A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
“Big Man on Campus Ladies”
by: Walter Metz / Montana State University
Metz discusses the Oxygen TV show Campus Ladies and the so-called outrageous collegiate lives, the politicization of academia and the “vitriol reserved at this moment of American culture for professors.”
Comedy is a Woman in Trouble
by: Heather Hendershot / Queens College
Questioning Comedy Central’s fixation on the male audience.
Krebs, Recycled
by: Daniel Marcus / Goucher College
Remembering Bob Denver as Maynard G. Krebs, a rebellious figure in early television. He was a beatnik icon for suburban youths who dreamed of upsetting accepted morals and conventions.
To Have and Have not (You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone)
by: John Hartley / Queensland University of Technology
The afterlife of Dead Like Me on Australian cable television and the pleasures and perturbances of watching an already-in-the-grave series.
Boy Soaps: Liberalism Without Women
by: Allison McCracken / DePaul University
What’s old is new again on television, as prime-time boy soap operas like Everwood, Jack and Bobby, Life As We Know It, Summerland, The Mountain, One Tree Hill, Smallville and The OC have come to replace girl-centered teen dramas like My So-Called Life, Popular, and Buffy.
To Pee or Not to Pee: On the Politics of Cultural Appropriation
by: Brian L. Ott / Colorado State University
Although I appreciate the courtesy of my fellow drivers letting me know what pisses them off and whom they’d like to piss on, I can’t help but notice that they have adopted the same cultural icon to convey, at times, very divergent targets of distaste.
