A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
Elizabeth Affuso examines the make-up tutorial video as a postfeminist genre which makes visible the hidden labor of aspirational beauty.
Read moreAshlynn d’Harcourt explores gender-based double standards for comedians through an analysis of the media backlash to Kathy Griffin’s participation in a photo shoot with a Trump mask covered in fake blood. Stand-up is conceptualized as a descendant of vaudeville and anarchistic comedy to better understand the comedian’s craft and motivations.
What does the presence of queer characters accomplish in historical shows? How much historicity do their depictions require? Britta Hanson explores the positive – and frequently negative – implications of modern-framed queer characters placed in the past.
Read moreShweta Khilnani examines female comedic anti-heroes through Selena Meyer’s (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) “performance of failure” in Veep, comparing her with Leslie Knope, the optimistic and sincere heroine of Parks and Recreation, and televisual male anti-heroes.
Read moreAnthony P. McIntyre lays the groundwork for future investigations into the cultural phenomenon that is “sonic cute.”
Read moreAlexis Carreiro explores the “year of the period,” i.e., the recent pro-period movement to free women’s menstrual cycles from their cultural stigma.
Read moreStephanie Brown explores the ways in which entrenched taste cultures and gendered hierarchies led critics to dismiss and disparage Oxygen’s docu-drama Funny Girls.
Read moreJane Feuer looks back on what The Mary Tyler Moore Show meant to her as a college student and then as a television scholar.
Read moreEmily Hoffman discusses the ways in which The Mary Tyler Moore Show demonstrates the possible messiness of motherhood and daughterhood without relying on sitcom conventions.
Read moreJennifer Fogel explores an often overlooked aspect of Mary Richards’ personality: her vulnerability. Mary waffled, wobbled, and “made it on her own”–a lesson still valuable to contemporary viewers.
Read moreCharisse L’Pree examines the historical representation of women in the sitcom and traces the development of what she terms the “Single City Girl” archetype.
Read moreAlexis Carreiro explores Ghostbusters‘s (2016) deployment of a queef joke in relation to the gendered history of fart jokes and the feminist implications of and social strictures against women making noise, both bodily and politically.
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