The Professional Wrestling Studies Association announces the first issue of the Professional Wrestling Studies Journal from editor Matt Foy. This online, open access journal can be reached at https://www.prowrestlingstudies.org/professional-wrestling-studies-journal. The first issue contains scholarly essays and reviews from different disciplines, all considering various aspects of professional wrestling. Issues include how professional wrestling relates to the…
Category: Gender Studies
Backwards and in High Heels
In the forty-second episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I discuss the on-screen dancing duo Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. In this episode, the co-hosts analyze the star personas of the classic duo for how they represent issues regarding gender and power dynamics. They interrogate the now famous saying that Rogers…
Updating Exorcism Cinema List
A year ago, Christopher Olson and I published a book on the representation of exorcisms in cinema. Possessed Women, Haunted States: Cultural Tensions in Exorcism Cinema (November 2016) was a comprehensive analysis of films across time and culture for the common themes surrounding who was the possessed and who was the exorcist. This analysis concluded…
Gendering Hatsune Miku
Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and I have been working on our concept of the networked gender, building off the concept of the networked self to understand the co-constructive nature of gender identity. We will be publishing a piece on using this concept to look at BMO in Adventure Time, and this represents our…
Gendering Robots: A Class Discussion
The next research project I hope to work on looks at how people make sense of robots. I am particularly interested in how people apply gendered assumptions and attributions to robots or artificial agents, and how apply those assumptions then impact how people engage with robots. In a sense, robots have become another medium as…
Exorcism Cinema Book Published
Here it is! The Tensions in Exorcism Cinema project began in 2013, when my partner Christopher J. Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and I watched the film The Possession and noted how common it seemed for women to be the victim of possession who needed to be saved through exorcism. We wondered, is that true of…
The Pop Culture Lens: Being John Malkovich
In the thirtieth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and I conclude the Halloween season by welcoming friend of the podcast, and fellow podcaster, Jim Laczkowski to discuss the existential film, Being John Malkovich (1999). In this episode, our conversation considers how the film portrays insecurity, which is…
The Pop Culture Lens on Yojimbo (1961)
In the twenty-seventh episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I welcome back friend of the podcast Joe Belfeuil to discuss Akira Kurosawa’s samurai classic Yojimbo (1961). In this episode, the conversation focuses on the film’s position as a transnational and transcultural pop culture text that acts as a link in a…
Cross-Gender Fandom
We understand a fan to be someone who’s affection for a media product to be above and beyond that of the rest of the audience (Jensen, 1992a, b). This affection involves higher and more various ways of engaging with the media product than others would exhibit. A common question in fan studies asks if this…
