Bibliography: leaves 69-73. / This thesis argues for, citing the example of four novels published at or near to the millennium, the establishment of antirely new genre. But implicit in this is an investigstion into what is meant by term 'genre'. Further the nature of these novels makes central the way in which these novels should be grouped over the grouping itself.

The numerous youth subcultures to emerge since the end of World War Two act as what I call “biopolitical cultural apparatuses” that help subjects navigate the discontinuity in values, labour, and material expectations between the Fordist and neoliberal formations. As such, subcultures play a socializing role, helping subjects adapt to an increasingly precarious and austere social sphere; but they also generate new forms of community, and new experiences of personal and collective agency that can contribute to significant social transformation. Responding to the contemporary body of “post-subcultural” studies, I combine Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of biopolitics and Slavoj Žižek’s treatment of the Lacanian symptom to frame a theory that can highlight the politically progressive elements of subculture, while at the same time acknowledging their complicity with elements of the cultural dominant. Complementing Dick Hebdige’s theory of the incorporation processes to which subcultures are subjected, I offer spatial-temporal incorporation as a predominant way in which subcultural difference is recuperated by patriarchal and capitalist structures. At the same time, the heterotopic spaces subcultures produce enable new solidarities and friendships to develop, and can offer important experiences of alterity within the fluid and individualized regulative structures of late capitalism. I investigate these dynamics through a focus on skateboarding as a subculture that is particularly representative of the kinds of control structures faced by contemporary, Western subjects. My dissertation concludes with a detailed case study of the struggles of skateboarders to maintain and preserve an aging skateboard park in Beasley, a downtown neighbourhood of Hamilton, Ontario. Hamilton’s project to re-brand itself as a post-industrial “hub” for the “creative economy” places the skateboarders in the position of having to manage their (sub)cultural capital in a new way, as developers attempt to gentrify the neighbourhood. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis describes contemporary subcultures as helping subjects navigate the shift from a Fordist to neoliberal society. A combination of Marxian theories about contemporary capitalism, Giorgio Agamben's theories of the apparatus, bare life and the friend, and Jacques Lacan's theories of the symptom are used to understand subcultures as both responding to this shift in values and institutions, and possibly providing forms of community and agency that anticipate a post-capitalist world. A particular focus on skateboarding and the extreme sports industry illustrates these theories. Specific chapters detail the extreme sports industry, the nascent street skateboarding culture in northern Ontario town of Barrie in the nineteen eighties, and the history of Beasley Skateboard Park in downtown Hamilton, Ontario.

This study seeks to explicate the intercultural experiences of Puerto Ricans within the diaspora of Central Florida. Specifically, the navigation of communication behaviors among intergroup and outgroup behaviors as Puerto Rican individuals acculturate into the area. This study utilizes communication accommodation theory as its basis to understand integration into a host culture and the impacts on socio-cultural communication behaviors. Findings show the importance of studying diasporic communities as they develop such as that of the Puerto Rican community in Central Florida because it situates the reality of an individual and groups sense of identity in a new cultural context. This research showcases Puerto Rican diasporic individuals struggling with the bilingual brain and acculturating based on their environment. Communication accommodation behaviors are thus deeply rooted in marginalization and negative treatment of diasporic individuals as the "other" in multicultural scenarios. Intercultural self-identity and intersectionality has therefore been impacted by the dynamic between the home culture and host culture.

In this thesis I argue that a suburban cultural imagination developed transnationally during the post-war period (roughly 1945-1970) rather than as a cultural phenomenon largely associated with the 1950s United States. I situate the suburbs—in both their physical and cultural constructions—as my primary focus and discuss the suburb's influence on hegemonic culture by performing an in-depth comparison of the U.S. with another country with a long history of suburbanization—Australia. Given that the suburbs structure several social, cultural, economic, political, and historical vectors—which all in turn inform issues of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality—I focus on how the suburbs inform gender; in particular, I identify how the suburban imagination has contributed to the creation of the housewife figure. To locate these suburbs, I turn to the mass-circulation magazines of the mid-twentieth century whose advertisements, editorials, and short fiction disseminated the rhetoric and iconography of the suburb. Magazines like Ladies' Home Journal and Harper's helped form a U.S. suburban imagination through "housewife writers" such as Shirley Jackson. Comparing these suburban texts to the Australian Women's Weekly, we can see continuities and variations between suburbia in the U.S. and Australian cultural imaginations. I conclude this thesis by sketching potential coordinates for future investigation, including in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Africa. While the process of suburbanization may vary in each country, a suburban imagination exists which transcends national experience and instead forms transnational lines that connect nations throughout the post-war period. These insights provide new ways of thinking about suburbanization, transnationalism, and globalization and the role that magazines had in shaping the cultures being constructed inside these suburban developments.

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between Wizards of the Coast's trading card game Magic: The Gathering and its digital adaptations. I used critical technocultural, ludic discourse analysis, and ludic textual analysis to examine the analog trading card game and digital adaptations. I examined an archive of paratextual media including trade magazines, developer blogs, game reviews, and player guides. I chose Magic for its long history, impact on the analog game industry, and the sheer number of adaptations that have been produced. This analysis begins by introducing a method for describing analog to digital adaptations called Adaptation Mapping. Adaptation mapping describes adaptations as a relationship between how the interface of the game is remediated and the degree to which a game represents the thematic and ludic experiences of the original. Then I examine the narrative framework that allows Magic to tell stories through both its theme and mechanics. Identifying the figure of the Planeswalker as a key component in how narrative functions in Magic, I trace the development of the planeswalker as a player analog to independent original characters under the purview of Wizards of the Coast. The adaptations provide a backdrop for this change and highlights the way that the same mechanical and algorithmic systems can characterize both player and official characters within Magics ecosystem. This shift highlights the way that marketing is approached and influences the design of the game. Finally, I examine how digital adaptations are intwined with ludic platform economy that has emerged through the 2010s. The apparatus that allows for capital to flow through the community is coopted via adaptation and remediated in ways that redirect capital back towards Wizards of the Coast as the platform owner. Analog to digital adaptation is a critical juncture in examining the impact of platformization on play and games.

This dissertation examines the representations of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in superhero television shows, their source comics, and their corresponding fan fiction. Using close reading, in the tradition of Bérubé's (2018) examination of disability narratives in The Secret Life of Stories and Schalk's (2018) analysis of bodyminds in Bodyminds Reimagined, I explore how a character's PTSD is represented in the canonical media text (first through the comic book then through the television show) and discuss how the representation changes or evolves between mediums and provides or does not provide accurate representations of trauma, PTSD, and mental health. Through a sampling of popular fan texts from a given fandom and close reading the fan fiction and the tags, I interpret how fans construct PTSD and disability in their works: do they use the hegemonic medical model of disability, or do they construct PTSD through a social model? By providing an analysis of multiple media forms and PTSD throughout the superhero's stories, I show how fans both use and ignore canonical representations of disability and contribute to forms of oppression through their disabling of characters.

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