Pop culture is semiotically self-reflexive. Something making it into the mainstream visible recirculates due to that very visibility. It’s public sphere presence surfaces it and then—as surface culture—it continues to circulate. Either because writers draw from what is already out there, or because editors trim what might not be commonly known, the store of common [...]
Tag Archive — discourse
Multi-modal Discourse Analysis
Multi-modal Discourse Analysis is one that is updated to suit the specific needs of researchers in cultural and communication studies working with new media forms and formulations where local, global and transnational flows of discourse; notions of production and consumption; and divisions between the popular and the political are increasingly collapsed and folded in upon [...]
Race-Blind Discourse
Thinking about how race-blind discourse articulates with the decorporialization of whiteness, how the qualities associated with whiteness — such as civility, mobility, cultural elite status — come to be held out as potentially “universifiable” in a way that masks their continued valuation. In espousing a discourse of race-blindness the underlying power relations between whites and [...]
Connoting Gender
Gender is one of the most complex words in our social and theoretical cannons. And a fundamental part of this complexity—or as Latour might say complicatedness—is that, to many, it appears simple and straightforward. As such, to define it, to speak of its denotation, becomes difficult, if not impossible. Like “queer” it escapes definition, or maybe more precisely [...]
Polyamory on the CBC
This article is actually from just over a week ago, but I didn’t let myself write about it because of marking deadlines. But now that the marks are in and I’m between classes for a few weeks, it’s worth a mention. Polyamorists’ Relationships Wrongly Targeted: Lawyer This article is interesting from a number of angles. [...]
Marking Reflections
Ensconced in marking this week, which is more interesting than usual due to teaching Methods this year and getting to engage with research projects my students have been working on all year, but, as always with me, it takes me a while to get my head around just what the marks mean. I’m planning to [...]
Not Necessarily Skynet, but…
Ok, so I am as enthusiastic about new trends in technology as the next geeky technophile—as Eddie Izzard would say I have “techno-joy” rather than “techno-fear”—but articles like this one creep me the heck out. It is called “Robots to Get their Own Internet” and discusses a project called RoboEarth that will interlink robotic workers in an [...]
“Birds Do It, Bees Do It…”
Today a link from my Guardian news feed reminded me about the sheer goodness of Isabella Rossellini’s short film series Green Porno. Started in 2008, Green Porno stars Rossellini in short dramatic reenactments of the sex lives of animals. Now, in addition to three series of Green Porno, I was excited to discover two new series of [...]
Intertextual Polygamy
As the coverage pours in on the latter-days of the B.C. Court’s polygamy reference case,1 I am struck by the way that discourse flows between the news coverage of polygamy and the fictional accounts of polygamous life in the HBO series Big Love. I wrote about the first series of Big Love in some detail [...]
