Author: CarrieLynn D. Reinhard
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Squirrel Girl and Feminism
I created this video for DePaul’s Pop Culture Conference in 2021 on superheroes. For the first time, it was an entirely online conference with asynchronous, video presentations for academic work. The ideas in this piece come from a chapter I wrote for an anthology being produced by Bryan Carr and Meta G. Carstarphen. That chapter…
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Fandom During the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant impacts on our lives, including how we experience our fandoms. Cons were moved online or cancelled. New movies came out on streaming apps at the same time as theatrical releases. Online gaming replaced in-person gaming. And people turned to their fandoms to cope with the pandemic. Krysten Stein and…
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Disney+, the Fan Industrial Complex, and Star Wars
I love this term: Fan Industrial Complex. Chris thinks he heard it from someone else, so I will need to investigate it. Because from a media ecology perspective, it’s very useful. That’s what we have now with online mediated fan-producer networks. The technologies and economic systems require a symbiosis between more ardent fans and producers,…
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The Four Paradigms in Spiral Form
Subtitle: A positivistically constructed model to critique dominant design with a postmodern flair This was a group project from a class with Patti Lather at OSU in 2005 that I completed with Carrie Hung, Hana Kang, and Yongfang Zhang. I look at it now and think it’s so twee! In looking at the four research…
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Taxonomy of Fannish Behaviors: A Work in Progress
I’m really interested in the ways we define fandom. Is it just associated with popular culture, or is it a more fundamental aspect of human life? I’m going to use this blog to work through my thoughts on this matter, so it isn’t by any means a completed document, and I will do my best…
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Virtual World Fandom Quasi-Autoethnography
This post contains my reflections on trying to express my Star Wars fandom in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. These reflections are based on the Twitter thread I ran in the summer and fall of 2020, which can be found here. I tried to reconstruct it chronologically to show the progression of events and my thoughts…
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WrestlePosium I Presentation
Earlier this year I organized, ran, and presented at the inaugural WrestlePosium open online symposium for the Professional Wrestling Studies Association. My presentation concerned the work I have been doing looking at wrestling fans writing slash for the characters of Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa. The entire presentation can viewed here. The other presentations from…
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Importance of Play to Politics
Reading Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and struck by discussion of how fundamental play is to the formation of culture and thus human civilization, as well as its relationship to politics and political life. Per Huizinga, “Now in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin… All are rooted in the primaeval…
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Frasier and the New Man
For the fifty-eighth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and CarrieLynn Reinhard are joined by friend of the podcast Kadee Whaley to discuss the classic 1990s sitcom, Frasier. In this episode, they discuss the different representations of masculinity contained seen in the series, from the New Man of the ’90s to the American…
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Don’t Panic! It’s Douglas Adams!
For the fifty-seventh episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and CarrieLynn Reinhard are joined by former guest, friend of the podcast, and Patreon supporter, Shane Tilton to discuss the cosmic influence of British writer Douglas Adams In this episode, they discuss Adams’ comedic background and his legacy on science fiction and fantasy…
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