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This book explores crucial moments in the emergence of feminine culture in Colombia hitherto unexamined in English-language criticism through an examination of the work of ground-breaking artist Débora Arango, best-selling novelist Laura Restrepo, and three generations of documentary filmmakers.

Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy is an engaging and provocative analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. Neal argues that black men and boys are bound, in profound ways, to and by their legibility. The most “legible” black male bodies are often rendered as criminal, bodies in need of policing and containment. Ironically, Neal argues, this sort of legibility brings welcome relief to white America, providing easily identifiable images of black men in an era defined by shifts in racial, sexual, and gendered identities. Neal highlights the radical potential of rendering legible black male bodies—those bodies that are all too real for us—as illegible, while simultaneously rendering illegible black male bodies—those versions of black masculinity that we can’t believe are real—as legible. In examining figures such as hip-hop entrepreneur and artist Jay-Z, R&B Svengali R. Kelly, the late vocalist Luther Vandross, and characters from the hit HBO series The Wire, among others, Neal demonstrates how distinct representations of black masculinity can break the links in the public imagination that create antagonism toward black men. Looking for Leroy features close readings of contemporary black masculinity and popular culture, highlighting both the complexity and accessibility of black men and boys through visual and sonic cues within American culture, media, and public policy. By rendering legible the illegible, Neal maps the range of identifications and anxieties that have marked the performance and reception of post-Civil Rights era African American masculinity.

The history of videogames has largely been imagined as a patrilineal timeline. Women, when they emerge as participants in the game industry, are typically figured as outliers, exceptions, or early exemplars of “diversity” in the game industry. Yet the common practice of “adding women on” to game history in a gesture of inclusiveness fails to critically inquire into the ways gender is an infrastructure that profoundly affects who has access to what kinds of historical possibilities at a specific moment in time and space. This contribution aims to shift the relevant question from “Where are women in game history?” to “Why are they there in the way that they are?” To do so, the essay strategically deploys Sierra On-Line co-founder and lead designer Roberta Williams as an exceptional case study on the problem of gender in videogame history. Drawing from both media archaeology and feminist cultural studies, this contribution first outlines the function Roberta Williams serves as a gendered subject of game history. The remainder of the essay is organized as three short, non-chronological vignettes about specific objects and practices in the biography of Roberta Williams. Attention to the contextual specificity of Roberta Williams and her historical moment produces an alternative genealogy for gaming centered around relations of intimacy and labor in domestic space. Rather than producing a chronology, the method of this essay illustrates a historical critique by sketching a contour that unsettles the presumptive logic of what we must account for when we write about the objects and subjects of game history.

This remarkable volume, many years in the making, records and scrutinizes definitions of Northwest Coast Native art and its boundaries. A work of critical historiography, it makes accessible for the first time in one place a broad selection of more than 250 years of writing on Northwest Coast "art." Organized thematically, its excerpted texts are from both published and unpublished sources, some not previously available in English. They cover such complex topics as the clash between oral and written knowledge, transcultural entanglement, the influence of surrealist thinking, and the long history of the deployment of Northwest Coast Native art for nationalist purposes. The selections are preceded by thought-provoking introductions that give historical context to the diverse intellectual traditions that have influenced, stimulated, and opposed each othe

This research explores the ways different people experience the racial content of video games. Building on DeVane and Squire, this research speaks to content analyses literature that shows games as modern minstrelsies. Using Bonilla-Silva’s definition of Racial Ideology in conjunction with Winddance-Twine’s concept of Racial Literacy, I examined racial ideology and its role as an interpretative framework. I also used Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital to account for video game cultural knowledge. Data were collected through personal interviews where participants played the video game Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony for 30-50 minutes. A sample of 31 participants covering variation in gender, gaming experience, and race answered questions assessing their racial ideology, then played the game introduction, and finally, answered questions assessing interpretations of game content. Racially aware people with little gaming experience echoed the content analysis minstrelsy findings while colorblind racist non-gamers believed the content accurately represented the world. However, deeper familiarity with gaming and other mass media opened up a new interstitial space for challenging the racial status quo. Racially aware gamers saw the franchises as lampooning the shallow stereotypes in mainstream society. More importantly, with a more sophisticated media context, many colorblind racist gamers also saw racial representations as intentionally offensive. Gamers herein create inventive, non-threatening, but meaningful ways to address racialization across a spectrum of racial literacies. As a result, content analyses need a richer understanding of the experiences of video games for consumers.

Transgender representations generally distance the transgender characters from the audience as objects of ridicule, fear, and sympathy. This distancing is accomplished through the use of specific narrative conventions and visual codes. In this dissertation, I analyze representations of transgender individuals in popular film comedies, thrillers, and independent dramas. Through a textual analysis of 24 films, I argue that the narrative conventions and visual codes of the films work to prevent identification or connection between the transgender characters and the audience. The purpose of this distancing is to privilege the heteronormative identities of the characters over their transgender identities. This dissertation is grounded in a cultural studies approach to representation as constitutive and constraining and a positional approach to gender that views gender identity as a position taken in a specific social context. Contributions are made to the fields of communication, film studies, and gender studies through the methodological approach to textual analysis of categories of films over individual case studies and the idea that individuals can be positioned in identities they do not actively claim for themselves. This dissertation also makes a significant contribution to conceptions of the gaze through the development of three transgender gazes that focus on the ways the characters are visually constructed rather than the viewpoints taken by audience members. In the end, transgender representations work to support heteronormativity by constructing the transgender characters in specific ways to prevent audience members from developing deeper connections with them.

Television’s synergy with the Web initially seemed inconceivable to network executives. With the rise of Internet use, newspaper and magazine articles announced the impending death of television. While that was clearly hyperbole, network executives, though often anonymously, expressed their fears that Web content would siphon off viewership and thus advertising dollars generated by television programming. Fears may have been quelled with the evidence of the success of television shows first made available streaming on network websites and then for paid download through digital servers such as iTunes.

In the United States, daytime soap operas are often critiqued as escapist fantasies with narratives that provide leisure and pleasure for middle-class and stay-at-home mothers. The storylines typically involve forbidden sexual liaisons and business relationships, with physical and psychological behaviors that center on powerful families. One family unit usually represents “old money” while the other family represents “new money” or an upwardly mobile group with aspirations of power, status, and influence. The economic differences are usually the source of conflict between the families, around which all other social relationships develop. The temporal space expands and contracts to accommodate storylines, which

Although discourses regarding 1980s representations of Blackness on television heavily focus on The Cosby Show, its NBC spin-off series, A Different World, depicting student life at a historically Black college, was equally groundbreaking and deserving of critical attention. Looking to transfer the appeal and audience share of The Cosby Show to A Different World, the spin-off show’s first season centered on the life of The Cosby Show’s star Denise Huxtable (Lisa Bonet) at Hillman College. A Different World’s story provides an illuminating case study of the role and power of television producers, highlighting their influence over a show’s narrative and

At best, our knowledge about the lives and experiences of Black gay men is limited to a series of stereotypes, snap judgments, and ridicule. In terms of television media product, this aforementioned knowledge has been packaged mostly within the framework of comedy: a red-leather-clad Eddie Murphy talking about the most effective ways to shield his ass from the gay male gaze in the 1983 HBO stand-up performance Delirious ; Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier’s effeminate film critics Blaine Edwards and Antoine Merriweather on the 1990s television variety show In Living Color ; fashionista panel members Miss J and Andre Leon Talley

As bell hooks points out in “Aesthetic Inheritances: History Worked by Hand,” writing an inclusive art history is no easy task. Until very recently, Aboriginal women have been written out of Canadian art history, or rather art history has been written around us. How do we write ourselves in? It falls far beyond simple insertion; the erasures are far too deep. Insertion presumes a simple forgetfulness, an oversight, a neglecting of the obvious. Insertion assumes a presence. It implies a shared mode of history, a common belonging to a collective archive, and an agreed-upon understanding of what it means to be an artist. Beyond the important considerations of race, gender, culture, and social class, our distinct legal status in Canada must be acknowledged. This was particularly true for women artists working between 1880 and 1970. For much of the time period under consideration, First Nations communities lived under a profoundly restrictive regime of colonial power. Relationships between First Nations people and the Canadian state have been defined by the Indian Act, a piece of legislation enacted in 1876 and surviving, through many amendments and revisions, until the present time.

A history of a past phenomenon - racial art - which has ramifications for the present.

Picture this: a comedy about an overweight Black woman who lives with and takes care of a white family. Joking all the way, she cooks, cleans, helps the father of the family, and comforts the children. Then at one point, we see the father holding his gun and pointing toward the door. The Black woman enters and jumps up and down, screaming, “Massa! Massa! Massa! Please don’t shoot!” It is easy to imagine these scenes in a 1930s film about the antebellum South. But they are actually from the first episode of a 1980s sitcom.

On November 4, 2008, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show via satellite. One of the more memorable moments of the interview came when Cooper expressed shock that DeGeneres was unfamiliar with the hit Bravo television show The Real Housewives of Atlanta. “You mean you don’t know about NeNe?” he demanded incredulously, referring to cast member NeNe Leakes—the most outspoken and self-proclaimed “realest” of the Housewives. Cooper’s segment, along with his admission that Leakes was his favorite of the cast, brought even more attention to the already widely debated show, the first of Bravo’s Housewives series

Résumé livre : Les échanges entre les Européens, leurs descendants en Amérique et les Autochtones depuis les premiers contacts jusqu’à nos jours constituent un thème de première importance dans les travaux menés depuis une quarantaine d’années en histoire des Amérindiens et en histoire coloniale. Ils sont cruciaux pour comprendre la situation contemporaine des nations amérindiennes, les relations entretenues avec les gouvernements, la question territoriale et la définition de l’identité. Pour rendre compte de la diversité des échanges entre Autochtones, Européens et Canadiens, et de leur importance dans l’histoire du Canada, les textes présentés dans cet ouvrage les abordent à partir des concepts de représentation, de métissage et de pouvoir. Les représentations qu’Amérindiens, Européens et Canadiens se sont forgées les uns des autres ont joué un rôle central dans leurs relations ; par exemple, la manière dont les Européens ont perçu, décrit ou imaginé les Autochtones a eu un poids déterminant sur les sociétés européennes et sur les politiques coloniales, influençant, en retour, les relations avec les Autochtones. Les images de l’Autre, en perpétuelle transformation, ont également eu une incidence sur la façon dont les Autochtones se sont auto-représentés, sur la façon dont ils ont adopté, transformé ces images pour se les approprier et, enfin, sur la façon dont ils les ont rejetées pour définir leur identité. Les représentations que les Autochtones ont forgées des Européens, moins bien connues malheureusement, ont également influencé l’évolution des rapports avec les colonisateurs. Utilisant différents supports : textes, images, récits oraux, sites internet et culture matérielle, les représentations résultent de processus complexes. Leur interprétation induit la question de leur élaboration et de leur transmission, celle de l’influence des idéologies et des catégories mentales de l’époque, mais aussi celle de la fonction et du pouvoir de ces représentations.

As activists and political leaders in Brazil call for increasing rights, recognition, and redress to address the multiple forms of marginalization that Afro-Brazilians have endured, media has become an increasingly important sphere through which different constituencies mobilize to advance a project of racial equality. Among these groups enlisting available media resources was a group composed predominately of Afro-Brazilian media professionals who joined together to launch the TV da Gente (Our TV) television network, Brazil’s first television station with the mission to produce racially diverse programming directed toward a Black viewing audience.

This article examines the response of minority gamers as they adopt new innovations in Xbox Live. Using diffusion of innovation theory, specific attention is given to gamers’ rate of adoption of the new Xbox Live environment, which was a recent update to the Xbox Live interface. By employing virtual ethnography, observations, and interviews reveal that gaming duration and gender are significant factors in identifying a gamer’s successful rate of adoption of the new innovation. Female participants reveal that Xbox Live intentionally targets males as the default gamer and enact changes based on their needs. The research concludes with a plea to Xbox Live to acknowledge minority gamers such as women to incorporate their needs within the decision-making process of new innovations.