Cultural StudiesPub Date : 2022-02-21DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2039257
Ilya Parkins
{"title":"Feminist sentimentalism? Ambivalent feeling in inclusive digital wedding media","authors":"Ilya Parkins","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2022.2039257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2039257","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article traces textual sentimentalism on popular, feminist wedding blog A Practical Wedding. In dialogue with Lauren Berlant’s work on sentimentalism as essentially apolitical and with feminist reclamations of the sentimental, it examines whether A Practical Wedding develops a feminist sentimentalism. Juxtaposing two of the blog’s foundational genres, the real wedding feature and the advice column, it excavates the blog’s invocations of the convivial, communal feeling that typically animates sentimentalism, setting them alongside an opposing archive of interpersonal boundary-making. Ultimately the blog epitomizes the ambivalence that some critics detect at the root of sentimentalism: A Practical Wedding’s real weddings hold up the wedding as a fantastical site of redemption, but this is countered by the unending return of political despair, frustration and rage in the advice columns. The result is a feminist sentimentalism as a specific offshoot of the moods of disappointment that pervade feminism.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"647 - 668"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44317429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cultural StudiesPub Date : 2022-02-18DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2034909
Donald V Kingsbury
{"title":"Lithium’s buzz: extractivism between booms in Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile","authors":"Donald V Kingsbury","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2022.2034909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2034909","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Plans for decarbonizing energy transitions – attempts to mitigate the climate crisis through electrifying the global economy – will require minerals like lithium for the electric vehicles and batteries of the near future. As a result, a ‘buzz’ of economic speculation, governmental policy making, and grassroots opposition is intensifying in the so-called ‘lithium triangle’ in Southern Bolivia, north western Argentina, and Northern Chile. Using archival investigation and stakeholder interviews this article examines the temporal and spatial effects of the extractivist buzz as it operates through complex ecological and social dynamics complicated further still by energy transitions. As decarbonization and the climate crisis inform and inflect extractivism, they also offer new vantages from which to understand established global, regional, and local power relations. Extractivism produces and shapes landscapes and timescapes through anticipation, frontiers, and sacrifice: buzz, boom, and bust cycles that have shaped livelihoods and landscapes in these three countries since colonization.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"580 - 604"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49644567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cultural StudiesPub Date : 2022-02-11DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2034908
Joanne Faulkner
{"title":"The child as mediator of racial ambivalence in Australia: ‘Egg Boy’ and the racist girl","authors":"Joanne Faulkner","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2022.2034908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2034908","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In white settler-colonial Australian imagination, ‘the child’ historically has both signalled the colony’s flourishing and is charged with anxiety about belonging and identity. This article analyses a set of events in which children were the occasion through which Australians managed racial violence and/or publicly distanced the mainstream from endemic racism. Differences between the mediating power of ‘white’ childhood versus Indigenous childhood are analysed, with a view to exploring how children are either problematized or positioned as figures of redemption, through processes of racialization.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"669 - 694"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45983742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cultural StudiesPub Date : 2022-02-04DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2021.2011936
Franziska Kloos
{"title":"Jennifer Walshe: A retrospective","authors":"Franziska Kloos","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2021.2011936","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.2011936","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Composer-performer Jennifer Walshe challenges established concepts of music production. In her alter ego collective, authorship and gender identities are at issue, testing new modes of musical expression. Through improvisation and experimental set-ups, she breaks new grounds, integrating physical and visual aspects into her compositions. Social media serve as a contemporary topic and a composing texture at the same time. In a community project, history emerges as a collaborative creative act. Walshe involves her listeners’ active imagination throughout her work.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"36 1","pages":"770 - 779"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48625982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cultural StudiesPub Date : 2022-02-03DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2030777
Kathryn Brown
{"title":"Art markets, epistemic authority, and the institutional curation of knowledge","authors":"Kathryn Brown","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2022.2030777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2030777","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The recent proliferation of data about art prices has been interpreted as the democratization of a formerly secretive economic sphere. Contesting this idea, I argue that such data is collected, controlled, and disseminated by international art dealers and auction houses for the purpose of reinforcing the myth of a single, integrated market for art. Through the analysis of presentation strategies in Gagosian Gallery’s online viewing rooms and Sotheby’s Mei Moses Index, I argue that dominant art world institutions use art history and price data to support the speculative value of artworks and to perpetuate knowledge asymmetries that reinforce their own epistemic authority. I debate whether Friedrich Hayek’s conception of price as an unbiased aggregator of dispersed information is a useful way of conceptualizing speculative value in the art world. I conclude that, in contrast to Hayek’s ideas, contemporary art market data is given the illusion of democratic dispersal while remaining within the purview of dominant institutions. The curation of knowledge involved in this process exacerbates art world inequality and risks sidelining the heterogeneous creative practices that populate a broad range of creative spheres.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"626 - 646"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59503447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cultural StudiesPub Date : 2022-01-06eCollection Date: 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2021.2011934
Laura Vermeeren
{"title":"Locating vernacular creativity outside the 'urban cool' in Beijing: ephemeral water calligraphy.","authors":"Laura Vermeeren","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2021.2011934","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.2011934","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT How and where to be creative, and what creativity entails and affords has been subject to momentous change in recent decades in China. Since the early 2000s, the discourse of creativity has played a leading role in governmental policies that aim to boost economic development through a focus on the creative industries. First-tier Chinese cities have reinvented themselves as creative hotbeds with distinctive areas, often located at the fringes of the city, for creative production and practice (Ren and Meng [2012]. Artistic urbanization: creative industries and creative control in Beijing. International journal of urban and regional research, 36 (3), 504–521, Power, capital, and artistic freedom: contemporary Chinese art communities and the city. Cultural studies, 33 (4), 657–689). This article complicates this creative-city script, one that is deeply enmeshed in a global proliferation of the creativity discourse in tandem with Chinese state policies, by examining the practice of water calligraphy. This is an urban ephemeral creative practice that takes place in public parks in the centre of Beijing. Water calligraphy, done by the elderly in Beijing, challenges the idea of creativity as the domain of a young cool urban class, while its ephemerality contests ideas that urban creativity is necessarily forced into structures of commodification and governmentalization. Water calligraphers' adherence to the traditional discourse of calligraphy, despite several creative deviations, further challenges notions of creativity that identify it with novelty. Within the urban landscape, these senior citizens carve out a creative space for themselves outside designated art districts and creative industries clusters. In doing so, they disregard the imperative of the new that is conventionally believed to underpin ‘real’ creativity, and thus may help us to rethink the idea of creativity itself.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"36 5","pages":"748-769"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_pdf/09/95/RCUS_36_2011934.PMC9436388.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40351331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cultural StudiesPub Date : 2021-12-29DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2021.2020315
L. Balfour
{"title":"An intersectional analysis of our robotic future","authors":"L. Balfour","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2021.2020315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.2020315","url":null,"abstract":"beyond an epistemological orientation to the world. Either way,Wild Things contributes directly to other projects in cultural studies that defy political classification by reaching for what is currently unimaginable. For instance, Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) dares to imagine a world no longer constrained by binary, racial logics, even as he is careful to forefront the contemporary necessity of racial solidarity between people of colour against the oppressive, white empire. Halberstam seems to be doing something similar. Despite wildness historically being deployed to justify subjugation, enslavement, and genocide, Halberstam still dares to challenge its condemnation.Wild Things’ conception of wildness is constantly deployed in relation to specific cultural projects and artifacts, like Where the Wild Things Are and the constraints of sexual classification. Through Halberstam’s examination of pop culture and political projects, his analysis is consistently brought back to racial tropes that define the socio-political state of colonialism today. Both the book’s embeddedness in this context and its willingness to radically imagine other possibilities, make it a significant contribution to cultural studies. ThoughWild Things does not offer a blueprint to enacting a ‘wild’ social world, it would be unfair to levy that as a damning critique against this book. An epistemology of the wild appears initially impossible to concretize in this way, but Halberstam dares his readers to try anyways. Far beyond a mere intellectual experiment, these epistemologies would make survival and existence possible for experiences between conceptions of the normative and the wild. By not limiting itself to linear notions of progress,Wild Things is a reminder that critical scholarship’s penchant for world-making and un-making is a political imperative to thinking beyond our hegemonic constraints.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"36 1","pages":"1045 - 1048"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44404690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cultural StudiesPub Date : 2021-12-20DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2021.2011931
Maša Huzjak
{"title":"Girl spaces: images of girlhood on the internet","authors":"Maša Huzjak","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2021.2011931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.2011931","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT When Rookie, a now-defunct online magazine for teenage girls, launched in 2011, it created a safe space for young women and girls to express themselves through any medium they wanted and in a myriad of different ways. Thus images of girlhood ceased to be just a mystery for the male gaze/brain to solve or portray; they became eclectic, bountiful, contradictory even. Furthermore, since 2012 Instagram has played a vital role in the democratization of publishing one’s own art to a larger audience. It has combined the broad reach of an extremely popular social network with what were perceived as ‘niche’ interests – activities done privately (collage making, bullet journaling, diary keeping) or publicly (photography, poetry, music, art) by often self-taught or self-published teenage girls. Artists like Petra Collins and Ashley Armitage are entering mainstream popular culture and changing perspectives on what it means to be a girl, to feel like a girl or to look like a girl. They document girls’ bodies, bedrooms, emotions and material belongings, and offer to the consumer of their art these girl spaces for inspection, questioning and identification. Since the internet requires no (straight, white, cis, male) gatekeepers when it comes to creating an identity or curating art, girls’ voices are much easier to hear. This is why I chose to analyse a generation of artists who are gaining momentum because of the internet and subverting, as well as reimagining, the patterns and stereotypes created by centuries of men describing girls’ narratives as trivial, mundane and irrelevant.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"36 1","pages":"732 - 747"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42779231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cultural StudiesPub Date : 2021-12-19DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2021.2012707
Kate Christine Moore Koppy
{"title":"Writing our stories with hooks and needles: literary women's voices in textiles","authors":"Kate Christine Moore Koppy","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2021.2012707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.2012707","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT From medieval romances to twenty-first century popular novels, weaving, sewing, embroidery, and knitting have been a framework for female voices otherwise marginalized by the culture depicted in the text or by the genre itself. The habitus connecting women and textiles is strong enough that, even as textile production has become almost wholly industrialized, the association remains powerful in contemporary popular culture. This article offers a comparative look at the textiles produced by women in Laura Esquivel's novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, Mexico, 1989) and Völsungasaga (The Saga of the Volsungs, Iceland, late 13th century). Although separated by almost a millennium, in these literary texts, Tita and Brunhild each use their skill at textile production to express the things they cannot say out loud. The close readings performed here are part of a larger work examining the varied means by which women in patriarchal societies enact agency through their reproductive labour, particularly women's communication of narrative through production of both texts and textiles.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"36 1","pages":"840 - 855"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47629742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cultural StudiesPub Date : 2021-12-10DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2021.2012708
Maša Grdešić
{"title":"The woman reader in Rebecca Mead’s My life in Middlemarch","authors":"Maša Grdešić","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2021.2012708","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.2012708","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT\u0000 Before the entry of feminist scholars into the field, literary theory either had no interest in the woman reader or used her to represent the type of reading that favours identification, escape and pleasure over engagement with the aesthetic and formal aspects of a text. According to feminist cultural and literary theorists such as Charlotte Brunsdon and Rita Felski, the woman reader has typically been defined as passive and uncreative, her interests as trivial and sentimental, her reading as consequently apolitical. Feminist literary theory and feminist cultural studies have long challenged the sharp divide between feminist and ‘ordinary’ women readers, academic and non-academic readers, creative and uncreative readers, pointing out that they are more alike than we are led to believe because they share certain affective and cognitive attributes. This artificial dichotomy is also called into question by popular memoirs on books and reading, which showcase the creativity of non-academic reading. One example is the 2014 book My Life in Middlemarch, journalist Rebecca Mead’s account of her lifelong relationship with George Eliot’s novel. Mead’s book, which combines literary criticism, biography and memoir, highlights the impact literature can have on its readers. I read Mead’s book as an example of Rita Felski’s theoretical concept of a ‘positive aesthetics’, a framework for reading texts that blends criticism and analysis with attachment and love. Using Felski’s categories of textual engagement, such as recognition, enchantment and knowledge, I argue that Mead’s project, by giving equal weight to emotional and intellectual aspects of reading, represents an important step in bridging the divide between academic and non-academic readers.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"36 1","pages":"780 - 798"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48630390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}