Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
2,215
result(s) for
"Human body in mass media."
Sort by:
Rebellious Bodies
Celebrity culture today teems with stars who challenge long-held ideas about a “normal\" body. Plus-size and older actresses are rebelling against the cultural obsession with slender bodies and youth. Physically disabled actors and actresses are moving beyond the stock roles and stereotypes that once constrained their opportunities. Stars of various races and ethnicities are crafting new narratives about cultural belonging, while transgender performers are challenging our culture’s assumptions about gender and identity. But do these new players in contemporary entertainment media truly signal a new acceptance of body diversity in popular culture? Focusing on six key examples—Melissa McCarthy, Gabourey Sidibe, Peter Dinklage, Danny Trejo, Betty White, and Laverne Cox—Rebellious Bodies examines the new body politics of stardom, situating each star against a prominent cultural anxiety about bodies and inclusion, evoking issues ranging from the obesity epidemic and the rise of postracial rhetoric to disability rights, Latino/a immigration, an aging population, and transgender activism. Using a wide variety of sources featuring these celebrities—films, TV shows, entertainment journalism, and more—to analyze each one’s media persona, Russell Meeuf demonstrates that while these stars are promoted as examples of a supposedly more inclusive industry, the reality is far more complex. Revealing how their bodies have become sites for negotiating the still-contested boundaries of cultural citizenship, he uncovers the stark limitations of inclusion in a deeply unequal world.
eBook
Girls, moral panic, and news media : troublesome bodies
\"In this book, Sharon Mazzarella examines the representational politics behind journalistic constructions of US girls and girlhood through a series of contemporary in-depth case studies which work to document a wider cultural moral panic about the troublesome nature of girls' bodies. The public concern and media fascination with youth so evident in the United States today is a century-old phenomenon. From the flappers of the 1920s to the bobbysoxers of the 1950s, from the hippies of the 1960s and on to the ever-present pregnant teens, this fascination has played out in the media and has consistently focused on (primarily White, middle-class, heterosexual) girls. A growing body of research, for example, has revealed the manner in which journalistic practice constructs such girls as problems. Girls, Moral Panic, and News Media takes a broad look at U.S. news media constructions of girls, girlhoods, and girl's bodies/sexualities through a series of contemporary in-depth case studies including, but not limited to news coverage of the 2008 Gloucester (MA) High School \"pregnancy pact,\" teen gun control activist Emma Gonzâalez, and the sexualization of \"early puberty.\" In general, the news media constructs girls' bodies as troublesome and in need of adult surveillance and policing. Taken as a whole these case studies document a cultural obsession with girls' bodies-an obsession that often approaches moral panic. This book will be key reading for researchers and instructors in a wide range of disciplines. While the primary audience will be those in the area of the rapidly growing international and interdisciplinary field of Girls' Studies, scholars and students of Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Women's/Gender/Sexuality Studies, Communication and Journalism will also find this an important study\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Sentient performitivities of embodiment
This collection addresses the burgeoning interest in the body as a site of affective and somatic, as well as sociocultural, communication. It explores what performers do with bodies in practice, rehearsal, and performance and how that translates to audiences and their sociopolitical contexts.
eBook
Seeing stars : sports celebrity, identity, and body culture in modern Japan
In \"Seeing Stars\", Dennis J. Frost traces the emergence and evolution of sports celebrity in Japan from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. Frost explores how various constituencies have repeatedly molded and deployed representations of individual athletes, revealing that sports stars are socially constructed phenomena, the products of both particular historical moments and broader discourses of celebrity. Drawing from media coverage, biographies, literary works, athletes' memoirs, bureaucratic memoranda, interviews, and films, Frost argues that the largely unquestioned mass of information about sports stars not only reflects, but also shapes society and body culture. He examines the lives and times of star athletes - including sumo grand champion Hitachiyama, female Olympic medalist Hitomi Kinue, legendary pitcher Sawamura Eiji, and world champion boxer Gushiken Yokoo - demonstrating how representations of such sports stars mediated Japan's emergence into the putatively universal realm of sports, unsettled orthodox notions of gender, facilitated wartime mobilization of physically fit men and women, and masked lingering inequalities in postwar Japanese society. As the first critical examination of the history of sports celebrity outside a Euro-American context, this book also sheds new light on the transnational forces at play in the production and impact of celebrity images and dispels misconceptions that sports stars in the non-West are mere imitations of their Western counterparts.
Book
Presence of the Body
Presence of the Body provides an interdisciplinary forum (including literary, performative, philosophical and anthropological approaches) for the dialogue between theory and practice about the impact of the body on human awareness in the fields of art, writing, meditative practice, and performance.
eBook
Sentient performativities of embodiment : thinking alongside the human
This collection offers writings on the body with a focus on performance, defined as both staged performance and everyday performance.Traditionally, theorizations of the body have either analyzed its impact on its socio-historical environment or treated the body as a self-enclosed semiotic and affective system.
eBook
Getting Under the Skin
Tracing the evolution of contemporary body discourse Getting Under the Skin analyzes the tension between a fragmented and holistic body concept in performance art, popular culture, new media arts, and architecture.
The body as an object of critical study dominates disciplines across the humanities to such an extent that a new discipline has emerged: body criticism. In Getting Under the Skin, Bernadette Wegenstein traces contemporary body discourse in philosophy and cultural studies to its roots in twentieth-century thought—showing how psychoanalysis, phenomenology, cognitive science, and feminist theory contributed to a new body concept—and studies the millennial body in performance art, popular culture, new media arts, and architecture.
Wegenstein shows how the concept of bodily fragmentation has been in circulation since the sixteenth century's investigation of anatomy. The history of the body-in-pieces, she argues, is a history of a struggling relationship between two concepts of the body—as fragmented and as holistic. Wegenstein shows that by the twentieth century these two apparently contradictory movements were integrated; both fragmentation and holism, she argues, are indispensable modes of imagining and configuring the body. The history of the body, therefore, is a history of mediation; but it was not until the turn of the twenty-first century and the digital revolution that the body was best able to show its mediality.
After examining key concepts in body criticism, Wegenstein looks at the body as \"raw material\" in twentieth-century performance art, medical techniques for visualizing the human body, and strategies in popular culture for \"getting under the skin\" with images of freely floating body parts. Her analysis of current trends in architecture and new media art demonstrates the deep connection of body criticism to media criticism. In this approach to body criticism, the body no longer stands in for something else—the medium has become the body.
eBook
Scripting the Black masculine body : identity, discourse, and racial politics in popular media
Traces the origins of Black body politics in the United States and its contemporary manifestations in hip-hop music and film.
Winner of the 2007 Everett Lee Hunt Award presented by the Eastern Communication Association
Scripting the Black Masculine Body traces the origins of Black body politics in the United States and its contemporary manifestations in popular cultural productions. From early blackface cinema through contemporary portrayals of the Black body in hip-hop music and film, Ronald L. Jackson II examines how African American identities have been socially constructed, constituted, and publicly understood, and argues that popular music artists and film producers often are complicit with Black body stereotypes. Jackson offers a communicative perspective on body politics through a blend of social scientific and humanities approaches and offers possibilities for the liberation of the Black body from its current ineffectual and paralyzing representations.
eBook
War without Bodies
Historically the bodies of civilians are the most damaged by the
increasing mechanization and derealization of warfare, but this is
not reflected in the representation of violence in popular media.
In War Without Bodies , author Martin Danahay argues that
the media in the United States in particular constructs a \"war
without bodies\" in which neither the corpses of soldiers or
civilians are shown. War Without Bodies traces the
intertwining of new communications technologies and war from the
Crimean War, when Roger Fenton took the first photographs of the
British army and William Howard Russell used the telegraph to
transmit his dispatches, to the first of three \"video wars\" in the
Gulf region in 1990-91, within the context of a war culture that
made the costs of organized violence acceptable to a wider public.
New modes of communication have paradoxically not made more war
\"real\" but made it more ubiquitous and at the same time
unremarkable as bodies are erased from coverage. Media such as
photography and instantaneous video initially seemed to promise
more realism but were assimilated into existing conventions that
implicitly justified war. These new representations of war were
framed in a way that erased the human cost of violence and replaced
it with images that defused opposition to warfare. Analyzing
poetry, photographs, video and video games the book illustrates the
ways in which war was framed in these different historical
contexts. It examines the cultural assumptions that influenced the
reception of images of war and discusses how death and damage to
bodies was made acceptable to the public. War Without
Bodies aims to heighten awareness of how acceptance of war is
coded into texts and how active resistance to such hidden messages
can help prevent future unnecessary wars.
eBook