Journal of Popular Culture最新文献

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of the character King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), reading the film as a cautionary tale about the danger proximity to whiteness poses for Black subjects. For all of its hyperbolic violence and linguistic excess, Django Unchained asks important questions about the way American popular culture structures stories of African American freedom around the trope of interracial friendship. In doing so, it reveals the problem at the heart of white identity-making in US popular culture and unmasks its complicity in violence against Black bodies.

“Bury Your Gays” is the popular name used to describe the common television trope in which characters who are ostensibly gender- or sexually-diverse are denied happy endings or “killed off”. Widespread online commentary among audiences reacting to incidents of “Bury Your Gays” are indicative of a public concern over the repetitiveness of this trope in contemporary popular culture. This paper investigates the cultural frameworks through which television producers respond to audience anger at “Bury Your Gays” incidents in order to provide a production perspective to scholarship on the topic. We compare two cases separated by a generation: the 2002 case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the 2016 case of The 100. We argue that the difference in responses is indicative of (i) a solidification of the producer-audience relationship since the advent of social media; (ii) the further embedding of a transactional approach to viewership in which “queerbaiting” is considered “false advertising” and (iii) the growth of cancel culture which fosters expectations that television representation will align with positive depictions and socially-progressive cultural values. The paper argues that these cultural shifts underscore the way in which producers respond, no longer justifying the death of a queer character based on narrative need, but now balanced with attention to audience identity and social demand.

This study explores the representation of Blackness in the telenovela La mamá del 10, revealing it as ambiguous but largely depoliticized. Herein, soccer presents a “sanitized” way of being Black when hard work and high-performance sports are used to frame nonwhite populations within white values that manage to save a young man from repeating his Black father's mistakes. In addition, the mall is examined in relation to racial democracy. La mamá del 10 emphasizes the importance of the mall as a place where Blackness meets social advancement at the expense of kinship and community.

This study examines docudramatic representations of human-pet relationships in China, applying the conversational storytelling research method. The study takes Modern Furry Tale (MFT, 2021), a controversial docudrama streamed on the Tencent Video platform as its targeted case. The article argues that contemporary Chinese docudramas do not so much “document reality” as continue a “cinematic tradition” of presenting “selected reality” by showing an idealized view of the pets“ living conditions and their owners” family lives. Describing and constructing friendly and companionable pet-human relationships, these docudramas reinforce the dominant “positive energy” state ideology, propagandistic mainstream family values, and repressive gender ideologies.

Prior analyses have examined various elements of punk rock as an aggressive anti-establishment cultural and social movement that arose in post-WWII America and flourished in the 1970s. The unique gender dynamic of punk, however, has been less of a focus of historical investigation. This essay examines the lives and music of three women involved in the early years of the emergence of punk, an era overwhelmingly dominated by men. By focusing on the creative expression and Penelope Houston of Avengers, Debbie Harry of Blondie, and Wendy O. Williams of Plasmatics, this paper seeks to analyze how certain women in the punk movement explicitly sought to challenge the conventional narratives of women's social, political, and sexual roles in the late 1970s and in so doing helped to carve out new paths for women's expression and ways of being in American society.

The detective/crime pulp series Vee Brown (Carroll John Daly) and Needle Mike (William E. Barrett) incorporate elements of contemporaneous criminological theory into their narratives as explanatory devices for social deviance. Initially, they align themselves along the dominant etiological divide of the 1920s and 1930s: intrinsic tendencies versus environmental factors, respectively. Over the course of individual stories and series arcs, internal contradictions arise in the representations of these positions, which are resolved, to some degree, in the contemporaneous anomie theory of Robert Merton. The protagonists' idiosyncratic engagement with the popular arts—Tin Pan Alley music and tattooing—becomes the metaphoric vehicle to reframe the individual/milieu conflict in terms of institutional inscriptions of individuals more constructivist than purely functionalist in nature.