popular culture

CALL FOR CHAPTERS / CFP

We invite chapter proposals (300-500 words) for an edited volume of critical essays dealing with screenwriter Joseph Stefano and elements of horror in the 1960s television program The Outer Limits.

Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture is a double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to the study of representations and expressions of queerness in its various forms. Its contents are international in scope and represent a wide variety of disciplines, with a particular emphasis on perspectives and approaches from the humanities, social sciences, and the arts.

From the Socratic dialogues to post-modern cyberchats, it is only in and through communicative interaction that we can understand the world, people, and how things are working around us (Bohm, 2004/1996, Rockwell 2003). By means of dialogue people are able to argue for their viewpoints, to come to terms with each other, to jointly solve problems, and to resolve conflicts (Pickering and Garrod 2021). Dialogue brings together women and men, young and old, people from the east and the west, from the north and the south. Through the creative synergy of shared thoughts, ideas, and experiences, we can travel anywhere in space and time.

"Tolkien and the Medieval Animal"

Call for Paper proposals for a session at the 57th International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo) to be held live on the internet, Monday through Saturday, May 9-14, 2022

NEMLA Convention

Baltimore, MD

March 10-13, 2022

This bilingual panel seeks to analyze the development of urban cultures in France (especially urban literature and music) while taking into account the impact of postcolonial studies in France since 2005, the year of the "urban riots". The panel also aims to explore the political aspect of urban culture as well as the influence of American (especially African-American) culture on French production.

Possible themes include:

The Latina maid has historically been one of the signature roles Hollywood has created for Spanish-speaking and/or Latina actors in both film and television entertainment. The late Lupe Ontiveros (1942-2012), one of the most recognizable and respected contemporary Mexican-American actors, said to have played the role of the Latina maid approximately 150 times for US audiences during her career, reflecting the stereotyping that still abounds in the US popular imaginary about the female Latinx Other.

As media texts show us superheroes from around the world(s), demonstrating extraordinary abilities and living a life shaped by a moral code, how we define their iconic features and cultural impact has been the focus of much scholarly debate.

Superheroes have proliferated and multiplied in the 21st Century, coming to prominence in film, television, and video game industries the same way that their popular narratives had begun to flourish in the comic book industry some eighty years before. Yet, while all of these stories and characters are tethered to these early years of the genre, through iterative retellings, reboots, and cultural readjustments, superheroes have consistently found renewed life in modern and contemporary re-imaginings.

Kayfabe: Working Theories 

A Special Section of the Professional Wrestling Studies Journal

Practice of comics and the academic history of comics studies are often found Eurocentric. Readers often favour the traditional comics, either American or Franco-Belgian or Japanese Manga. They find the aesthetic flavour in them and most of the unorthodox graphic storytelling are left out. With Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics (2005), comics studies include the “other” voices and thereby the untold stories and unforeseen graphic patterns of the colonised and indigenous people are celebrated. The affiliation of comics studies with Auto/biography studies, Feminism, postcolonialism, postmodernism opens an arena for the readers/researchers of comics and graphic narratives to develop a new field of studies.

The editors are seeking historically and theoretically insightful essays that explore various aspects of crime and criminal justice films made and/or released in the United States during the decade of the 1970s. Individual contributions may address the social construction of crime, application of criminological theory, examination of moral dilemmas, as well as analysis that connects past representations to present social and cultural conditions. In-depth analyses of period representations of class, ethnicity, gender, masculinity, race, and sexual orientation are also desired. Potential contributors are encouraged to interpret and explore this topic area quite broadly and innovatively.

When Serena Williams wore a ‘catsuit’ during the 2018 French Open, this choice of clothing was banned because it allegedly showed a lack of “respect” for the game of tennis. The decision, and the overall incident, caused an uproar that went well beyond the world of sports, with many commentators criticizing the ban as a punishment directly aimed at policing women’s bodies.

It has been more than two decades since Ashraf Rushdy published his genre-defining analysis of neo-slave narratives, which argues that literary artists of the 1960s and 70s became interested in creating fictionalized versions of antebellum slave narratives in order to articulate new understandings of Black political subjectivity that developed during the civil rights era. In the decades following the book’s publication, we have seen a surge of antiracist literature and activism aimed at addressing deadly police violence, mass incarceration, and ongoing discrimination in employment, education, healthcare, and housing opportunities for African-American people.

“Spaces”

2021 Meeting of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts

October 14-16, 2021

Hilton Garden Inn

Austin, Texas

Call for Papers

Words and Music - Rock and Roll Writing

Book Project

Frank Zappa (if indeed it was he— words of music have a notorious life of their own) once said that writing about music is ‘like dancing about architecture.’ This infamous quip sounds clever, but how true is it, how valid? Whatever else it does, music also makes us say— or write— things.