Journal Articles
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915
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Item “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 KWhen 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.Item Seven theses about the so-called culture war(s) (or some fragmentary notes on ‘cancel culture’)(1/01/2023) Phelan SHow might we understand the forms of mediatized politics that are signified under the dreary heading of the ‘culture war(s)’? This article addresses this question in the form of seven theses. Informed by a distinct theoretical reading of Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of antagonism, I highlight the anti-political character of culture war discourses, particularly as amplified in a public culture dominated by the social media industry. The seven theses are prefaced by an overview of the category of ‘cancel culture’, in light of its recent prominence as an object of culture war discourse. I highlight the primary role of far-right actors in the normalization of culture-war conflicts that persecute different identities, but also critique the online left’s entanglement in sedimented antagonisms that primarily benefit reactionary actors. The theses stress the repressive effects of culture war discourses on our collective political imagination. They redescribe some of the fault lines of a familiar terrain by thematizing the differences between a moralized and radical democratic understanding of political antagonism.Item Shameful sins: a Reaction to Capitalist Ethics in No quiero quedarme sola y vacía (2006)(Purdue University Press, 14/12/2018) Bortolotto M; Chen, F-JIn her article “A Sinful Reaction to Capitalist Ethics in No quiero quedarme sola y vacía (2006)” María Celina Bortolotto analyzes how Lozada’s characterization of the main character, La Loca, questions the ideals of free agency offered by consumerist capitalism and the urban gay male ideal under the promise of a liberating gay lifestyle in a social context defined by identity politics. The novel is a fictionalized autobiographical account of Puerto Rican author Angel Lozada’s misadventures in the early 2000s gay scene in New York. This essay plays with the punitive sense of the word “capital” in the seven capital sins as a thematic thread to invite a reflection on the concepts of virtue and value constructed under U.S. Protestant capitalism: the former as emancipatory guilt; the latter as the specific status society grants to objects, practices and people creating, in turn, subjects whose value is purely economic versus those whose lives are deemed (morally) valuable in themselves.Item Editorial, Special Issue: music/media/politics(1/03/2015) Wilson OR; Overell RItem Access, Place and Australian Live Music(2016-06) Carter D; Whiting SItem Business communication of drivers and barriers for climate change engagement by Top New Zealand, Australian and Global Fortune 500 Corporations(Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA), 18/06/2019) Thaker JA small number of corporations are responsible for two-thirds of historical global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. While many studies have evaluated business communication about climate change, they have several limitations, including an understudy of businesses outside the U.S. and Europe, and a lack of cross-country benchmarking. This study compares 30 of the largest New Zealand companies with top Australian and Fortune Global 500 businesses on communication of drivers and barriers related to climate change engagement. A quantitative analysis of 90 corporations’ latest reports finds that the most frequently reported drivers are external and internal stakeholders, regulatory concerns, and commitment to a low carbon economy. Few organisations report barriers such as economic growth, process and technology factors, and regulatory uncertainty. New Zealand companies lag behind Australian corporations who communicate equally as well as the top Global 500 on different dimensions of drivers and barriers for engagement. Factors driving business engagement with climate change and its implications on business communication, are highlighted.Item Diminishing Dreams: The Scoping Down of the Music NFT(M/C - Media and Culture, 4/04/2022) Rogers I; Carter D; Morgan BA; Edington AIn a 2019 report for the International Journal of Communication, Baym et al. positioned distributed blockchain ledger technology, and what would subsequently be referred to as Web3, as a convening technology. Riffing off Barnett, a convening technology “initiates and serves as the focus of a conversation that can address issues far beyond what it may ultimately be able to address itself” (403). The case studies for the Baym et al. research—early, aspirant projects applying the blockchain concept to music publishing and distribution—are described in the piece as speculations or provocations concerning music’s commercial and social future. What is convened in this era (pre-2017 blockchain music discourse and practice) is the potential for change: a type of widespread, broadly discussed, reimagination of the 21st-century music industries, productive precisely because near-future applications suggest the realisation of what Baym et al. call dreams. In this article, we aim to examine the Web3 music field as it lies some years later. Taking the latter half of 2021 as our subject, we present a survey of where music then resided within Web3, focussing on how the dreams of Baym et al. have morphed and evolved, and materialised and declined, in the intervening years. By investigating the discourse and functionality of 2021’s current crop of music NFTs—just one thread of music Web3’s far-reaching aspiration, but a potent and accessible manifestation nonetheless—we can make a detailed analysis of concept-led application. Volatility remains throughout the broader sector, and all of the projects listed here could be read as conditionally short-term and untested, but what they represent is a series of clearly evolved case studies of the dream, rich precisely because of what is assumed and disregarded.Item Editorial: Surveillance, copyright, privacy(Media NZ, 1/12/2014) Farnsworth J; Fisher K; Pearson EEItem Interactive cinema is an oxymoron, but may not always be(Game Studies, 30/09/2012) Veale KR"Interactive Cinema" is a term that has been associated with videogames within historical media discourse, particularly since the early nineties due to the proliferation of CD-ROM technology. It is also a fundamental misnomer, since the processes of experiential engagement presented by the textual structures of videogames and cinema are mutually exclusive. The experience of cinematic texts is defined, in part, by the audience's lack of ability to alter events unfolding within the film's diegesis. In comparison, the experience of videogames is tied inextricably to the player's investment and involvement within the game's textual diegesis, and within a Heideggerian world-of-concern. However, there has been a recent development that suggests a bridge between these two structures: texts which are less defined by their ludic qualities than by a set structure - but where the affective qualities of the experience rely entirely on the direct involvement of the person engaging with the text. These are a storytelling form which are neither "played" or "watched," and it may be that "interactive cinema" is an appropriate way of conceptualising these experiences.
