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In this timely analysis of the economics of access that surround contemporary female celebrity, Hannah Yelin reveals a culture that requires women to be constantly ‘baring all’ in physical exposure and psychic confessions. As famous women tell their story, in their ‘own words’, constellations of ghostwriters, intermediaries and market forces undermine assertions of authorship and access to the ‘real’ woman behind the public image. Yelin’s account of the presence of the ghostwriter offers a fascinating microcosm of the wider celebrity machine, with insights pertinent to all celebrity mediation. Yelin surveys life-writing genres including fiction, photo-diary, comic-strip, and ar...
Women in Rock Memoirs vindicates the role of women in rock music. The chapters examine memoirs written by women in rock from 2010 onwards to explore how the artists narrate their life experiences and difficulties they had to overcome, not only as musicians but as women. The book includes memoirs written by both well-known and lesser-known artists and artists from both inside and outside of the Anglo-American sphere. The essays by scholars from different research areas and countries around the world are divided into three parts according to the overall themes: Memory, Trauma, and Writing; Authenticity, Sexuality, and Sexism; and Aging, Performance, and the Image. They explore the dynamics of memoir as a genre by discussing the similarities and differences between the women in rock and the choices they have made when writing their books. As a whole, they help form a better understanding of today's possibilities and future challenges for women in rock music.
A series of stories that, although written as fiction, are based on real events.
This interdisciplinary volume introduces the field of Kardashian Studies through collections of essays based in sociology, media studies, cultural studies, critical race theory and fashion theory. The Kardashian empire and dynasty is intertwined with some of the most important movements of the early twenty-first century. Celebrity, cultural appropriation, new forms of feminism, social media, ideal bodies, evolving notions of physical beauty and the global fashion system have all been affected by the quintessential influencers in this family of matriarchs. The anthology is structured around core thematic parts. From Storytelling and Race, through Fashion and Celebrity, to Time and Embodiment,...
Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture explores the recent rise in different types of men using digital media to sexualise their bodies. It argues that the male body has become a key site in contemporary culture where neoliberalism’s hegemony has been both secured and contested since 2008. It does this by looking at four different case studies: the celebrity male nude leak; the rise of young men sharing images of their muscular bodies on social media; RuPaul's Drag Race body transformational tutorial, and the rise of chemsex. It finds that on the one hand digital media has enabled men to transform their bodies into tools of value-creation in economic contexts where the historical means they have relied on to create value have diminished. On the other it has also allowed them to use their bodies to form intimate collective bonds during a moment when competitive individualism continued to be the privileged mode of being in the world. It therefore offers a unique contribution not only to the field of digital cultural studies but also to the growing cultural studies literature attempting to map the historical contradictions of the austerity moment.
This book contributes to our collective understanding of the significance of representations of women and gender in magazines in both their print and online forms. The essays are authored by scholars, writers and cultural producers in fields such as art, film and visual studies, literature, critical race studies, communications, broadcast and print journalism, history, and women and gender studies. Taken as a whole, the volume offers historical breadth and perspectives that are transnational and cross-racial on women in magazines and digital media in a variety of ways. It examines how women are represented, how women have created and produced magazines and how women make meaning of themselves and their world using magazines as key sources of information.
In recent decades, the global wealth of the rich has soared to leave huge chasms of wealth inequality. This book argues that we cannot talk about inequalities in Britain today without talking about the monarchy. Running the Family Firm explores the postwar British monarchy in order to understand its economic, political, social and cultural functions. Although the monarchy is usually positioned as a backward-looking, archaic institution and an irrelevant anachronism to corporate forms of wealth and power, the relationship between monarchy and capitalism is as old as capitalism itself. This book frames the monarchy as the gold standard corporation: The Firm. Using a set of case studies – the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince Harry, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle – it contends that The Firm’s power is disguised through careful stage management of media representations of the royal family. In so doing, it extends conventional understandings of what monarchy is and why it matters.
The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory brings together top scholars in the field to explore the significance of narrative to pressing social, cultural, and theoretical issues. How does narrative both inform and limit the way we think today? From conspiracy theories and social media movements to racial politics and climate change future scenarios, the reach is broad. This volume is distinctive for addressing the complicated relations between the interdisciplinary narrative turn in the academy and the contemporary boom of instrumental storytelling in the public sphere. The scholars collected here explore new theories of causality, experientiality, and fictionality; challenge normative modes of storytelling; and offer polemical accounts of narrative fiction, nonfiction, and video games. Drawing upon the latest research in areas from cognitive sciences to complexity theory, the volume provides an accessible entry point for those new to the myriad applications of narrative theory and a point of departure for new scholarship.
This edited collection examines a new phase in the creation of transnational high-end drama in television’s current multiplatform era. Fuelled by the wider international exposure that internet distribution has brought to TV shows, this phase for high-end drama is one of unprecedented budgets and costs, frequent transnational coproduction and increased cultural diversification. While this drama continues to be facilitated by national broadcasters, fuelling the above trio of influences upon it has been the commissioning activity of multinational subscription-video-on-demand (SVoD) providers. This book showcases leading examples of transnational TV drama, produced outside the US, yet involving collaboration with US-owned SVoDs. It foregrounds some new potentials for drama creation in the context of its strategic importance to providers as different as national broadcasters and multinational SVoDs. This book helps to explain why today’s high-end dramas are demonstrating new elements of cultural specificity despite their common objective to engage a diverse international audience.