Glee And New Directions For Social Change

In the fall of 2009, the Fox network took a bold step in their primetime television lineup. Borrowing from the success of reality music performance shows like its own American Idol, the network introduced us to the students at McKinley High School, a fictional high school in Lima, OH, and home to the glee club known as the New Directions. The group is made up of freaks and geeks who feel the wrath of being “different.” The cool kids are hell bent on making life difficult for the students in glee club. Yet, because of the determination of Mr. Will Schuester, the club’s advisor, along with a few great songs, Glee has brought a new tone of inclusion to modern television and direct parallels can be seen between the experiences of the show choir members and what is happening in contemporary society. Glee has shown the importance of examining the intersections of pop culture and social issues; this text will encourage thinking on how effective the show has been beyond the screen. Essays provide critical analyses of the show, its characters, and its overall usefulness as a commentary on social issues. The show’s content often deals with subject matter that would lend easily to critique around such social issues as sexuality, bullying, interpersonal communication, conflict resolution, and family relationships. This text invites readers to examine the intersections between media, society, and the individual.

This book examines queer characters in popular American television, demonstrating how entertainment can educate audiences about LGBT identities and social issues like homophobia and transphobia. Through case studies of musical soap operas (Glee and Empire), reality shows (RuPaul’s Drag Race, The Prancing Elites Project and I Am Cait) and “quality” dramas (Looking, Transparent and Sense8), it argues that entertainment elements such as music, humour, storytelling and melodrama function as pedagogical tools, inviting viewers to empathise with and understand queer characters. Each chapter focuses on a particular programme, looking at what it teaches—its representation of queerness—and how it teaches this—its pedagogy. Situating the programmes in their broader historical context, this study also shows how these televisual texts exemplify a specific moment in American television.

The contemporary popular cultural space has leveraged the queer in the same format of representation as its presentation in the 1990s. Although the queer is portrayed in a less perverse light than a decade ago, popular cultural representations of the queer in the visual culture genres are still on the level of the banal. While popular culture has become more encouraging towards the queer, the broader cultural opinion about the queer has been progressively more skeptical, compromised by the idea that the queer is encroaching on spaces reserved exclusively for heteronormative recreation. The essays in this volume look closely at how the queer is portrayed across media and throughout the world.

Cultural Politics in Harry Potter: Life, Death and the Politics of Fear is the first book-length analysis of topics, such as death, fear and biopolitics in J.K. Rowling’s work from controversial and interdisciplinary perspectives. This collection brings together recent theoretical and applied cultural studies and focuses on three key areas of inquiry: (1) wizarding biopolitics and intersected discourses; (2) anxiety, death, resilience and trauma; and (3) the politics of fear and postmodern transformations. As such, this book: provides a comprehensive overview of national and gender discourses, as well as the transiting bodies in-between, in relation to the Harry Potter books series and related multimedia franchise; situates the transformative power of death within the fandom, transmedia and film depictions of the Potterverse and critically deconstructs the processes of subjectivation and legitimation of death and fear; examines the strategies and mechanisms through which cultural and political processes are managed, as well as reminding us how fiction and reality intersect at junctions, such as terrorism, homonationalism, materialism, capitalism, posthumanism and technology. Exploring precisely what is cultural about wizarding politics, and what is political about culture, this book is key reading for students of contemporary literature, media and culture, as well as anyone with an interest in the fictional universe and wizarding world of Harry Potter.

This two-volume encyclopedia explores representations of people of color in American television. It includes overview essays on early, classic, and contemporary television and the challenges for, developments related to, and participation of minorities on and behind the screen. Covering five decades, this encyclopedia highlights how race has shaped television and how television has shaped society. Offering critical analysis of moments and themes throughout television history, Race in American Television shines a spotlight on key artists of color, prominent shows, and the debates that have defined television since the civil rights movement. This book also examines the ways in which television has been a site for both reproduction of stereotypes and resistance to them, providing a basis for discussion about racial issues in the United States. This set provides a significant resource for students and fans of television alike, not only educating but also empowering readers with the necessary tools to consume and watch the small screen and explore its impact on the evolution of racial and ethnic stereotypes in U.S. culture and beyond. Understanding the history of American television contributes to deeper knowledge and potentially helps us to better apprehend the plethora of diverse shows and programs on Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and other platforms today.

Gender Futurity, Intersectional Autoethnography showcases a collection of narrative and autoethnographic research that unpacks the complexity of gender at its intersections, i.e. by ability, race, sexuality, religion, beauty, geography, spatiality, community, performance, politics, socio-economic status, education, and many other markers of difference. The book focuses on gender as it is lived, chaperoned, and chaperones other social identity categories. It tells stories that reveal problematic gender binaries, promising gender futures, and everything in between—they ask us to rethink what we assume to be true, real, and normal about gender identity and expression. Each essay, written by both gender variant and cisgender scholars, explores cultural phenomena that create space for us to re-imagine, re-think, and create new ways of being. This book will be useful for undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional degree students, particularly in the fields of gender studies, qualitative methods, and communication theory.

In exploring the dynamics and narratives of peace in journalism, this book explains the media's impact on the transformation of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It discusses the perspectives of peace activists who have been involved in grassroots action since the first Intifada, and examines how their relation with the mainstream media has evolved over time. It compares these views with those of professional journalists who have been covering the conflict, and their sense of the difficulties inherent in practicing a different kind of journalism. The interviews included in this study contribute towards the model of Peace Journalism, with a view to facilitating its successful application to this conflict. Highlighting both the obstacles and opportunities associated with this endeavour, Tiripelli offers suggestions for the strategic application of this model.