Browsing by Author "Clarke K"

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    “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend”? Tracing the implications of a song in Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
    (2/05/2023) Clarke K
    When Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) dressed as Lorelei (Marilyn Monroe) from 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes performs “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Cathy Yan’s 2020 film Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), links are drawn between 70 years of film history and women’s representation on screen. In this article, I put various iterations of “Diamonds” into dialogue to explore how this moment in Birds of Prey might be understood. I consider this scene as central to understanding Quinn’s “emancipation,” with the representation of women’s security and control over their lives key themes in the history of this scene. The return to this song throughout the histories of film and video enables a sense of solidarity across time, acknowledging the systemic problems that remain unresolved, and contemplation of this can alter the ways we understand characters and texts, past, present, and future.
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    ‘Listening closely’ to mediated intimacies and podcast intimacies in Song Exploder
    (1/08/2023) Clarke K; Bjork C
    Intimacy is an important and growing concept in both media studies and podcast studies. But research regarding intimacies in both disciplines has yet to fully account for the connection between sound and normativity, which is essential to podcasting and important to mediated intimacies more broadly. In this article, we mobilise scholarship from these two fields to analyse the award-winning music podcast Song Exploder. Our study highlights that attending to intimacies in podcasting involves both analysing how the story structure aligns with social norms and listening critically to the ways the sound design and audio editing complements and complicates these intimate stories. We contend that identifying the intersection of sound and normativity in this podcast contributes to understanding the cultural work of podcasting and underscores the key role of sound in mediated intimacies.