Category: Audience/Reception Studies
-
When Audiences Collide: The Fractured Fandom of My Little Pony
This post comes from a presentation I will be giving at the Popular Culture Association conference in Chicago on April 18th, 2014. This presentation comes from the beginning of the research I am doing with the help of my research assistant, Elizabeth Robinson. It is also an expanded version of the presentation I gave at…
-
Understanding Uses and Gratifications
[The following comes from my Ph.D. candidacy exam in 2007; in this part of the exam, I was asked to consider the uses and gratifications approach to media studies: what it is, how it came to be, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of it.] We are concerned here with explaining the uses-and-gratifications…
-
Support Grayson and All Young Bronies
If you are a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fan, and you have not heard of Grayson Bruce, then you need to do some reading. And not just about Grayson, but about all the other young male fans of the series who are being bullied, by kids and adults alike, just because they have…
-
Making Sense of Superheroes: Awareness of superhero genre conventions around the world
Report by CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Roskilde University (March 6, 2009) of the Quantitative Results (This paper was presented at the Danish scifi convention Fantasticon to discuss the nature of superheroes.) A series of quantitative and qualitative questions were asked of individuals around the world on: whether or not certain characteristics defined superheroes; creating their own…
-
Superheroes Around the World Examples
As part of a project I am working on, I’m looking for examples of people outside of the United States appropriating and/or incorporating some aspect of the American superhero genre into their pop culture and everyday lives. Here we have an example of a man in Cairo exploring what a superhero, in this case Spider-Man,…
-
Equestria Girls Sequel: Rainbow Rocks
The first was apparently a big enough hit (in home video sales at least) for the hit animated series that a follow-up is coming this fall. My Little Pony‘s Equestria Girls are returning in a sequel called “Rainbow Rocks.” The trailer went out online a couple days ago, and Hasbro released it on their MLP:FIM Facebook…
-
Men and Their Engagements with Stereotypically Feminine Media Products
The following is an excerpt from the paper I will be presenting at the 2014 Central States Communication Association Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This paper presents a new analysis from the data collected for my dissertation on gendered media engagings. With the help of my undergraduate research assistant, Kevin Miller, we were able to conduct…
-
The Study of Gendered Media Engagings (Part 3): Why It Matters
This is the third part of my dissertation’s first chapter. The first part was on defining gendered media engagings. The second part was on defining gender. Why studying gendered media engagings matters Thanks to the work of scholars such as Dallas Smythe, we are aware of the central role of advertisement in most media industries (Smythe,…
-
The Study of Gendered Media Engagings (Part 2): Defining Gender
This is the second part of my dissertation’s first chapter. The first part was on defining gendered media engagings. Theoretical constructions of gender In order to properly begin a discussion on the theoretical approach being employed in this study, it is necessary to define what is meant by the gendering process. The concept of gender…
-
Doctor Who Theme Week @ In Media Res
Chris Olson and I kick off the In Media Res theme week to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. This piece, with a wonderful video produced by Chris, is based on the conference paper we recently presented at MPCA. You can see the post and the video via “I AM the Doctor”: Polysemic rhetoric and…
It's Playing, Just With Research 