Fandom as Repeatedly Returning to What Matters Most

Being a fan can mean many different things to many different people. It may mean a person likes to collect memorabilia for a favorite sports team. It may mean a group like to wear costumes and reenact an important event. It may mean individuals compete with one another to test their knowledge in trivia contests. […]

Ghost Whisperer’s Ghost in the Machine

This essay was originally posted as part of my work for the Virtual Worlds Research Group at Roskilde University. This essay reflects my interest in how pop culture represents new media technologies, such as virtual worlds, as part of the process whereby a society / culture comes to determine what will be the acceptable and […]

The Pop Culture Lens Podcast Goes Live!

Christopher Olson (of the blog Seems Obvious to Me) and I present a new podcast, The Pop Culture Lens, where we discuss the media of the past through the lens of today to understand how relevant it is to our modern lives. You can follow the podcast on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, or get the […]

Sukiyaki Western Django as a Representation of Transcultural Identity

Christopher J. Olson discusses how our globalized pop culture is resulting in new transcultural films where the directors act as DJs, remixing different cultures for completely new experiences. This paper is the most recent draft of the presentation he will be giving at the PCA Conference in Chicago this upcoming April, 2014. via Sukiyaki Western […]

The Rise of Hentai in America, Part 3

[This is the final part of the women studies paper I wrote on hentai. You can find Part 1, on the definition of hentai, here, and Part 2, on the comparison of hentai to live action pornography, here. And, once again, the material covered in this part is strictly NSFW.] While it may not be […]

Hypersexualism in Gameplay and the Problem of the Action Heroine

The history of consumption of video games and computer games has largely been of one-sided demographics: the notion that men are more likely than women, boys more than girls, to play the games that had been the backbone of the gaming industry. This notion has also become entrenched in the stereotype of the gamer as […]

Buffy and Public Discourse on Women’s Health

After Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended it’s television run, Joss Whedon inked a deal with Dark Horse Comics to continue the storyline in comic form. What started with “Season 8” in 2007 has since become “Season 9”. The current season finds Buffy in a world without magic, balancing living as a young, working gal in San Francisco […]

Fear the Virtual World?

I must make a confession up front: I would never have watched The Ghost Whisperer if it was not for my involvement with the Virtual Worlds Research Project at Roskilde Unviersity. I’m most certainly not a Jennifer Love Hewitt fan, and the idea of the series never captured me. Especially since it was on Friday […]