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 'Just doing their job?' Journalism, online critique and the political resignation of Metiria Turei(SAGE Publications, 18/03/2019) Phelan S; Salter LAAbstract When Metiria Turei resigned as co-leader of the Green party of Aotearoa New Zealand in August 2017, there was clear disagreement about the role played by journalism in her resignation. The controversy began after Turei confessed to not disclosing full information to the authorities about her personal situation as a welfare recipient in the 1990s. Journalists insisted they were simply ‘doing their job’ by interrogating Turei’s story, while online supporters accused the media of hounding her. This article examines the media politics of the controversy by putting Carlson’s concept of metajournalistic discourse into theoretical conversation with Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, especially their concept of antagonism. We explore what the case says about traditional journalistic authority in a media system where journalism is increasingly vulnerable to online critique from non-journalists.Item Journalism ‘fixers’, hyper-precarity and the violence of the entrepreneurial self(1/07/2023) Ashraf SI; Phelan SThe figure of the so-called journalism ‘fixer’ has received overdue academic attention in recent years. Scholars have highlighted the role played by fixers in international news reporting, a role historically obscured in the mythos of the Western foreign correspondent. Recent research has produced useful insights about the work done by fixers in ‘the shadows’ of the international news economy. However, it has also tended towards a domestication of the role, where the local ‘fixer’ finds their place in a collaborative relationship with those officially consecrated as ‘journalists’ from elsewhere. This article presents a critical theoretical analysis of this functional role, building on the image of the fixer as a kind of ‘entrepreneur’. Rather than interpreting the latter designation as a source of empowerment or agency, we approach it as a euphemism for the hyper-precarious and exploitative underpinnings of fixer-labour. Our argument draws on different theoretical sources, including Foucault-inspired work on the entrepreneurial rationality of the neoliberal self, Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, and Rancière’s concept of politics. The theoretical argument is supported by the first author’s reflections of working as a Pakistani-based ‘fixer’ during the U.S-led war on terror.Item Draw a Thousand Words: Signification and Narration in Comics Images(2007) Postema BItem 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 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 Neoliberalism and authoritarian media cultures: a Vietnamese perspective(1/03/2022) Yến-Khanh N; Phelan S; Gray EThis study asks how the concept of neoliberalism can be adapted to a critical analysis of authoritarian political and media cultures that cannot be adequately understood through the Western-centric narratives that dominate the literature on neoliberalism. We examine the case of Vietnam, a country where the relationship between the media system and the political system is defined primarily by the power of the party-state autocracy. We explore the extent to which neoliberalism is a useful theoretical category for grasping the relationship between state, market, and civil society actors in Vietnam, especially as it relates to the media system. Supported by an analysis of how Vietnamese news media cover healthcare and education for people with autism, we conclude by extrapolating three theoretical-methodological guidelines that will be useful to researchers examining the relationship between neoliberalism and authoritarian political and media cultures in different countries.
