A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
Horror scholar Andy Owens explores the genre’s complex relationship to gender, and delves into two recent films that are tackling toxic masculinity head-on.
Read morePaxton Haven examines the role of glitched vocal distortion in Dorian Electra’s new album. In doing so, Haven draws a trajectory of Electra’s contemporary work to transgressive artists of the past who use the affordances of their respective genres to articulate a queered masculinity through vocal performance.
Read moreAmanda Phillips writes about the representation of masculinties, particularly through the representation of penises, the omnipresent hardness, and the always absent softness or flaccidity.
Read moreHollis Griffin discusses the popularity of Biden memes, their relation to gendered political discourse, and suggests memes like “Pussy Grabs Back” will persist instead while providing political motivation without similar gender trappings.
Read moreDavid Greven explores the masculine and queer representations of the seventh season of AMC’s The Walking Dead in relation to 90s teen comedies, the Judd Apatow school of Beta Males, and alt-right white nationalism.
Read moreBritta Hanson examines the politics of cross-dressing and gender-bending performance on the popular show Lip Sync Battle, which ultimately contains such performances and reifies heteronormative gender roles.
Read moreWhitten Overby continues his explorations of the intersections of architecture, technology, and gender in AMC’s Mad Men, this time through the lenses of Futurism, car travel, and the sprawling Los Angeles cityscape.
Read moreWhitten Overby argues that the modern architectural spaces and sets in AMC’s Mad Men assert white, patriarchal ideologies that challenge feminist readings of the show and illustrate the show’s shortcomings in exploring issues of racial discrimination.
Read moreAn investigation of Asian masculinities in Little Fish and Japanese Story.
Read moreRedefining Indecency
by: John McMurria / DePaul University
Television networks fearful of steep fines and consumer backlash rush to ensure decency standards are upheld. This article looks at indecency in myriad of ways, from the Superbowl pre-game and half-time shows to the funeral of Coretta Scott King.
Comedy is a Woman in Trouble
by: Heather Hendershot / Queens College
Questioning Comedy Central’s fixation on the male audience.
Boy Soaps: Liberalism Without Women
by: Allison McCracken / DePaul University
What’s old is new again on television, as prime-time boy soap operas like Everwood, Jack and Bobby, Life As We Know It, Summerland, The Mountain, One Tree Hill, Smallville and The OC have come to replace girl-centered teen dramas like My So-Called Life, Popular, and Buffy.