In her memoir, Girl in a Band, musician Kim Gordon addresses how fashion and music are mutually constitutive outlets for creative expression and feminist critique.
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Celebrity/Stardom
Kim Gordon’s Self-Fashioning
Kollecting Kim K. Skills: Kardashianized Celebrity in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood
In the mobile game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, the celebrity legitimizes her image while also propagating her brand by redefining fame as an accumulation of skills.
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On Kale, Transmedia, and Winning GISHWHES
On winning GISHWHES (Greatest Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen), which enacts the fannish/digital ethos of playful creativity, experimentation, and community awareness in the world.
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#SCMS14: Klout & The ‘Influence’ Economy
Klout attempts to quantify the ephemeral, subjective concept of online influence through social media analytics. What does such a number mean for how we consider self-presentation online?
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Accessing Beyoncé
Though initially met with surprise, the pop star returns to a number of themes with Beyoncé and will again, regardless of how she chooses to distribute them.
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Conflicted Coverage: ESPN and Johnny Manziel
ESPN reacted to Heisman-winner Johnny Manziel's controversial return to college football with both praise and criticism. What message are they trying to send to viewers, and why is it important culturally as well as financially?
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Let’s talk about search: Some lessons from building Lantern
This week, Lantern, a search and visualization platform for the Media History Digital Library, reached its first wide public.
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On Wearing Two Badges: Indifference and Discomfort of a Scholar Fan (LeakyCon Portland)
Part 2 of a 7 part series on LeakyCon focuses on the struggles of being both an academic and a fan.
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What Are You Missing? Apr 28 – May 11
Ten (or more) media industry news items you might have missed recently.
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The Power of Women’s Voices in The Great Gatsby
The female voices on The Great Gatsby's soundtrack channel the hard-won feminist power of past generations.
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The Deanna Durbin Cult
The figure of the recently passed Deanna Durbin (1921-2013) is fascinating today because of how it embodies a sensibility within stardom: the cult of the child star.
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Creating is Collecting
The culture of contemporary baseball card collecting is an excellent example of how creativity can serve as a satisfying replacement for traditional economic incentives.
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Mutants from the Cultural Gene Pool: Reality Parodies on Kroll Show
Comedy Central's new sketch comedy program Kroll Show offers an infinite regression of media industry meta-discourses, recreating a dominant reading position that masquerades as oppositional.
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Rosario Dawson and the Ambiguous Blackness of Latinidad
The film work of actress Rosario Dawson helps media studies scholars address overlooked social discourses concerning Latina/o mixed race subjectivity.
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Whatever Happened to the Devil’s Music?
Surely in the final minutes of the last day of the Glastonbury rock festival, people are supposed to look sick, bedraggled and filthy, following a weekend of unfettered debauchery, but those kids are just too clean!. Come to think of it, why is Beyonce headlining anyway?
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