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 […]

The Possession and the Traditional Exorcism Narrative

This analysis presents an example of how we are analyzing the films of the exorcism cinema subgenre for how they reflect the traditional exorcism narrative, which you can read more about here and here. This analysis is based on the notes we took while watching the film, which are given here. The 2012 film The […]

The Pop Culture Lens Episode 16: The Exorcist (1973)

As I have been writing about for awhile now, Chris and I are working on a book project that explores the tensions depicted in exorcism cinema. That is, we are analyzing films that depict possession and exorcism to understand what is being said about the world through those representations. Part of this analysis has been […]

My Little Pony on The Pop Culture Lens

In the fourteenth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher and I are joined by Aaron Kashtan of Miami University in Ohio (https://ogresfeathers.wordpress.com) to discuss the gendered and transmedia nature of the long-surviving and recently rejuvenated franchise, My Little Pony. Our discussion focuses on the distinctions between the earlier manifestations of this franchise and […]

Cataloging Exorcism Cinema

For the past couple years now, we have been working on this project analyzing the tensions in exorcism cinema. We are currently writing a book on the topic, and part of the research for this book has been to track down and catalog all of the movies that in some way depict possession and exorcism. […]