This piece is a continuation of a conversation started in Part I. Donna: In addition to Mulvey’s writing, Kavka’s (2020) work on “fuck-me” and “fuck-you” celebrities can be a useful lens to the fan perceptions of Girl Crush K-pop artists. Your discussion of HyunA’s overtly sexual yet “‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude” (p. 20) resonates with Kavka’s discussion of subversive (sexual) agency in some contemporary female celebrities: “the inversion of fuck-me to fuck-you implies a reversal of (sexual) agency, in the sense that I am doing the fucking, while, on the other hand, the rhetorical force of ..read more

(G)I-DLE. “Nxde” Concept Photos (Source: Cube Entertainment) Henry:  During my recent trip to Shanghai, I was introduced -- by Lenore -- to the music videos of [G]I-DLE and taken by the ways they seem to echo the themes and some of the style I associated with Madonna videos from the 1980s and 1990s and that some of my students here have compared to the Gwen Stefani videos of the early 2000s. I was struck by the quality of discussions they were generating among the young women of Lenore's generation in China and the ways they functioned as vehicles for popular feminist concepts from South ..read more

This post is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. This post features two video essays responding to the 96th Academy Award Best Picture winning film Oppenheimer (2023): Kai after Kai’s “The Guilt of Oppenheimer” and Ella Wright’s “Fission, Fusion, and Character in Oppenheimer.” I encourage you to pay particular attention to the sound in each piece, the careful dichotomies between loudness and silence in “Fission, Fusion, and Character in Oppenheimer” and the menacing yet also space age-y melodies of Kai after Kai’s origina ..read more

This post is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. This is a dialogic piece between Henry Jenkins and Kris Longfield that explores the three recent feminist re-tellings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Lisa Frankenstein (2024), The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster (2023), and Oscar-nominated Poor Things (2023). Henry Jenkins: I saw and enjoyed Lisa Frankenstein recently, which is the third feminist retelling of the Frankenstein myth I've seen in the past six months. In one (The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster), the woman is ..read more

This post is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. Barbie is a cultural icon. Invented by Ruth Hadler and first released in 1959 by toy manufacturer Mattel, ‘Barbie’ is a fashion doll that has had transformative impact on how children tell stories through play. In this context, Barbie is culturally polysemic: “brim with multiple meanings capable of attracting multiple types of individuals” (Rogers 1999, 2). According to Mary F. Rogers in the book Barbie Culture, such cultural icons are paradoxical, whereby “icons become suc ..read more

This is the latest in a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. Before the nominations for the 96th Academy Awards were even announced, I made the overly confident prediction that Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese, US 2023) would win Best Picture. As I write this post, the ceremony is approximately a week away, so I have no idea what the actual outcome will be. But my conviction in my initial prediction has diminished substantially in the intervening months. Although I watch the ceremony nearly every year, I do not pay e ..read more

This is the first of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. If ever there was a film of the moment, Oppenheimer must be it, right now. The film ends ominously with the image of the globe’s surface being consumed by (nuclear) fire (Figure 1), doing so at a time when the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set its Doomsday Clock, both in January 2023 and in January 2024, at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to the end of our world it has ever come since the clock’s inception in 1947. With two nuclear powers (Russia and Israel) current ..read more

Rodrigo Terra is an old-school transmedia evangelist who still maintains the systemic logic of developing storytelling projects with advanced immersion technologies for interactive content. His career is a great model of a hybrid researcher, with parallel academic and professional trajectories over more than 15 years of work in Brazil and abroad, especially related to virtual reality. Co-founder and Chief Technology Evangelist of ARVORE Immersive Experiences, Rodrigo Terra has won several international awards, including the first Primetime Emmy®️ in Brazil. He was awarded a Graduate in Adminis ..read more

With the evolution of media from the late 19th century onwards the ‘spectacle’ of serial killing moved beyond the realm of one-to-many, lean back and read-only media to be incorporated across our many-to-many, lean forward read-and-write 21st century digital environment. The new media landscape – where we do not live with, but in media - is not merely a state of having more media. Rather, it reflects (as much as it invites) a radically altered experience of being in the world, one that is at once collective and collaborative, inevitably shared and participatory (whether through surrendering ou ..read more

Forward COVID-19 lockdowns inspired the Civic Paths research group to explore how food is involved in civic imagination, the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions. Although physically isolated, we found ourselves connecting over food—making it, eating it, missing it, and dreaming about it. These everyday experiences allowed us to share, learn, and think of what could be: they fed our civic imagination. By organizing the Forum “Feeding the Civic Imagination” on Lateral, the journal of the Cultural Studies Association, we invited others ..read more