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 ‘Listening closely’ to mediated intimacies and podcast intimacies in Song Exploder(1/08/2023) Clarke K; Bjork CIntimacy 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.Item "‘Anybody May Look Smart!’: The Smart Aesthetic and Women Film Stars in 1930s Hollywood(Taylor and Francis Group, 3/04/2023) Duncan PAs Maria DiBattista has shown (2003, 332), the ascendance of figures like Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn during Hollywood’s depression decade (1930–1939) marked the rise of a new breed of woman film star: the “smart girl.” These stars were smart in two senses. Yes, they were quick-witted and quick-tongued—proto-feminist fodder for the newly egalitarian vision of (re-)marriage peddled in 1930s screwball comedy. Yet they were also smart in a new, aesthetic sense, embodying a “smart aesthetic” that marked a shift away from the formal, affective, informational and gendered logics of glamour. For contemporary commentators on 1930s Hollywood, these stars’ smart mouths and their equally smart dresses were in clear accord—and, in part as a result of this apparent accord, the smart aesthetic earned a reputation as a progressive aesthetic formation that both expressed and reinforced the feminist potential of the new strain of “smart girls” on screen. This essay, however, complicates this view by at once elaborating and unpicking the links between these two registers of smartness. Through an analysis of the smart aesthetic as it emerged across coverage in 1930s fan periodicals, it contends that the smart aesthetic’s progressive promise may have been more apparent than actual.Item Public Relations and Participatory Culture: Fandom, Social Media and Community Engagement. Routledge, 2016. Edited by Amber L. Hutchins and Natalie T. J. Tindall(The University of Newcastle, 2016) Swiatek LMA book review for Public Relations and Participatory Culture: Fandom, Social Media and Community Engagement. Routledge, 2016. Edited by Amber L. Hutchins and Natalie T. J. TindallItem Telling stories about farming: Mediated authenticity and New Zealand's Country Calendar(SAGE Publications, 2022-01) Fountaine S; Bulmer SMediated authenticity in New Zealand’s Country Calendar (CC) television program is explored from the perspective of its producers, and rural and urban audiences. Paradoxically, CC is understood as both “real” and “honest” television and a constructed, idyllic version of the rural good life in New Zealand. Techniques and devices such as a predictable narrative arc, consistent narration, invisible reporting and directing, and naturalized sound and vision contribute to the show’s predictability, ordinariness, spontaneity and im/perfection, mediating an authentic yet aspirational view of farming life. We elucidate how factual, primetime television contributes to a shared national sense of “who we are” while navigating different audience experiences and expectations. At stake is New Zealanders’ attachment to rural identity, which underpins public policy commitments to the farming sector, at a time when new agricultural politics are increasingly contested.Item Multiplicities and the subject: Rethinking a mix-of-attributes approach in the digital world(University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, 1/01/2015) Pearson EE; Elliot GIt has been 30 years since Clark made his call to focus on fundamental structures of media rather than media formats (such as radio or television) and more than 10 years since Eveland proposed a mix-of-attributes approach to media effects. This article suggests that it is time for a reevaluation of the mix-of-attributes approach, noting that there is a continued focus on format when studying media content. We argue for rethinking the assumptions that preempt a mix-of-attributes approach. As a way of accounting for the complexities of how messages move in the digital media ecology, beyond the constraints of singular media formats, we first invoke the concept of multiplicities (concurrent engagement with multiple information sources) and then propose that the role of the subject be foregrounded within a revised mix-of-attributes approach to studying media effects in the digital age.Item 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.Item Relationships and reputation: Managing intercultural health communication issues(University of Newcastle, 26/07/2021) Brunton M; Galloway CItem Memories that Don't Weaken: Seth and Walter Benjamin(2004) Postema B
