This study explores humor, irony, and satire in the wake of the September 11th attacks, and in relation to nationalist, conservative, and racialized ideologies in the United States. Employing a case study approach, the dissertation analyzes a range of media texts spanning the decade following 9/11, including: political sketches from Saturday Night Live’s 2001-02 season; an episode of South Park that aired on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003; cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that ran in the Danish Jyllands-Posten in 2005; Stephen Colbert’s keynote address at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2006; the satirical cover of a 2008 issue of the New Yorker magazine (Barry Blitt’s “The Politics of Fear”); and, finally, Jon Stewart’s response on The Daily Show to Osama bin Laden’s assassination in 2011. These humorous, ironic, and satirical media texts at times challenged, and at others underscored, dominant discourses around September 11th and the Bush Administration’s response. In mapping these texts and their engagement with different sources of power, the dissertation illuminates how ambivalently they do so, as well as the extent to which the meaning of comedic texts are particularly dependent on their contexts. The study’s primary orientation is cultural studies, but it also borrows from rhetorical analysis and critical race theory in its larger discussion of the potentials and shortcomings of such texts as tools of oppositional politics. The questions and goals of the dissertation are both theoretical and political, as it addresses the significance of such comedic texts not only as sources of entertainment and catharsis, but also as essential components in political discourse and cultural engagement. At the heart of the project are questions and issues related to hegemony, subversion, corporate media, stable and unstable irony, discursive communities, authorial intention, context, ironic (or hipster) racism, and ideological blind spots. Moving beyond simple binaries—“getting” or “not getting” irony, humor, or satire—this study argues that humor texts are complex ideological amalgams that contest and solidify power relations in rich, and, at times, contradictory ways.

This study examines the ideologies of gender, race, and class present in Martha Stewart’s unprecedented popularity, beginning with the publication of Stewart’s first magazine in 1990 and ending in September 2004, after Stewart’s conviction for her involvement in the ImClone scandal. My approach is built on the intersection of American mass communication research, British cultural studies, and feminist theory, and utilizes Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model to examine how social, cultural and political discourses circulate in and through a mediated text and how those meanings are interpreted by those who receive them. Drawing from textual and ideological analysis of over thirteen years of Martha Stewart Living magazine and twelve weeks of Stewart’s four television programs, I investigate the ways in which the mode of address in Stewart’s media texts positions her simultaneously as a close friend and respected teacher. As the model for “living” in her media texts, Stewart uses these modes of address as the foundation of her messages about women’s roles, racial and ethnic traditions, and social mobility. To understand how readers and viewers make sense of these messages, I conducted focus group interviews with thirty-eight fans of Martha Stewart Living between October 2002 and July 2004. Two distinct types of fans emerged as my interviews progressed, and the participants, who have a range of different gender, race, sexuality and class identifications, expressed a variety of positions on the messages about gender roles, racial representations, and class aspiration they observed in Stewart’s texts. I was uniquely positioned to examine how fans’ feelings about Martha Stewart and Martha Stewart Living changed when Stewart was indicted, convicted and sentenced to prison because of her sale of ImClone stock; as a result of my observations, I argue that scholars should take a closer look at how fan practices and beliefs function in fans’ lives and in the larger culture. In total, this examination of Martha Stewart’s media texts and audience members offers a rich account of the ways in which discourses of gender, race, and class influenced American culture at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Based on an ethnographic investigation, the dissertation examines the emergence and significance of discourses around "the environment" in the Lake District of the Araucanía region of Chile (Araucanía Lacustre). These are understood as part of the discursive aspect of globalization – the process by which the territory and its population are integrated ever more tightly into the networks of global market society – and considered in conjunction with discourses around Mapuche indigenous identity. Drawing on media-cultural studies, actor network theory, and medium theory, the analysis seeks to advance an ecological concept of communication that does not privilege human consciousness and agency. Communication is argued to be the principle by which space (physical and metaphysical) is configured and connected. Through a discussion of the physical and human geography of the territory it is argued that discourse is mutually immanent with material realities, including human practice and pre-discursive, nonhuman elements (chapter 3). The connection between environmental discourse and Mapuche culture is examined through the stereotype of the ecologically virtuous indigenous subject – a stereotype whose significance is changing as parallel neoliberal multicultural and sustainable development discourses boost the prestige of both Mapuche culture and ecological responsibility, even as the steady expansion of market society undermines both (Chapter 2). A program run by an NGO, funded by the Chilean state, and intended to market the agro-ecological produce of Mapuche small farmers to tourists, provides a concrete case of the intersection of neoliberal multiculturalism with environmental discourse (Chapter 4). The concept of "postmaterialism" is adapted, with a critical edge, in an exploration of the environmental activism and a certain dissatisfaction with modernity among college educated immigrants to the District from Santiago, North America and Europe (chapter 5). The process of globalization, through which Mapuche campesinos come to use environmentalist discourses, involves interactions among old and new information technologies, transportation technologies, and the non-anthropogenic realities of physical space-time and geography (chapter 6). The dissertation concludes with a normative argument about the ethical and epistemological inadequacy of globalizing market society.