The Wedding Spectacle Across Contemporary Media and Culture

The Wedding Spectacle Across Contemporary Media and Culture

Author: Jilly Boyce Kay

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-24

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0429997817

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This book interrogates the hyper-visibility and stubborn endurance of the wedding spectacle across media and culture in the current climate. The wide-ranging chapters consider why the symbolic power of weddings is intensifying at a time when marriage as an institution appears to be in decline – and they offer new insights into the shifting and complex gender politics of contemporary culture. The collection is a feminist project but does not straight-forwardly renounce the wedding spectacle. Rather, the diverse contributions offer close analyses of the myriad forms and practices of the wedding spectacle, from reality television and cinematic film to wedding videography and bridal boutiques. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, the chapters illuminate the paradoxes, contradictions, disappointments, cruelties and pleasures that are intimately bound up with the wedding spectacle. Written by leading and emerging feminist scholars, the chapters range across different national and cultural contexts to explore how the gender politics of weddings are changing and adapting to a new cultural and social landscape. This in-depth analysis of the wedding spectacle will appeal to academics and researchers in the fields of gender and mass media, cultural studies, feminist studies, and intercultural communication.


Imagining "We" in the Age of "I"

Imagining

Author: Mary Harrod

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-29

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1000404625

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Winner, MeCCSA Edited Collection of the Year, MeCCSA Outstanding Achievement Awards 2022 In the early twenty-first century shifts in gender and sexuality, work and mobility patterns and especially technology have provoked interest in perceived threats to social bonding on a global scale. This edited collection explores the fracturing of couple culture but also its persistence. Looking at a variety of media sites—including film, television, popular print fiction, new media and new technologies—this volume’s diverse range of contributors examine how mediated scenes of intimacy proliferate, while real-life experiences are cast in a newly uncertain light. The collection thus challenges a latent but growing tendency towards perceptions of romantic decline, in a variety of cultural contexts and with attention to the impact of COVID-19. This is an accessible and timely collection suitable for scholars in gender studies, media, cultural studies and communication studies.


Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture

Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture

Author: Anthea Taylor

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-29

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 042977298X

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This intellectually vibrant volume is the first collection to deal with Australian celebrity in ways that account for both cultural and gendered specificities, demonstrating how gendered ways of imagining Australia are reinforced and contested in celebrity representations and self-presentations. Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture engages with celebrities across a diverse range of fields – actors, journalists, athletes, comedians, writers, and television personalities – and in doing so critically reflects upon different forms of Australian fame and the media platforms and practices that sustain them. Authors in this volume engage directly with pertinent issues relating to gender and sexuality, including celebrity feminism and the generative capacity of feminist rage; normative femininity and its instability; hegemonic masculinities; and queerness and its (in)visibility. Contributors also intervene in a number of ongoing debates in media and cultural studies more broadly, including those around the politics and affordances of digital media; whiteness and Australia’s colonial histories; celebrity labour; and methodologies for celebrity studies. This timely collection urges scholars of celebrity to attend further both to the gendered nature of celebrity culture and to local conditions of production and consumption. This book will be of key interest to researchers and graduate students in cultural studies, television and film studies, digital media studies, critical race and whiteness studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literary studies.


The Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary Turkey

The Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary Turkey

Author: Hilal Alkan

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-05-20

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 075561741X

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In Turkey, the Justice and Development Party government has introduced new regulations about reproductive rights, and shifted family and gender policies. Women's central role in reproductive and domestic work was swiftly reaffirmed, and abortion and IVF were newly debated. Taking Turkey as the case study, this is the first book to examine the various ways neoliberal modes of governing women's bodies interact with conservative and authoritarian measures. The contributions focus on reproduction, maternity and sexuality, to explore the three main areas of governmental interventions into the female body. Topics for discussion include: the expansion of IVF and egg markets, the privatization of gynaecological and obstetrical care, differential treatment of poor and ethnic minority women's fertility/sexuality, and women's multiple responses to these shifts. While focusing on Turkey, the book presents analytical tools applicable under rising authoritarianisms and conservatisms worldwide.


Tweenhood

Tweenhood

Author: Melanie Kennedy

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-10-30

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1788316649

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A powerful female, pre-adolescent, consumer demographic has emerged in tandem with girls becoming more visible in popular culture since the 1990s. Yet the cultural anxiety that this has caused has received scant academic attention. In Tweenhood, Melanie Kennedy rectifies this and examines mainstream, pre-adolescent girls' films, television programmes and celebrities from 2004 onwards, including A Cinderella Story (2004), Hannah Montana (2006) and Camp Rock (2008). Her book forges a dialogue between post-feminism, film and television, celebrity and most importantly; the figure of the tween. Kennedy examines how these media texts, which are so key to tween culture, address and construct their target audience by helping them to 'choose' an appropriately feminine identity. Tweenhood then, she argues, is transient and a discursive construct whose unpacking highlights the deification of celebrity and femininity within its culture.


Running the Family Firm

Running the Family Firm

Author: Laura Clancy

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2021-09-28

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 152614932X

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In recent decades, the global wealth of the rich has soared to leave huge chasms of wealth inequality. This book argues that we cannot talk about inequalities in Britain today without talking about the monarchy. Running the Family Firm explores the postwar British monarchy in order to understand its economic, political, social and cultural functions. Although the monarchy is usually positioned as a backward-looking, archaic institution and an irrelevant anachronism to corporate forms of wealth and power, the relationship between monarchy and capitalism is as old as capitalism itself. This book frames the monarchy as the gold standard corporation: The Firm. Using a set of case studies – the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince Harry, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle – it contends that The Firm’s power is disguised through careful stage management of media representations of the royal family. In so doing, it extends conventional understandings of what monarchy is and why it matters.


The Neoliberal Self in Bollywood

The Neoliberal Self in Bollywood

Author: Namrata Rele Sathe

Publisher: Intellect Books

Published: 2024-02-21

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1789388813

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This book explores the consequences of unbridled expansion of neoliberal values within India through the lens of popular film and culture. The focus of the book is the neoliberal self, which, far from being a stable marker of urban, liberal, millennial Indian identity, has a schizophrenic quality, one that is replete with contradictions and oppositions, unable to sustain the weight of its own need for self-promotion, optimism, and belief in a narrative of progress and prosperity that has marked mainstream cultural discourse in India. The unstable and schizophrenic neoliberal identity that is the concern of this book, however, belies this narrative and lays bare the sense of precarity and inherent inequality that neoliberal regimes confer upon their subjects. The analysis is explicitly political and draws upon theories of feminist media studies, popular culture analyses, and film studies to critique mainstream Hindi cinema texts produced in the last two decades. Rele Sathe also examine a variety of other peripheral ‘texts’ in her analysis such as the film star, the urban space, web series, YouTube videos, and social media content.


Media Spectacle

Media Spectacle

Author: Douglas Kellner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-08-29

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1134493959

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During the mid-1990s, the O.J. Simpson murder trial dominated the media in the United States and were circulated throughout the world via global communications networks. The case became a spectacle of race, gender, class and violence, bringing in elements of domestic melodrama, crime drama and legal drama. According to this fascinating new book, the Simpson case was just one example of what the author calls 'media spectacle' - a form of media culture that puts contemporary dreams, nightmares, fantasies and values on display. Through the analysis of several such media spectacles - including Elvis, The X Files, Michael Jordan, and the Bill Clinton sex scandals - Doug Kellner draws out important insights into media, journalism, the public sphere and politics in an era of new technologies. In this excellent follow up to his best selling Media Culture, Kellner's fascinating new volume delivers an informative read for students of sociology, culture and media.


Media Spectacle and Insurrection, 2011

Media Spectacle and Insurrection, 2011

Author: Douglas Kellner

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2012-11-02

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1441185771

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Douglas Kellner elaborates upon his well known theory which explores how media spectacle can be used as a key to interpreting contemporary culture and politics. Grounded in both cultural and communication theory, Kellner argues that politics, war, news and information, media events (like terrorist attacks or royal weddings), and now democratic uprisings, are currently organized around media spectacles, and demonstrates how and why this has occurred. Rooting the discussions within key events of 2011 - including the war in Libya, the Arab Uprisings, the wedding of William Windsor to Kate Middleton, the killing of Osama bin Laden, and the Occupy movements - Media Spectacle and Insurrection, 2011 makes a highly relevant contribution to the field of media and communication studies. It offers a fresh perspective on the theme of contemporary media spectacle and politics by adopting an approach that is based around critical social and cultural theory. This series gives students a strong critical grounding from which to examine new media.


The Bride Factory

The Bride Factory

Author: Erika Engstrom

Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781433117466

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In response to the growing scope and popularity of wedding-related offerings and the media attention given to celebrity and royal weddings, The Bride Factory critically examines various bridal media outlets, artifacts, and the messages they convey about women today. The book departs from conventional wisdom and other treatments of the bridal industry as a scholarly topic by revealing how media portray women in modern American society, and how these portrayals reflect feminism and femininity and illustrate the hegemony created by these media. The book discusses the portrayal of women as brides in media coverage throughout history; the various forms of wedding media, including print, television, and the Internet; how bridal media forward ideals of feminine beauty; how reality wedding programs depict brides - and the new «bridezilla» - as agents of control over their perfect day; the role of men in wedding planning; and the extent to which the white wedding ideal is embraced or resisted, with special attention given to alternative wedding media. Cohesive and multidisciplinary in its approach, The Bride Factory is the first major publication to shed critical light on bridal media and their feminist implications.