Driving toward disability rhetorics: narrative,crip theory,and eco-ability in Mad Max: Fury Road

We argue that the film Mad Max: Fury Road challenges stigmas associated with disability by conceptualizing a world that embraces the differences between disabled and abled bodies. Drawing on crip theory and eco-ability scholarship, we examine how Mad Max: Fury Road’s narrative criticizes normative and ableist understandings about the body by imagining a world that constructs accessible and valued spaces for the disabled. Dolmage [Dolmage, J. (2013). Disability Rhetoric. New York: Syracuse University Press] argues that scholars need to situate rhetoric on the experiences of disabled bodies to generate new meanings about disability. Mad Max: Fury Road generates such meanings by challenging normative and stigmatizing conceptions of disability through positive and nuanced representations of disabled bodies.     

Transforming Work into Play and Play into Work within the Domestic Sphere

This paper examines representations of urban domestic sphere and communication technologies in Playboy during the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that Playboy carved out a space for a seamless relationship between work (production) and leisure/free time (reproduction) in the domestic sphere, specifically the bachelor pad, which contributed to current notions of the live–work lifestyle. Combining work, consumption, and leisure through technology within the home permits the erosion of boundaries between work and free time. Consequently, advances in communication and entertainment technologies, consumerism and Playboy's celebration of the urban bachelor pad contributed to current definitions of the good life and reflected the paradigm shift to the post-industrial economy and the subsequent emergence of the knowledge economy.     

Telenovela reception in rural Brazil: gendered readings and sexual mores

In The Cattle King, a Brazilian telenovela, melodramatic elements of class ascension, love and betrayal, adultery, and pre‐marital sex played a central role in the lives of the main characters. This ethnographic study of viewers in Macambira, a small rural community in the backlands of northeast Brazil, discusses how these rural viewers appropriated telenovelas in their daily lives and how the meanings assigned to the texts were interpreted according to their own values and beliefs about gender roles, relationships, and sexuality. I argue that the geographical isolation and the local patriarchal culture mediated the process of reception, interpretation, and appropriation of telenovelas. The isolation in which Macambira is located in relation to the urban representations in the telenovela narratives intensified the perceived gap between the local patriarchal culture and the urban reality constructed in the television text.     

Among the Sensuous: Listening to Film,Listening to the Philippines

In this paper, I argue that listening to a film is as significant as watching it; in spite of what seems like a formalist argument, I examine in what ways such an approach intervenes in the production of knowledge around Philippine history and Filipina/o bodies. In Kidlat Tahimik's film, Mababangong Bangungot, an overprivileging of the visual aids and abets the film's masculinist nationalism, despite the best efforts of critics to find a “third term.” That third term just might come from listening to the film, which delivers its own kind of postcolonial and feminist critique, one which impacts how we think about contemporary communication and cultural studies.     

Reference in a 3-D Virtual World: Preliminary Observations on Library Outreach in “Second Life”

ABSTRACT

As technologies continue to evolve, the library will need to explore new ways to communicate with the public. One of the newest technologies is a 3-D virtual world software called Second Life. Second Life presents new opportunities and challenges for reference librarians to support the information needs of that community.     

The Affections of the American Pickers: Commodity Fetishism in Control Society

This article examines the widespread popularity and criticism of American Pickers, a show that transforms commodity fetishism into televisual fare. The show presents the pickers as model consumers through three types of images-of-affection: action-images where exchange is presented as reality, affection-images that portray positive affection as spiritual possibility, and impulse-images that naturalize production as a source of value. Such representations have generated significant criticism for exploitation. I argue that these criticisms, although instructive about resistance in control society, remain limited because they consider Pickers a representation of reality rather than an active engineering of it. Instead, Pickers should be envisioned as an expression of control society, a business strategy that circulates images in order to generate feedback that can then be tracked, targeted, and channeled. Such strategies enable Pickers to control markets by transforming products and directing access. Focusing criticism on the representations misses these mechanisms and thus lacks efficacy. Instead, Pickers’ representations, despite exposing rather than concealing commodity fetishism, serve to create a second fetish, one that masks strategies for controlling markets and creating unequal access.     

Queering communication studies: a Journal of Applied Communication Research forum

ABSTRACT

Genders and sexualities continue to remain underexplored in the field of communication studies and the academy in general. This essay examines possibilities for incorporating queer perspectives into communication studies. At the invitation of the Journal of Applied Communication Research editor, 9 communication scholars who use queer theory or queer perspectives in their own work responded to a series of questions addressing how queer theory and perspectives can be used in the discipline, both by those who are new to queer theorizing and those who are looking to expand their knowledge and practices. The answers to these questions provide an understanding of what queer theory is and its relationship with LGBT studies; allow practical considerations for incorporating queer perspectives into communication scholarship in multiple methodological areas; offer considerations for welcoming queer voices in the classroom, the communication discipline, and the larger academy; and indicate several scholarly resources for those who want to learn more about queer theory and LGBT studies.     

“There was Sex but no Sexuality*:” Critical Cataloging and the Classification of Asexuality in LCSH

Abstract

This paper examines the addition of “asexuality” to the Library of Congress Subject Headings as a case study from which to examine the critical cataloging movement. Beginning with a review of some of the theoretical and practical issues around subject access for minoritized and marginalized sexualities, this paper then contextualizes, historicizes, and introduces the critical cataloging movement to the literature, situating it within a larger and longer history of radical cataloging. It will define critical cataloging as a social justice-oriented style of radical cataloging that places an emphasis on radical empathy, outreach work, and recognizes the importance of information maintenance and care. This paper introduces the concept of “catalogic warrant” to characterize the process of “reading” the catalog to examine the harm or benefit of terms on users and the wider library community.     

Feeling for the State: Affective Labor and Anti-Terrorism Training in US Hotels

This essay argues that Eye on Awareness?, a recent deployment of the If You See Something, Say Something? Department of Homeland Security campaign in US hotels, disciplines workers in order to organize their senses for the state, a process I term “feeling for the state,” by subtly redefining what it means to see the terrorist as what it means to feel the terrorist. I argue that feeling for the state throughout the training legitimizes expanded sovereign power and organizes affective labor to police racialized bodies and behaviors. I conclude by offering implications for readings of biopolitics that foreground affect.     

Shiny Happy People Holding Guns: 21st-Century Images of War

When U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan filter their war experiences through visual aesthetics characteristic of contemporary mobile messaging culture, they produce a new visual discourse for war in the Internet age. A critical reading of 250 Facebook photos reveals an emphasis on colloquial representations of young adult life: hanging out, goofing off, playing games, and wearing costumes. For example, one image depicts two Marines in full desert camouflage posing for a picture while wearing skeleton masks. The Marine on the left looks down at his digital camera, either reviewing a photo or getting ready to hand it off to the “shooter.” The gear in the photo (masks aside) suggests that they are prepared for a combat scenario. Mortars and rockets could hit their base at any moment. The silliness and nonchalance captured in the photo seems antithetical to their physical locale, especially a condition of imminent danger. Most audiences would not recognize this as a combat scenario. Photos like this reflect the ways in which our shifting visual repertoire—with emphases on friendship, domesticity, and spontaneity—modifies visual discourses for contemporary war.     

Disposition versus situation: Neurocommunlcology and the influence of trait apprehension versus situational factors on state public speaking anxiety

Research indicates that individuals with elevated levels of public speaking anxiety report significantly different mental representations of the public speaking context, when compared to individuals with lower levels of anxiety. To examine the effect of the differences in mental representations, narratives for three public speaking contexts were developed. Results indicated that disposition (i.e., trait apprehension) was a better predictor of state anxiety when giving an impromptu speech. Situational factors (i.e., importance, skills, impression), however, were better predictors of state anxiety when either giving a speech to a 5^th grade class or giving a speech to friends.     

Archival ambience and sensory memory: Generating queer intimacies in the settler colonial archive

The shift to archives as rhetorical places creates opportunities to examine environmental accessibility, the role of archives in legitimating official public memory, and tactics to evoke memory at the margins. I conceptualize the relation between archival environments, feeling, and memory as “archival ambience.” Ambience challenges modern theories of invention and foregrounds the entanglements of sensory culture, corporeality, sensation, feeling, and memory. Ambience reimagines invention and circulation as the relational materiality of bodies and as central to the generation of intimacies. This essay models a sensory engagement with archives at the American Heritage Center and Grace Hebard and Agnes Wergeland collections. Guided by the settler colonial environment of the American Heritage Center (AHC) and what remains of Hebard and Wergeland, I craft a queer sense of their “intimate friendship” and argue that perception of Hebard and Wergeland's intimate friendship takes shape through the sensory culture of the AHC and that their queerness is an effect of the archive.     

The wounded man: Foxcatcher and the incoherence of white masculine victimhood

American cinema has recently favored representations of white men as victims of socioeconomic and political change. Recent scholarship on white masculinity suggests that representations of male victimhood enable white men to disavow that hegemonic white masculinity still fundamentally structures society. This essay argues that Hollywood’s wounded man similarly provides white masculinity with stable footing. I illustrate how the unintelligibility of screen masculinity evades criticism and, further, how melancholic male dramas nurture a traumatic attachment to victimhood. Examining the film Foxcatcher (2014), I show how unmasked portraits of white male victimhood function as counterparts to the hard-bodied action hero. The filmmaker’s effort to parse the distinction between material and superficial wounds reifies the experience of noble suffering as a superlative expression of aggrieved white manhood. Foxcatcher’s fragmented portrayal of white masculinity illustrates the elasticity of victimhood even where “crisis” suggests that white masculinity is open to revision.     

When Off-Campus Means Virtual Campus: The Academic Library in Second Life

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how a library's consistent policy of accessibility and foresight positioned itself to serve its students, faculty and staff in the virtual world of Second Life. Always ahead of the technological curve, this library has been the front-runner in providing services to distance learners via text messaging, “chat,” e-mail, and telephone services and via its laptop librarian project across the campus. It now is poised and ready to provide service in Second Life. Collaboration between the library and teaching faculty culminated in the creation, development, and furnishing of a library in Second Life, an environment that gives new meaning to “off-campus” learning. Without marketing, but as a visible presence, the Second Life library was able to attract both off-campus guests and affiliated students and faculty and even participated in campus-wide projects. This experiment has enjoyed the support of both the university and library administration.     

Teaching in the Information Age:

As students grapple with new and often confusing information technologies, librarians must be able to adapt their teaching methods to address student anxieties, while simultaneously enhancing student learning. The development of activities which allow students to both confront and think critically about new material and concepts is one way to accomplish this. This article considers student apprehension when encountering new information technologies (CD-ROM technology in particular) and proposes a variety of active learning exercises within the framework of four questions that Abigail Loumis and Deborah Fink ("Instruction: Gateway to the Virtual Library," in The Virtual Library: Visions and Realities, ed. Laverna M. Saunders, Westport, CT: Meckler, 1993, p. 48) suggest researchers in the virtual library should be taught when learning how to search electronic sources: (1) Where am I? (2) How do I do it? (3) What am I trying to do? (4) What do I do with it? The use of student journals as an effective tool for gauging student learning and encouraging critical thinking is also detailed.     

Handheld Serials

ABSTRACT

As computing becomes more portable, an ever-increasing number of people are dependent upon smartphones, personal digital assistants, webpads, and other wireless devices. This paper addresses the effect, if any, of these current and future wireless technologies on electronic journal publishing. Have these technologies impacted e-journal publishing to this point? What are the expectations and strategies of journal publishers in dealing with the changing technology? What special issues do these devices present regardimng licensing?     

The rebirth of European publishing: An Anglo-European perspective of “1992”

The Single European Market heralds the biggest and most exciting change in English-language publishing since the Anglo-American copyright agreement was signed a century ago. Now the change is being driven by economic factors; by social, educational, and cultural elements; and by dreams of an age in which publishing prospers in a totally literate world. Philip Attenborough has been Chairman of Hodder & Stoughton, London, since 1975 and has been with the firm for 32 years, serving as export manager, director, and sales director. He has been a member of the Publishers Association Council since 1976 (and was its President from 1983 to 1985). He is a Director of Book Tokens Ltd, Chairman of the British Council Publishers Advisory Committee, and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Publishers Association. He is a former member of the British Library Advisory Council.     

Mediated images of success: Hegemonic media representations and social justice

This activity highlights the concept of cultural hegemony, illustrating it by a reflection on the images of success and successful people portrayed in the media. The purpose of the exercise is to introduce students to this concept, and for them to examine how hegemonic views of others and the self affect the way they conceptualize success and perceive who a successful person is. Students will understand the role of the media in reproducing hegemonic representations of reality in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, and so on, and how these representations limit their world view and are detrimental for those who do not abide by the dominant stereotypical images. The exercise also intends to expose students to complex narratives of what success may mean beyond accumulation of wealth, competition, nationality, whiteness, and patriarchal values, and for them to reflect upon intersectionality, by challenging and critiquing dominant portrayals of human achievement.

Courses: Introduction to Media Studies, Introduction to Media and Culture, or any introductory communication course discussing media representation.

Objectives: Students will (1) identify the role of cultural hegemony in the mediated construction of success; (2) understand and critically evaluate how hegemonic media representations of gender, class, race, ethnicity, physical ability, national origin, and so on limit people’s world views about human achievement; and (3) self-reflect on their own representations of success and reframe “success” moving beyond hegemonic representations attached to patriarchy, heteronormativity, whiteness, physical ability, competition, and capitalist accumulation.     

Reinventing Privilege: The New (Gay) Man in Contemporary Popular Media

In recent years, the gay man/heterosexual woman couple configuration has become a genre unto itself in mediated popular culture, resulting in unprecedented mainstream visibility for gay men. Major mainstream films, such as My Best Friend's Wedding, Object of My Affection, and The Next Best Thing, showcase this combination as their centerpiece, as does the highly rated prime-time network situation comedy, Will & Grace. In this essay, I assess this particular performance of gay identity in order to discern what qualities render it – as presented in this configuration – not only acceptable but popular, given the heteronormative sensibilities that characterize the mainstream audience to which it is directed. I argue that, in these texts, homosexuality is not only recoded and normalized in these representations as consistent with privileged male heterosexuality but is articulated as extending heterosexual male privilege. In so doing, blatant sexism is reinvented and legitimized, and gay male identity simultaneously is defined by and renormalizes heteronormativity.