Pub Date : 2022-05-27DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2022.2080848
Kelly Boudreau
ABSTRACT Game studies addresses a wide range of topics, concepts, questions, and perspectives. From reading games as technical and cultural artifacts to exploring players, player communities, and the industry itself. Toxic culture within gaming communities and the gaming industry has negatively affected and even harmed individuals, community growth, the creative potential of video games, and even the study of some topics in game studies. This is not up for debate. However, toxic culture plays a role in shaping alternative visions and methods of inclusivity, as those affected by it push against the toxic boundaries and existing conditions through a wide range of strategies to create positive change. From supportive threads on social media to coordinated, collective efforts in the form of the creation of organizations, events, and emotional support networks, this article looks at resistance to toxic gaming culture and how it reshapes and reconstructs the boundaries and social norms towards creating a more inclusive gaming community and culture. The future of game studies is necessarily critical, but its future is also constructive.
{"title":"Beyond deviance: toxic gaming culture and the potential for positive change","authors":"Kelly Boudreau","doi":"10.1080/15295036.2022.2080848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2022.2080848","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Game studies addresses a wide range of topics, concepts, questions, and perspectives. From reading games as technical and cultural artifacts to exploring players, player communities, and the industry itself. Toxic culture within gaming communities and the gaming industry has negatively affected and even harmed individuals, community growth, the creative potential of video games, and even the study of some topics in game studies. This is not up for debate. However, toxic culture plays a role in shaping alternative visions and methods of inclusivity, as those affected by it push against the toxic boundaries and existing conditions through a wide range of strategies to create positive change. From supportive threads on social media to coordinated, collective efforts in the form of the creation of organizations, events, and emotional support networks, this article looks at resistance to toxic gaming culture and how it reshapes and reconstructs the boundaries and social norms towards creating a more inclusive gaming community and culture. The future of game studies is necessarily critical, but its future is also constructive.","PeriodicalId":47123,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies in Media Communication","volume":"13 1","pages":"181 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82004728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-26DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2022.2058763
Ned O’Gorman
{"title":"Unmanning: how humans, machines, and media perform drone warfare","authors":"Ned O’Gorman","doi":"10.1080/15295036.2022.2058763","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2022.2058763","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47123,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies in Media Communication","volume":"70 1","pages":"488 - 496"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81566316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-19DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2022.2067347
Max Dosser
ABSTRACT This article examines the representation of masculinity in the animated Disney film Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018). Popular reviews of the film focused heavily on critiques of toxic masculinity. Often associated with homophobic and misogynistic speech, the concept of toxic masculinity ultimately serves to reinforce and rescue elements of hegemonic masculinity by painting “toxic” male behaviors as something that can be “cured” or “fixed.” To probe the troubled concept of toxic masculinity as seen in animated media, this article demonstrates how Ralph Breaks the Internet reifies a false dichotomy of healthy and toxic masculinity. Through examining the ways Ralph’s physical appearance, his behaviors, his manipulative relationships with women, and the film’s ultimate resolution reflect the current crisis of masculinity, this article argues that while reviews claim the film critiques toxic masculinity, the film itself actually reinscribes qualities of hegemonic masculinity. By invoking toxic masculinity in scholarship and reviews, critics obscure other critiques of masculinity films may put forward—positive and negative.
{"title":"I’m gonna wreck it, again: the false dichotomy of “healthy” and “toxic” masculinity in Ralph Breaks the Internet","authors":"Max Dosser","doi":"10.1080/15295036.2022.2067347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2022.2067347","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the representation of masculinity in the animated Disney film Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018). Popular reviews of the film focused heavily on critiques of toxic masculinity. Often associated with homophobic and misogynistic speech, the concept of toxic masculinity ultimately serves to reinforce and rescue elements of hegemonic masculinity by painting “toxic” male behaviors as something that can be “cured” or “fixed.” To probe the troubled concept of toxic masculinity as seen in animated media, this article demonstrates how Ralph Breaks the Internet reifies a false dichotomy of healthy and toxic masculinity. Through examining the ways Ralph’s physical appearance, his behaviors, his manipulative relationships with women, and the film’s ultimate resolution reflect the current crisis of masculinity, this article argues that while reviews claim the film critiques toxic masculinity, the film itself actually reinscribes qualities of hegemonic masculinity. By invoking toxic masculinity in scholarship and reviews, critics obscure other critiques of masculinity films may put forward—positive and negative.","PeriodicalId":47123,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies in Media Communication","volume":"84 1","pages":"333 - 346"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90185678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-10DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2022.2070230
Nathan Rossi
ABSTRACT This article analyzes the cultural work of queer Salvadoran comedian Julio Torres through the Muñozian lens of queer utopian aesthetics and ethnic camp. Through textual and discursive analysis, it establishes how Torres’ comedy disrupts dominant images of male Central American migrants as violent gang members, as well as how Torres creates a space for queer U.S. Central American subjectivities in the Latinx media imaginary. This article also examines Torres’ advocacy work alongside his comedy to consider the extent to which both uphold economic value as central to evaluating the worthiness of immigrants seeking U.S. citizenship. This approach that considers the affordances and limitations of utopian aesthetics illuminates the contradictions in contemporary U.S. Central American representation. I argue that Torres’ cultural work offers glimpses into queerer future U.S. Central American representations and immigration rights discourses that ensure that queer migrant lives are more livable.
{"title":"Julio torres and the queer potentialities of U.S. Central American representation","authors":"Nathan Rossi","doi":"10.1080/15295036.2022.2070230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2022.2070230","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article analyzes the cultural work of queer Salvadoran comedian Julio Torres through the Muñozian lens of queer utopian aesthetics and ethnic camp. Through textual and discursive analysis, it establishes how Torres’ comedy disrupts dominant images of male Central American migrants as violent gang members, as well as how Torres creates a space for queer U.S. Central American subjectivities in the Latinx media imaginary. This article also examines Torres’ advocacy work alongside his comedy to consider the extent to which both uphold economic value as central to evaluating the worthiness of immigrants seeking U.S. citizenship. This approach that considers the affordances and limitations of utopian aesthetics illuminates the contradictions in contemporary U.S. Central American representation. I argue that Torres’ cultural work offers glimpses into queerer future U.S. Central American representations and immigration rights discourses that ensure that queer migrant lives are more livable.","PeriodicalId":47123,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies in Media Communication","volume":"9 1","pages":"367 - 379"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90086281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-06DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2022.2069279
Anthony Twarog
ABSTRACT This article proposes that professionalization services are significant media industry spaces because they are the first access points to industry work for many nonprofessionals. I use business-facing marketing materials from the popular self-publishing platform Wattpad as a case study, drawing on discourse analysis to argue that the platform’s strict guidelines governing which users can professionalize are a response to gendered and generational assumptions within legacy media industries about the commercial value of the data gathered from Wattpad’s predominantly young and female userbase. Weighing Wattpad’s business-facing rhetoric against the platform’s strict governance of professionalization, I argue that the efforts of platforms to promote their users to legacy media industries as exploitable workforces can provide important insights into how and why platforms structure professionalization for their users.
{"title":"Journey to the stars program: the gendered and generational governance of professionalization on Wattpad","authors":"Anthony Twarog","doi":"10.1080/15295036.2022.2069279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2022.2069279","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article proposes that professionalization services are significant media industry spaces because they are the first access points to industry work for many nonprofessionals. I use business-facing marketing materials from the popular self-publishing platform Wattpad as a case study, drawing on discourse analysis to argue that the platform’s strict guidelines governing which users can professionalize are a response to gendered and generational assumptions within legacy media industries about the commercial value of the data gathered from Wattpad’s predominantly young and female userbase. Weighing Wattpad’s business-facing rhetoric against the platform’s strict governance of professionalization, I argue that the efforts of platforms to promote their users to legacy media industries as exploitable workforces can provide important insights into how and why platforms structure professionalization for their users.","PeriodicalId":47123,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies in Media Communication","volume":"27 1","pages":"353 - 366"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73793779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-25DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2022.2059540
D. Valkanova
ABSTRACT Studies of films of the 1980s have noted a tendency towards “ideological conglomeration”—the presence of multiple contradictory ideological registers. This article argues that 80s films’ “ideological conglomeration” is made legible and coherent through Michael Rothberg’s (2009, Multidirectional memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization. Stanford University Press) concept of multidirectional memory. It thus proceeds to apply a theoretical framework of multidirectional memory to the analysis of two “New Cold War” films—Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky IV (1985) and Taylor Hackford’s White Nights (1985). Reading Rocky IV through a lens of multidirectional memory allows us to perceive links between the “New Cold War,” U.S. racializing logics, and the racializing schemas of the Nazi regime. In White Nights an analytic of multidirectional memory foregrounds the connections between Little Rock, Arkansas, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the displacement of the associated discourses of state brutality, racism, and accountability onto the Soviet Union. The article concludes that multidirectional memory offers a generative theoretical framework for the study of the cinema of the “New Cold War” that illuminates how films link U.S. Cold War and racial logics to secure the hegemony of white masculinity.
{"title":"White masculinity in the “New Cold War”: reading Rocky IV and White Nights as multidirectional memories","authors":"D. Valkanova","doi":"10.1080/15295036.2022.2059540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2022.2059540","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Studies of films of the 1980s have noted a tendency towards “ideological conglomeration”—the presence of multiple contradictory ideological registers. This article argues that 80s films’ “ideological conglomeration” is made legible and coherent through Michael Rothberg’s (2009, Multidirectional memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization. Stanford University Press) concept of multidirectional memory. It thus proceeds to apply a theoretical framework of multidirectional memory to the analysis of two “New Cold War” films—Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky IV (1985) and Taylor Hackford’s White Nights (1985). Reading Rocky IV through a lens of multidirectional memory allows us to perceive links between the “New Cold War,” U.S. racializing logics, and the racializing schemas of the Nazi regime. In White Nights an analytic of multidirectional memory foregrounds the connections between Little Rock, Arkansas, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the displacement of the associated discourses of state brutality, racism, and accountability onto the Soviet Union. The article concludes that multidirectional memory offers a generative theoretical framework for the study of the cinema of the “New Cold War” that illuminates how films link U.S. Cold War and racial logics to secure the hegemony of white masculinity.","PeriodicalId":47123,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies in Media Communication","volume":"18 1","pages":"319 - 332"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82620503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-06DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2022.2056217
Elaine Schnabel
ABSTRACT Unorthodox is a four-episode Netflix series that offers a compelling narrative of freedom from religion for feminine subjects. This paper interrogates the vision of freedom offered by the show through the lens of lived religion (which circumvents the secular/religion dichotomy by treating the moral meaning-making practices of everyday life as “religious.” A close reading of the lived religious practices in Unorthodox shows three, morally-valanced practices sustaining secular feminine freedom: making the private public, overcoming historical narratives, and taking pleasure. Because in Unorthodox the central barrier to freedom for feminine subjects is the racialized religious community, this paper builds on literature about the racial other and religious freedom to propose the concept of “white secularity.” White secularity is a belief system that assumes every individual can freely opt into good forms of religion, coded as white, and out of bad forms of religion. In white secularity, bad forms of religion are racialized because they make visible white dominance in the public sphere. In this way, white secularity divides the interests of women and racialized minorities by pitting feminine freedom against racialized communities.
{"title":"White secularity: the racialization of religion in Netflix’s Unorthodox","authors":"Elaine Schnabel","doi":"10.1080/15295036.2022.2056217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2022.2056217","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Unorthodox is a four-episode Netflix series that offers a compelling narrative of freedom from religion for feminine subjects. This paper interrogates the vision of freedom offered by the show through the lens of lived religion (which circumvents the secular/religion dichotomy by treating the moral meaning-making practices of everyday life as “religious.” A close reading of the lived religious practices in Unorthodox shows three, morally-valanced practices sustaining secular feminine freedom: making the private public, overcoming historical narratives, and taking pleasure. Because in Unorthodox the central barrier to freedom for feminine subjects is the racialized religious community, this paper builds on literature about the racial other and religious freedom to propose the concept of “white secularity.” White secularity is a belief system that assumes every individual can freely opt into good forms of religion, coded as white, and out of bad forms of religion. In white secularity, bad forms of religion are racialized because they make visible white dominance in the public sphere. In this way, white secularity divides the interests of women and racialized minorities by pitting feminine freedom against racialized communities.","PeriodicalId":47123,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies in Media Communication","volume":"47 1","pages":"305 - 318"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82099545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-19DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2022.2049617
A. Dial
ABSTRACT Trump had COVID-19. The world held its breath. We, in very real terms, were on pause. Trump's reality, the reality of millions of Americans and people around the world, was one of quarantine, an existence put on pause. Here, I would like to consider the polyphony of meanings and performances foregrounding our varied understandings of the pause. Trump's pause and our own excavate a stacking of dual existences: one where we are either waiting to die or get sick and another where we are waiting to get better or return to normal. COVID-19 represents an original moment where the reality of incessant dying is remarkable, and the questions asked within critical Black studies regarding the ontological conditions of humanity and the existential necessity of Black death for the flourishing of white life are laid bare. Through its interrogation of the pause, this work treats pausing as a technical, corporeal, material, and racialized assemblage of realities. Though pausing is a technopolitical formation that is immediately apprehended through gaming and game culture, we must push beyond the computational fact of pressing pause to further an imaginary centering the ordinariness of Black death as being in suspension with the extraordinariness of COVID death.
{"title":"On pause, an essay on the inverse logics of quarantine and Black asphyxia","authors":"A. Dial","doi":"10.1080/15295036.2022.2049617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2022.2049617","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Trump had COVID-19. The world held its breath. We, in very real terms, were on pause. Trump's reality, the reality of millions of Americans and people around the world, was one of quarantine, an existence put on pause. Here, I would like to consider the polyphony of meanings and performances foregrounding our varied understandings of the pause. Trump's pause and our own excavate a stacking of dual existences: one where we are either waiting to die or get sick and another where we are waiting to get better or return to normal. COVID-19 represents an original moment where the reality of incessant dying is remarkable, and the questions asked within critical Black studies regarding the ontological conditions of humanity and the existential necessity of Black death for the flourishing of white life are laid bare. Through its interrogation of the pause, this work treats pausing as a technical, corporeal, material, and racialized assemblage of realities. Though pausing is a technopolitical formation that is immediately apprehended through gaming and game culture, we must push beyond the computational fact of pressing pause to further an imaginary centering the ordinariness of Black death as being in suspension with the extraordinariness of COVID death.","PeriodicalId":47123,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies in Media Communication","volume":"38 1","pages":"291 - 304"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89206485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-16DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2022.2049616
Jasmine T. Austin, Jill A. Edy
ABSTRACT Public memory serves as a foundation for national identity, so struggles to balance respect for difference with the need for common ground emerge repeatedly in struggles over how to remember the public past. Cultural pluralism and multiculturalism tend to articulate a politics of difference in which inequities are identified but common ground proves elusive. Yet, documentaries by African American filmmakers commemorating the 25th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles riots suggest ways of narrating the public past on fairer terms that accept difference while recognizing mutuality. Produced by the dominant white culture, LA92 uses an omniscient perspective and simple characterizations to label and denounce incompetence and villainy, suggesting a form of cultural pluralism in which identity groups live side by side, barely tolerating their inherent differences. In contrast, LA Burning and Let It Fall, films grounded in African American cultural traditions of intersectionality and double consciousness, address the tensions of cultural pluralism by integrating diverse perspectives without marginalizing any of them. Rather than distinguishing good from bad people, they distinguish just from unjust social relationships, establishing the possibility of multicultural public memory.
{"title":"Narrating the past on fairer terms: approaches to building multicultural public memory","authors":"Jasmine T. Austin, Jill A. Edy","doi":"10.1080/15295036.2022.2049616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2022.2049616","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Public memory serves as a foundation for national identity, so struggles to balance respect for difference with the need for common ground emerge repeatedly in struggles over how to remember the public past. Cultural pluralism and multiculturalism tend to articulate a politics of difference in which inequities are identified but common ground proves elusive. Yet, documentaries by African American filmmakers commemorating the 25th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles riots suggest ways of narrating the public past on fairer terms that accept difference while recognizing mutuality. Produced by the dominant white culture, LA92 uses an omniscient perspective and simple characterizations to label and denounce incompetence and villainy, suggesting a form of cultural pluralism in which identity groups live side by side, barely tolerating their inherent differences. In contrast, LA Burning and Let It Fall, films grounded in African American cultural traditions of intersectionality and double consciousness, address the tensions of cultural pluralism by integrating diverse perspectives without marginalizing any of them. Rather than distinguishing good from bad people, they distinguish just from unjust social relationships, establishing the possibility of multicultural public memory.","PeriodicalId":47123,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies in Media Communication","volume":"151 1","pages":"276 - 290"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77470627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2022.2043556
Rachel Plotnick
ABSTRACT Looking historically at cleanliness, care practices, and accessories, this article examines how a variety of actors—from record listeners and music journalists to inventors, advertisers, and corporations—grappled with the problem of cleaning vinyl records in the pursuit of “clean sound” in the period between the 1950s and 1970s. Detailing how washing and preserving records became a commercialized, scientific, and often gendered caretaking process for collectors, the piece makes the case for studying under-explored dimensions of music production/consumption related to housekeeping, preservation, and embodied practices. To this end, the article offers the concept of “media hygiene” as a tool for initiating broader discussions in media studies about fragility and the role of mess in everyday media interactions. Thinking with media hygiene provides insight into the ways that people are encouraged to take responsibility for media technologies’ lifespan.
{"title":"Sticky fingers and smudged sound: vinyl records and the mess of media hygiene","authors":"Rachel Plotnick","doi":"10.1080/15295036.2022.2043556","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2022.2043556","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Looking historically at cleanliness, care practices, and accessories, this article examines how a variety of actors—from record listeners and music journalists to inventors, advertisers, and corporations—grappled with the problem of cleaning vinyl records in the pursuit of “clean sound” in the period between the 1950s and 1970s. Detailing how washing and preserving records became a commercialized, scientific, and often gendered caretaking process for collectors, the piece makes the case for studying under-explored dimensions of music production/consumption related to housekeeping, preservation, and embodied practices. To this end, the article offers the concept of “media hygiene” as a tool for initiating broader discussions in media studies about fragility and the role of mess in everyday media interactions. Thinking with media hygiene provides insight into the ways that people are encouraged to take responsibility for media technologies’ lifespan.","PeriodicalId":47123,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies in Media Communication","volume":"40 1","pages":"260 - 275"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78365615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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