International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ahead of Print. In recent years an increasing number of cultural products have come under fire for moral or political reasons, such as racist or sexist content, in the mainstream (White) public sphere. An outstanding example is the classic 1939 film Gone with the Wind (GWTW), which is loved by many but also strongly criticised for glorifying the American Antebellum South and ignoring the inhumanity of slavery. This case study explores how fans of the film (and the novel on which it was based) negotiate their appreciation of GWTW and these controversia ..read more

International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ahead of Print. The concept of resilience has become widely used to account for how people respond both to acute crisis and, increasingly, to protracted precarity. Yet, cultural studies theorists have also vigorously critiqued resilience discourse as a tool of neoliberal governmentality. In this article, we turn from the discourse of resilience to the practice of resilience. We argue, through a case of theatre students and recent graduates in Ghana, that the practice of resilience can be both individual and collective. Moreover, we show that resilienc ..read more

International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ahead of Print. The concept of the Synthetic is developed to trace and trouble the prevailing popular mythology of Alberta's oil sands and place the omnipresence of petro-hegemony into focus in a time of crisis and transition. The Synthetic is theorized as a period of petroculture beginning in the late 1960s with the rise of Alberta's oil sands industry together with a rise in oil sands narratives, docudrama, and the emergence of mediated or synthetic politics reliant upon processed images. Attention focuses on three mediated moments within the Synthe ..read more

International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ahead of Print. In this article we discuss the entanglement of apps, mobilities, and migration – and the way that apps work as migrant infrastructure in a Covid context. We develop our analysis through a case study of Singapore's response to the pandemic during 2020–22, centred on the control of migrant workers through the use of Covid apps. We argue that Covid apps enact ‘managed inequality’ in blatant as well as subtle ways for migrants and the societies in which they live and belong ..read more

International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ahead of Print. This article foregrounds the benefits and challenges of deploying remote interviews to investigate the digital practices of older adults from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds during a series of stay-at-home orders in in 2020 and 2021 in Victoria, Australia. By critically examining the employment of technologically mediated data collection (via video and phone call), we reconceptualize remote fieldwork as a collection of ethnographically significant field events. We draw on the socio material approach to map the ..read more

International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ahead of Print. The article relates taxidermy to oil in the subculture associated with the oil sands in the Canadian West. Kitsch as it relates to postmodernism, and postmodernism to oil, share a sense of melancholy; an affect which is explored through the author's own practice as a visual artist and in the work of Claire Morgan, an artist from the UK. The affect of oil, and its implications as to mortality on the landscape are examined through an engagement with objects considered as ‘remains’ sourced from the local area, generally in or near the tow ..read more

International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ahead of Print. The fandom community has been one of the most engaging and active segments in the global participatory culture. However, fans face multilevel and intertwined constraints from various social forces while seeking pleasure and fantasies. This study zooms in on a real-person shipping fan community in China where shippers are doubly marginalized as they fantasize about two male idols being in a romantic relationship in a society with both the derogative projection of fans and low levels of acceptance of same-sex relationships. Relying on a ..read more

International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ahead of Print. This article reflects on how offline and online everyday life coexists for encamped, young Karen living in protracted displacement. As part of the special issue ‘Cultures of (im)mobile entanglements’, edited by Earvin Cabalquinto and Koen Leurs, I centre the voices of young Karen living in Mae La refugee camp in Thailand and unpack how personal and social relationships are built and maintained physically in the camp, as well as in digitally mediated spaces. I focus on the tensions of (im)mobility and how life and presence were mediated ..read more

International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ahead of Print. This article examines the tension between public gender expressions and official regulations in mainland China. Utilizing a critical discourse analysis, we investigate a transition in state-initiated criticism and censorship against the danmei genre and male effeminacy. Focusing on the pandemic period, we use official regulations and state media feature articles as data, ‘reticent / han-xu’ politics as a grounding theoretical basis, and statements from mainstream media platforms as secondary resources. We argue that han-xu politics fun ..read more

International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ahead of Print. Some of the earliest writings to which we have access introduce the myth of a human child raised by wolves. Enkidu is the “wild” friend of Gilgamesh in the eponymous Sumerian epic; Romulus and Remus of Rome are the infants who suckle from the she-wolf Lupa; and Mowgli's story has been told ever since he was conceived by Rudyard Kipling in The Jungle Book. While this wolf story might seem to imagine a friendly way of living with other-than-human beings, its contemporary uptake in media also serves as a prop for white supremacist orienta ..read more