Jennifer Lynn Jones analyzes recent images and discourse on non-normative female athletes in sports media.
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Perspectives
More Than a (Small/White/Cisgender) Woman: Images of Non-Normative Women in Sports
Public Stadium Financing: The World’s Greatest “Save Our Show” Campaign
Spending public funds on sports stadiums and arenas is just as much about cultural policy as it is economic policy.
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“Any God Worth Believing in Sends You Dudes in Thongs When in Need”: Exploring Women’s Pleasure in Magic Mike XXL
Magic Mike XXL adds new iconography to the intersectionally raced, gendered, and very classed pleasures found within the women's film through its attention to the centrality of women's sexual desires vis-à-vis the deployment of male bodies who serve to maintain that pleasure.
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Videographic Criticism 101
Melanie Kohnen reflects on what she learned at Middlebury College's videographic criticism workshop.
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Losing Our Heads for the Tudors: The Unquiet Pleasures of Quixotic History in The Tudors and Wolf Hall
The Tudors and Wolf Hall can actually tell us a great deal about how the early modern appears in contemporary popular culture, as well as how we engage with the historical past.
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The Road Western: The Mad Max Series and its Latest Installment, Fury Road
The Mad Max series continues to be a cult classic, in part because it re-appropriates the western and the road movie and redeploys them to create an environmentally catastrophic vision of a future that we could create.
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Unpacking Rust, Race, and Player Reactions to Change
This spring, game designers of Rust courted controversy by assigning players unchangeable, racialized avatars. Adrienne Shaw unpacks how game design helped produce some of that player outrage.
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Road to Nowhere: Mad Max: Fury Road and the Unstoppable Safe Transgressions of Cult Cinema
Against orthodox thought that cult films earn their status through lengthy reception trajectories, Mad Max: Fury Road is always already a cult film.
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Disney Deletes TRON 3: End of Line?
Disney's hesitation to move forward with TRON 3 is symptomatic of the company's inability to find an appropriate strategy to bridge disparate pieces under one unified brand.
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“They Repackaged It”: Technofuturism in Tomorrowland
Li Cornfeld considers the technofuturism and Cold War nostalgia in "Tomorrowland," in light of the Walt Disney Company’s own corporate departure from space age optimism.
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Moving Into a Fuller House: Television Reboots, Nostalgia, and Time
Mark Lashley discusses "Fuller House" and the current trend of resurrected television nostalgia, and how the notion of television as an ephemeral or disposable media form is diminishing.
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Style, Structuring Conceits, and the Paratexts of Mad Men
Piers Britton on Mad Men's visual style, series structure, and Sixties-philiac tendencies, and how the TV series turned its tension between the espousal of emotional truthfulness and a preoccupation with “superficial” visual pleasures into a branding strategy.
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Black Widow and Whedon Exceptionalism: Accounting for Sexism in Age of Ultron and the MCU
Piers Britton explores questions of representation and issues of authorship and creative control in "Avengers: Age of Ultron" and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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Marvel, Wired? Daredevil and Visual Branding in the MCU
How far are Marvel Studios’ film and television franchises visually coded for homogeneity? How insistently, that is to say, is brand identity maintained at the levels of design, cinematography, editing and post-production processing?
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The Wire, Freddie Gray, and Collective Social Action
Why hasn’t The Wire, which showed us how structural racism and an abusive police department defines black life in Baltimore, translated into collective social action? Why are there only thousands in the streets? Where are the millions of fans of The Wire? And why aren’t they supporting black folks in Baltimore?
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