A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
Casey McCormick uses the Twitter reaction to the end of the Obama administration as a jumping off point to explain why finales matter and how audiences express an ambivalence regarding the ends of longform televisual storytelling.
Meg Hansen describes the “styled identity” and its articulation in Gossip Girl (2007-2012), demonstrating the dialogic between aesthetics and female identities, self-presentation and selfhood, in the specular economies of postmodern media and culture.
Alexis Carreiro explores Ghostbusters‘s (2016) deployment of a queef joke in relation to the gendered history of fart jokes and the feminist implications of and social strictures against women making noise, both bodily and politically.
Germaine Halegoua considers how virtual assistants like Alexa represent a shift from the imagination of the smart home as a space of ambient screens to ambient interfaces for continual background listening.
