofF. W. Twine and C. Gallagher (2008), I then survey the field of critical whitenessstudies and outline an emerging third wave in this interdisciplinary field. This new wave ofresearch utilizes the following five elements that form its basic core: (1) the centrality of raceand racism and their intersectionality with other forms of oppression; (2) challenging whitesupremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other dominant ideologies; (3) a critical reflexivitythat addresses how various formulations of whiteness are situated in relation to contemporary

formulations of Black/people of color identity formation, politics, and knowledgeconstruction; (4) innovative research methodologies including asset-based researchapproaches; and, finally, (5) a racial elasticity that identifies the ways in which white racialpower and pigmentocracy are continually reconstituting themselves in the color-blind era andbeyond (see A. A. Akom 2008c). [oppositional identity, Black student achievement,youth development, acting white, Du Bois, critical whiteness studies, critical racetheory, race, Black metropolis, double consciousness, twoness, hip-hop].

The NBA Dandy Plays the Fashion Game: NBA All‐Star All‐Style and Dress Codes of Black Masculinity

A 2016 television ad for the apparel company Bonobos literally sets the stage as theater curtains pull back to reveal National Basketball Association (NBA) player Jimmy Butler. He wanders through an urban landscape and declares in an equally rambling monologue, “I walk the walk of a man who isn’t afraid to wear floral,” and “I’m comfortable in my own skin, but a man can’t walk in public in his skin alone” (“Wear No Doubts”). These truisms echo a recent trend sweeping through the NBA: a fashionista turn associating players with prestige fashion labels and designers and using their high media visibility to model ensembles at the forward edge of fashion. Scott Cacciola of the New York Times noted that for the 2016 NBA Playoffs, “the bowels of basketball arenas are turned into the shabbiest fashion runways in the world” as the players’ walks to the locker room—and the outfits they chose for those walks—were broadcast to millions of television viewers. He gives special attention to the “sartorial pyrotechnics” of Russell Westbrook of the Oklahoma City Thunder, a singular figure driving this trend. Westbrook’s ensembles are far more daring than his contemporaries and use elements such as tiger prints, leather shirts, flannel, and androgynous sheaths to create striking silhouettes.

Comics from the Underground: PublishingRevolutionary Comic Books in the 1960sand Early 1970s

Issue No. 16 of the comic book Mad came out in 1954 with a prophetic cover: Men in white coats carry one of the cartoonists, Bill Elder, from the street, while Harvey Kurtzman—the cover artist himself—sells his comic books hiding in a street corner. The cover reads in screaming letters: “COMICS GO UNDERGROUND!” (Daniels 85).

 

Kurztman’s cover referred to a threat to the comics industry from the formation of the Comics Magazine Association of America, designed to enforce the Comics Code, an effort at industry self‐regulation in the face of popular and governmental criticism. Kurtzman’s prediction that edgy comics would soon be produced outside a highly regulated industry soon proved all too correct. The comics industry’s capitulation to the Comics Code, established in 1954, resulted in extremely tight censorship for comics creators. Entertaining Comics (commonly known as EC Comics), the publisher of Mad, was at the forefront because its owner, William Gaines, had testified at a Senate hearing on the deleterious effects of comics on children but had not managed to make a case in defense of his publishing line, which included graphic horror comics (Daniels 83–89; Estren 35–38). MAD was the only magazine of EC Comics to survive the onslaught of censorship.

Online Antagonism of the Alt-Right in the 2016 Election

The 2016 election evoked concerns over the decline in the level of political discourse.  Among these was the lament “Make Trolling Great Again,” by which Emma Green referred to the spiteful provocations emanating from the political fringes. The “altright,” short for alternative right, was both a harbinger and culmination of these

tendencies during the election. It includes white nationalists and disillusioned right-wing dissidents who draw from theories like neoreaction, a political theory that is contemptuous of modernism, democracy, and egalitarianism, and favors a form of “nondemocratic system with rule-driven succession.” As an online movement, it also has

firm links with participatory media networks through websites such as 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit, along with meme and troll culture. The alt-right capitalized on the antiimmigration and anti-establishment campaign themes of Donald Trump to thrust its ideas into the political mainstream. Just as Trump made use of social media, the alt-right utilized memes—and like Trump, the movement attracted attention and visibility through provocations and sensationalism.

Organizing MySpace:Youth Walkouts, Pleasure,Politics, and New Media

While the major urban centers around the countrywere flooded by millions of protesters demanding immigrantrights in March 2006, the San Francisco BayArea remained relatively quiet.A coalition of organizers,including Centro Legal de laRaza, DeportenALaMigra,and the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition mobilizeda one-week hunger strike, creating media visibility andpolitical pressure despite theirsmallernumbers.Approximately30 strike organizers and 15 huegalistasdehambrecamped on the concrete in front of the Federal Buildingin San Francisco, and operated as a condensingpoint fora series of small actions, including several marches andrallies, none of which exceeded a few hundred people.

Facebook, Neoliberalism, and the Foreclosing of Imagination

The “Oregon Trail Generation” has become a popular term for the group of people born in the late 1970s and early 1980s who fall somewhere between GenXers and Millennials. Anna Garvey, who coined this name for the group, writes about how growing up on the cusp of the massive adoption of home computers and the rise of Internet access during childhood defines this microgeneration. She asserts, “[Being born at this point in history] made us the first children to grow up figuring it out, as opposed to having an innate understanding of new technology the way Millennials did, or feeling slightly alienated from it the way Gen X did.” As a member of this group, I distinctly remember learning to play computer games in elementary school, using AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) to chat with friends in middle school, and joining Facebook in college. As such, I am a kind of “digital native” who also remembers a time before the Internet’s ubiquity. Thus, I enter conversations about social media with a unique balance of familiarity and skepticism. For these reasons, I am uniquely positioned to see that as neoliberalism inserts technology, particularly social media, more intimately into our lives, it shapes human subjectivities, configuring our understandings of ourselves and one another to be merely “users.” As a result of this, our ability to imagine new ways to organize society, to address issues of social justice, and to seek our ideal future is greatly curtailed.

Paperback pornography: Mass market novels and censorship in post-war America

In the volatile political and social climate of post-War America in 1952, threats to the established order were taken with unprecedented seriousness. In little more than a century, paperback novels had gone from a democratizing element in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, providing reading material to anyone who could afford their nominal price, to a subversive influence in the mid-twentieth century, for much the same reason.

The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life

The explosion of user-created media content on the web (dating from,say, 2005) has unleashed a new media universe. (Other terms often used torefer to this phenomenon include social media and user-generated content.)

On a practical level, this universe was made possible by free web platformsand inexpensive software tools that enable people to share their media andeasily access media produced by others, cheaper prices for professionalqualitydevices such asHDvideo cameras, and the addition of cameras andvideo capture to mobile phones. What is important, however, is that thisnew universe is not simply a scaled-up version of twentieth-century media

culture. Instead, we have moved from media to social media.What doesthis shift mean for how media functions and for the terms we use to talkabout media? What do trends in web use mean for culture in general and

for professional art in particular? These are the questions this essay willengage with.

Female “Lone Wolves”: The Anti-SocialHeroine in Recent Television Series

In her late 2016 article, “What Does it Mean to be a ‘GoodWoman’?”, Emily Rapp marveled at Homeland’s Carrie Mathison(Claire Danes), admiring the “strange, fantastical, beautiful messthat makes her terrific at her job as CIA station chief and an outrightfailure as a partner, a mother, a friend. . . . Her goal is singular: to begood at what she does, at all costs.” This kind of female protagonist,the “lone wolf,” who is single-mindedly focused on her professionand deprioritizes personal relationships, is exceptionally rare. However,whether in literature, film, or television, the “lone wolf” hasbeen a commonly used character trope when it comes to male heroes/protagonists. While it has by now become acceptable for female charactersto have a job, excel at it, and even be in charge on occasion, notseeing a steady relationship and never wanting children still seem tobe transgressions of norms, which may be tolerable for a villain butnot for a heroine. In other words, being antisocial, not filling therelational roles (of a girlfriend, a wife, a mother, a sister, or a daughter)that female characters have been reduced to for so long, stillappears to be too much of a gender defiance for female protagonists.Nevertheless, some recent changes in the depictions of female televisioncharacters might have paved the way for the occurrence of (ifonly a small number of) antisocial heroines in contemporary Americantelevision. Exploring how these antisocial heroines are depicted inspecific television series that seem to attempt to approximate thiskind of lone wolf in female characters reveals a glaring double-standard.

A cyber-ethnographic forayinto GR&T internet photo blogs

Internet studies are rapidly approaching disciplinary status in academia (Silver 2006:2). As ethnographers we find Internet cyber-culture(s) and social networking usingadvancing communication technologies to be provocative and relatively unexploredethnographic topics. As Romani studies scholars we seek out research applications

relevant to our specific interest in culture change among Gypsies (Romanies) andTravelers in the United States (GR&T peoples). As cyber-ethnographers using a ‘datadredging’ methodology we explore Internet cyber-subcultures comprised of youthfulGR&T peoples. We describe GR&T adaptive and creative uses of some interfacingnew mass communications technologies; for example, photo cell phones, the Internetand personalized web logs. GR&T adolescents using these technologies constructself-ascribed identities and ascribe identities to others via their online Internet communications.They also reveal their values and material cultures. GR&T ‘self-narratives’encountered in their photo-blog guest books comprise a distinctive written argot.From these online data sources we isolate and discuss specific themes, and a theoreticalimplication.

Participant Observation and the Study of Self:  Burning Man as Ethnographic Experience

Since the mid-1990s, Burning Man has received considerable media coverage, although little of it has increased the public’s knowledge about the significance and complexity of the event. During the same period, however, participants in the Burning Man community have been busily committing their experiences to various written media, such as the “e-playa” forum on burningman.com, in testimonials and personal journals on the Internet, and in Black Rock City newspapers like Piss Clear, The Spock Science Monitor, and the Black Rock Gazette. A sizable rift now separates the descriptions proffered by mainstream, commercial media outlets and the personal accounts written by Burning Man participants. In the former, Burning Man tends to be viewed as little more than a countercultural spectacle, an entertaining diversion to be treated with clichéd analogies and superficial stereotypes. In contrast, participant-driven characterizations of Burning Man tend to be much more personal, culturally aware, and socially significant.

The Limits of Master Narratives in History Textbooks

In this study, I argue that American history textbooks present discrete, heroic, onedimensional,and neatly packaged master narratives that deny students a complex,realistic, and rich understanding of people and events in American history. In makingthis argument, I examine the master narratives of Martin Luther King, Jr., inhigh school history textbooks and show how textbooks present prescribed, oversimplified,and uncontroversial narratives of King that obscure important elements inKing’s life and thought. Such master narratives, I contend, permeate most historytextbooks and deny students critical lenses through which to examine, analyze, and

interpret social issues today. The article concludes with suggestions about how teachersmight begin to address the current problem of master narratives and offer alternativeapproaches to presenting U.S. history.

Re-Envisioning Black Masculinity in LukeCage: From Blaxploitation and Comic Booksto Netflix

NETFLIX’S 2016 RELEASE OF LUKE CAGE MARKS A SHIFT IN THEMarvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) dialogue on race inAmerica. The show directly addresses issues of race by settingthe series in Harlem, featuring a predominantly black cast, andplacing African-American showrunner Cheo Coker at the helm. Muchheralded before the release of the show, Luke Cage is the first African-American superhero featured in his own production as part of theMCU. In 1972, forty-six years before the Netflix series, Luke Cagewas the first African-American superhero featured in his own comicbook title, Luke Cage, Hero for Hire. The Netflix series draws on theoriginal comic book for plot and characterization, and both the comicbook and the TV show draw heavily on elements of blaxploitationfilm. A genre that typically featured African-American men, blaxploitationwas known for its gritty violence, explicit language, andportrayals of masculinity inspired by black nationalism. Under thecreative direction of Cheo Coker, Luke Cage revises these narrow andstereotypical portrayals of black masculinity as the Luke Cage narrativeshifts from the comic book medium to the streaming televisionplatform through adaptation.

“In My Day It Used to Be Called a Limp Wrist”: Flip-Floppers, Nelly Boys, and Homophobic Rhetoric in the 2004 US Presidential Campaign

The importance of understanding what the Republican National Committee (RNC) and their supporters accomplished in emasculating and queer baiting Kerry lies in its influence on the election’s outcome, which itself can be measured not merely by pre-election polls and media coverage but also by the jarring resonance of campaign homophobia in postelection Republican policy. While anyone modestly versed in gay studies or women’s studies, if not any critically thinking adult, knows effeminacy to be an unreliable index of homosexuality, many ideologues, media strategists, reporters, and internet pundits routinely collapse gender into sexuality without blinking.3 In a culture rife with metrosexuals and, compared with twenty years ago, flush with gay media presence (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Will & Grace, Queer as Folk, Six Feet Under, Boy Meets Boy), somehow being unmanly, being vulnerable to being pegged as gay, is still as good as being gay.4 As in high school gym class, “unmanly” equals “sissy” equals “queer.”

“The Future of Sex”: Intermedial Desire between Fembot Fantasies and Sexbot Technologies

The first decades of the twenty‐first century are a critically important period in the history of Human–Robot Interaction (HRI). This “robotic moment,” as Sherry Turkle calls it, finds people “willing to seriously consider robots … as potential friends, confidants, and even romantic partners” (9). As robots’ roles shift from manual and industrial labor to social and emotional companions (Gn 175), popular discourses generate visions in which robots are expected to fulfill intimate roles, such as caretakers, entertainers, lovers, and mediators in complex sociotechnical environments (Katsuno 96; Yonck xi). As one branch of Emotional Artificial Intelligence (AI), sex robots are much overhyped, yet culturally fascinating objects, frequently set up within popular discourses (fiction and nonfiction) as the inevitable end‐point, or an extreme case‐in‐point, of human‐robotic relations. “Like it or not,” prognosticators warn, “robot lovers are coming” (Crist, “Sexbot”).

Nude dancing: Scenes of sexual celebration in a contested culture

In the long cultural war against a puritan and patriarchal establishment, nude dance clubs are outposts on the frontier of the current conflict. Schiff discusses nude dancing’s role as it illustrates the oppositional nature of the unstable neo-puritan legacy.

Hollywood’s Uncritical Dystopias

In a period in which people talk about capitalism’s dystopic effects without naming the capitalist system as their cause, Hollywood sells viewers in the United States and around the world a plethora of images and narratives about the future of the world. The dialectical dance of the utopian and dystopian imagination in capitalism, however, has not been well represented by Hollywood studios or in the wider society in which they pursue profit. Today’s Hollywood science fiction films are disproportionately dystopian. All dystopian stories offer a generalized critique of Right-wing Utopianism. Hollywood’s dystopian films contain a plurality of stories about near future catastrophes and circumstantial aftermaths that align with the ideologies of the Right and the Left, sometimes a combo of the two. Dystopian films can be regressive or progressive, conservative or radical, or both.

So You Think You Can Salsa: PerformingLatinness on Reality Dance Television

IT’S SALSA!” A CONTESTANT INFORMS THE CAMERA, “IT’S MOREabout style than technique” (season 2, episode 9). Benji is aprofessional ballroom dancer competing for the title of“America’s Favorite Dancer” on the popular competition reality showSo You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD). The show prides itself onfeaturing a diverse array of dance styles and contestants but frequentlyemploys stereotypical tropes in its presentation of salsa. Bythe end of this particular segment, Benji is featured driving away ina car saying, “Catch you at the salsa club” in an adopted Spanishaccent. During the same season of the show, salsa is described as “muycaliente, as they say in Spanish” (2:6) and “something I usually put onmy chips” (2:12). These comments demonstrate larger narratives of

Latinx hypersexuality, perpetual foreignness, and primitivity that theshow constantly employs across a decade of programming.

Mulan (1998) and Hua Mulan (2009)National Myth and Trans–CulturalIntertextuality

The myth of Mulan, an ordinary woman who serves in the army disguised as a man in her enfeebled father’s place and becomes a hero, has undergone subtle yet significant changes throughout Chinese history when Mulan merges from layers of narratives as the quintessential woman warrior after centuries of retelling and reinterpretation in literary and visual texts. The most recent cinematic re-imagination of Mulan is the Chinese live action film Hua Mulan 花木兰 by Jingle Ma 马楚成 from 2009, but its representation of a national myth demands transnational interpretation because of Disney’s globally popular Mulan (1998) franchise, directed by Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook. Between Disney’s immensely popular animation Mulan and China’s live action film Hua Mulan 花木兰 , the Mulan narrative’s migration to Hollywood and back to China creates a delta of trans-cultural intertextuality where the understanding of these transnational film texts is triangulated by gender, political, and social discourses. This chapter argues that Disney’s Mulan homogenizes the Chinese heroine with its gallery of Disney princesses in order toreinforce the studio’s leadership in global popular culture production and maintain a long tradition of the celebration of personal growth, individualism, and independent spirit. By contrast, Hua Mulan is a transnational discourse that expresses an accentuated national patriotism that harks back to China’s peaceful rise in foreign policy. The portrayal of a remarkably feminized Hua Mulan in Hua Mulan also situates itself within the postfeminist cinematic representation of a new generation of female lead characters, comparable to the heroines in a number of postfeminist films that become prominent in contemporary Chinese cinema.

Anxious and Ambivalent Representations: Nineteenth-Century Images of Chinese American Men

During the nineteenth century, American journalists, cartoonists, novelists, and playwrights represented Chinese American men as both docile pets and nefarious invaders; potential citizens and unassimilable aliens; effeminate, queue-wearing eunuchs and threateningly masculine, minotaur-like lotharios.1 The ways in which Chinese American men were imagined as “not quite” American and “not quite” men indicate much about how Euro-Americans defined “authentic” Americanness and manliness. Moreover, by examining the ambivalent representations of Chinese American men during this period, it is possible to mark the project of defining “authentic” Americanness and manliness as essentially unstable and open to challenge. As Lisa Lowe points out, Asian Americans serve as a “screen” on which Euro-Americans project their anxieties (18).2 This article argues that nineteenth-century figurations of Chinese American men as emasculated often justified Euro-American imperial and capitalistic motives, and figurations of Chinese American men as threateningly masculine often revealed Euro-Americans’ concern about their own crises regarding masculinity.3 Both desire and fear marked the end of the nineteenth century for many Americans, as the nation considered becoming an overseas imperial power and dealt with the benefits and problems of large-scale industrialization, increasing immigration, and incipient modernism. Through anxious and ambivalent representations of Chinese American men in popular culture, some Euro-Americans registered and negotiated feelings of desire and fear associated with these changes.

“With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility”:American Comic Book Censorship and the ColdWar Consensus

Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotiveand able to leap tall buildings in a single bound”— Comicbooks have been a dynamic commodity in American history. Duringthe Great Depression and World War II, comic books and graphicnovels emerged as a new form of mass culture which uniquely targetedadolescents. Known as the “Golden Age of Comics”, the periodfrom 1938 to early 1950s saw an unparalleled rise of comic sales.

Scholars have estimated that in 1944, ninety-four percent of Americanchildren ages 6-11 and eighty-five percent ages 12-17 read comicbooks regularly. The superhero genre, largely modeled after thesuccess of Superman, became extremely popular during WWII whenwriters like Jerry Robinson, Will Eisner, and Stan Lee penned new

soldiers to win the war: Batman, The Spirit and Captain America.Most of the superhuman celebrities that have dominated popularAmerican culture with lunchboxes, backpacks, and billion dollarblockbuster films were “born” during WWII. Children paid over 20million dollars a year to see Captain Marvel and others brutally defeatingthe Axis enemy. Despite their trivial association today,comic books were an important medium through which nationalisticideas were imparted to children.

Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel: The(Dis)Continuity of Gender Politics

THE RECENT WONDER WOMAN (2017) AND CAPTAIN MARVEL(2019) films epitomize what is currently at stake in superherogender politics. This, in turn, offers a snapshot of widerdynamics at play in popular culture, or what Tony Bennett called the“articulation” of power and resistance that marks the fluid workingsof hegemony. The films appeared at a contradictory time whenmovements like #MeToo and the Women’s March suggested the

emergence of a possible fourth wave of feminism (Munro), although adecidedly white, middle-class postfeminism claims political, social, and economic disparities have been overcome.Contradictions are also evident in a publisher like Marvel supportingthe shift toward diversity—meaning greater representation of women,people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ communities in boththe stories and the creative teams—while its CEO, Isaac Perlmutter,donates money to support Donald Trump, whose politics run counterto every progressive advance being made within the industry.

Technoshamanism: Spiritual Healing in the Rave Subculture

This paper explores the rave as a form of socially produced spiritual healing. Raves come in many different forms, but can be defined generally as all-night dance parties featuring loud “techno” music.(FN1) Though the precursors to the rave are many and diverse, as we will see below, raves as I have defined them became important landmarks in British subcultural topography in the mid to late 1980s. The earliest raves were underground, often illegal phenomena, taking place in and around London in venues like warehouses, outdoor fields, and clubs with tightly restricted door policies, such as Shoom and The Project. By the early 1990s, raves had emerged from the underground and reached the center of British youth culture. The scale was “huge and ever increasing” (McRobbie 168) as the raves became a fully licensed, multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry (Thornton 15). Following their growth in England, raves gained popularity on the Continent and in the United States, though to a much smaller degree than in Great Britain.

Mitt Romney, Mormonism, and the Media: Popular Depictions of a Religious Minority

In early 2015, journalists Ashley Parker and Alex Thompson published a New York Times piece considering the role Mitt Romney’s faith might play in a third presidential campaign (Parker and Thompson). They describe Romney’s 2012 approach to his Mormonismas “tortured” and suggest that his “strategy of awkward reluctance and studied avoidance” may have “helped doom his campaign.” Any consideration of a third run, Parker and Thompson suggest, would be rooted in Romney’s particular confluence of faith and public service. Persistence and patriotic duty, they argue, are specific features of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐day Saints (LDS Church) that would support a third attempt at the presidency. A few days after the piece was published, Romney declared he was not going to run in 2016.

Integrating Postmodern and ChristianContemplative Thought: Building aTheoretical Framework

Responding to literature that invites Christian counselors to engage postmodern thinking, this article seeks

to articulate a worldview that is integrally both postmodern and Christian. However, instead of being Christian

in a broad sense, it draws upon a specific Christian tradition: contemplation. Building upon the strengths of

both Christian contemplative and postmodern thought, and recognizing where the two disciplines are compatible

and mismatched, a theoretical framework that is appropriate for the postmodern context is constructed.

The resulting paradigm has two realities, two selves, two ways of communicating, and two speakers.

Based upon this bringing together of postmodern and contemplative ideas, a model of counseling is briefly

developed around the concepts of the therapy system, the therapy process, and the therapy relationship.

Hags and Whores: American Sin and Shaming from Salem to Springer

Puritans Then Watchfulness was a core element of the Calvinist culture. Because of their entwined notion of human depravity and God’s grace, the Puritans had a tendency toward self-scrutiny. […] Americans still disapprove of sin, but they love the spectacle of it.

 

Americans have always been obsessed with sin and shame. Our literature, our politics, and even our television shows reflect that obsession.The last decade seems particularly rife with shame-sins, their discovery, and the almost inevitable mea culpas. As the Clinton scandal incensed the right and embarrassed the left, the rhetoric ran toward America’s loss of a “moral compass” and Clinton’s “unspeakable behavior” (Novak 42). Jerry Falwell pronounced that September 11 was likely a punishment for Americans’ sins- particularly the sins of lesbians, gays, and the ACLU. There are Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, Michael Vick, and, of course, trash television: Flavor of Love, The Bachelor, and The Jerry Springer Show.

Telling Forgotten Storiesof Slavery in thePostmodern South

Forty years ago, Ralph Ellison served notice that one of thelegacies of Jim Crow’s demise would be the remaking of American historyand stories about that remaking as well. “[W]e have reached agreat crisis in American history,” he declared at the 1968 meeting of theSouthern Historical Association, “and we are now going to have a fullAmerican history…. Here in the United States we have had a politicalsystem which wouldn’t allow me to tell my story officially. Much ofit is not in the history textbooks” (qtd. in West 125). African Americansresorted accordingly to oral tradition for the preservation of memoriesand histories “even as,” Ellison added, “they were forced to accommodatethemselves to those forces and arrangements that were sanctioned byofficial history.” The result in black writing, he noted drily, was “a highsensitivity to the ironies of historical writing” and “a profound skepticismconcerning the validity of most reports on what the past was like” (126).

 

The Non- and Anti-Democratic in Post-Modernity

Is, or has, democracy a universal value? Is it based on natural law, which HugoGrotius (1583-1645) once believed to be indispensable among people and nationswith different cultures and interests? If so, we can easily trace the moral foundationof democracy. If not, we may be obliged to admit power politics as the only effectiveor convenient means to political solutions. Nowadays international law seldommeans universal law. Instead, it only means a diplomatic and strategic agreementgenerally on the basis of national interest and power. Only positive laws seem to berelevant to any rule for mankind in general. Hence democracy is treated as a kind ofinstitution or political legal system, not as a humane mental attitude.Is or has democracy more than a set of rules based on free election or the principleof majority rule? If democracy could be regarded as the probable and minimumconsensus appealing to any people, we should defend it by every means. However,today, no one would be fully confident of its value, generally regarding it as usefuland rational, not as an absolutely just principle.

Cyberterrorism: Postmodern State of Chaos

This paper examines cyberterrorism and its potential to create apostmodern state of chaos. In general, chaos refers to a state of extremeconfusion and disorder. This analysis breaks new ground in that it describeschaos theory as a foundation for better understanding cyberterrorism andexplains how chaos theory and game theory are tightly coupled. The authoralso contrasts modern, conventional terrorism with postmodern, innovativecyberterrorism. The main idea is that the postmodern state of chaos causedby cyberterrorist attacks differs dramatically from the destruction caused byconventional terrorist acts. This comparison serves as the basis for making thepoint that cyberterrorism is not three-dimensional, it is not analog (but it isdigital), and it exposes actors of cyberspace to new concepts of time andspace. Another important argument is that the postmodern state of chaosimplies the danger of cascading failures brought forth by cyberterrorists. Acascading failure is a succession of failures (i.e., cascade) caused by the eliminationof a crucial node (i.e., a point or location in an infrastructural system)from a network.

 

This paper is groundbreaking in that it adds fresh, new insights on scholarlyperceptions of cyberterrorism. While most of the literature on the subject istechnical and political, this paper brings a philosophical outlook to the associationbetween postmodernism and the evolving face of terrorism. This paperbegins with a thorough description of cyberterrorism, which refers to attacksconducted against computers, networks, and systems. Of equal relevance is thedistinction between cyberterrorism and simple hacking. This paper then proceeds

to explain postmodemism, asserting that cyberspace needs to be framedin the context of hyperreal (the blurring of distinctions between the real in theunreal). What comes next is the heart of the paper: the postmodern state of

chaos. This paper ends with a discussion that also includes suggestions forfuture research.

Derrida on teaching: The economy of erasure

This article explores Derrida’s claim that teaching is a deconstructive process.In order to explore this claim, the Derridean concept of ‘‘erasure’’ is explored. Using theconcept of erasure, this article examines two important aspects of teaching: the name thatteachers establish for themselves, and, teaching against social power from a Derridean(erasure-oriented) perspective. Ultimately, the paper confirms Derrida’s claim that teaching

is indeed a deconstructive practice.

Art comes for the Archbishop: The Semiotics of Contemporary ChicanaFeminism and the Work of Alma Lopez

The Virgin of Guadalupe is omnipresent in Chicano/a visual space. She ispainted on car windows, tattooed on shoulders or backs, emblazoned onneighborhood walls, and silk-screened on t-shirts sold at local flea

markets. Periodically, her presence is manifested in miraculous apparitions:on a tree near Watsonville, California; on a water tank, a car bumper,or a freshly made tortilla.1 She is the sorrowful mother, a figure who

embodies the suffering of Chicano/a and Mexican populations in thecontext of colonization, racism, and economic disenfranchisement.