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This project utilizes a case study approach to explore the various ways in which the portrayals of gay people have changed on American television. Three contemporary programs - Will & Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and The L Word - are examined as examples of how far American television has progressed in terms of treating gay people with respect. Whether those shows move beyond merely presenting gay characters and into a level of actively challenging mainstream views on gay people is also examined. Findings suggest different factors affect the ability of the individual programs to test said views - including the genres to which each belongs, and their presence on network television (Will & Grace), basic cable (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) or premium cable (The L Word). While all three programs show some tendencies toward queerness, they also take steps toward negotiating with mainstream culture, indicating that complete queerness may be an unattainable goal on American television.

This critical study unveils the ideological underpinning of contemporary network series narratives through a thematic approach combined with the analysis of the strategies of representation that support the ideological inclination of the series/Cette analyse critique dévoile l'idéologie sous-jacente des séries télévisées contemporaines des networks américains par une approche thématique combinée à une analyse des stratégies de représentations qui appuient la tendance idéologique de ces séries / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

<p>  </p> <p>Many viewers—especially those from the continental United States—have praised Disney for such recent actions as casting Pacific Islanders in the animated feature film <em>Moana</em> (2016) and assembling a group of cultural advisors (named the Oceanic Story Trust) to guide the filmmakers’ creative decisions. However, my project contends that Disney continues to play a significant role in the maintenance of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i, despite these seemingly progressive attempts at challenging Hollywood’s whitewashing. In this project, I argue that Disney creates and replicates the structures of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i through a mechanism that I term <em>imagineered imperial tourism</em>. In my formulation, imagineered imperial tourism involves commodifying historical narratives of colonization to serve the Disney brand by “innocently” repackaging them for the purpose of settler tourist consumption. To signal a Disney-specific branding and reproduction of settler colonial tropes and ideologies, I use the term “imagineered”—a play on Disney’s trademarked term <em>Imagineering</em>, which names the work of the creative team tasked with engineering the company’s most innovative devices, built environments, and technologies.</p> <p>Through a sustained study of Disney’s relevant productions—from the feature films <em>Lilo & Stitch</em> (2002) and <em>Moana</em> to its built environments at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, FL, and Aulani, A Disney Resort & Spa in Ko Olina, Hawai‘i—I suggest that over time, Disney has normalized a version of Native Hawaiian people and history in US popular culture that reproduces common settler colonial discourses which have structured popular perceptions of Hawai‘i. The company’s almost century-long history of media production has cemented these discourses into a set of public pedagogies that have been reproduced across generations. Disney’s Pacific Island-themed productions and attractions are rife with tropes of native primitivism and imperialist nostalgia. They also reveal the primacy of the discursive framework of hegemonic multiculturalism vis-à-vis the commodified “spirit of aloha,” a sentiment which is superficially rooted in Native Hawaiian epistemologies and branded as a key selling point by the tourism industry. Furthermore, Disney has actively colonized Hawaiian lands since 2007, capitalizing on the Islands’ exploitative tourist industry while also obscuring longstanding battles over land ownership and denying Native Hawaiians sovereignty over their stolen lands. Ultimately, I suggest that Disney’s ostensibly “innocent” repackaging contributes to the violent erasure of Native Hawaiian history in popular culture. </p>

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Framing theory is one of the most used theories in the discussion of media effects on how people make sense of issues, especially in the political environment. Although it is majorly used for the discussion of news media, framing theory can also be applied in other areas surrounding media production. This thesis uses this theory to discuss how presidents are framed in fiction and implications of race and gender in the assessment of presidential characters by analyzing Fox’s fictional drama 24. Although at first the show seems to bring new options for the presidency, the analysis points Presidents Palmer and Taylor as unfit for office and President Logan as unethical and power-hungry. Following Entman’s (1993) process for analyzing frames in media, embedded white male hegemony was identified in the show. As the show presented a postfeminist and postracial world, it continued to frame femininity and blackness as the opposite to effective executive leadership. Further, white masculinity was associated with power, ambition and ultimately corruption. As other races and gender were pointed as unfit, the status quo was questioned as being corrupt. The show both increases the cynicism that people may develop against politics and damages a more proper consideration of women and people of color to be elected president.

Within the last three decades, contemporary North America came to reinvent a socially focused genre of literary personal narratives. These new editorial and writing projects, published in the form of collections of personal narratives, emerged as a tool for the socially voiceless to secure some measure of agency in their contemporary social and cultural situation. Projects such as the Freedom Writers’ Diary or volumes of the Voice of Witness book series fit in the process that is currently labeled social empowerment. Witnesses express a deep urge to share their story in the hope to denounce their experience of an enduring social injustice. The written word, primary a means for self-disclosure, serves to exorcise the suffering associated to this specific predicament. The narrators engage in a powerful self-investigative gesture oriented towards resilience and renewed enfranchisement in regaining control over their life and environment. At the moment of publication, however, these testimonies come to be validated as authentic examples of the injustices they disclose. These examples serve an educational purpose: raising the audience’s awareness and opening deliberative fora for these issues to be discussed and for solutions to be hammered out and eventually implemented. <p>The purpose of this dissertation is to propose a theoretical model for the subgenre of testimonials of social empowerment. With the concept of empowerment as groundwork, the model develops a textual approach framed in a psychosocial structure. I argue that testimonials may be described as examples of Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action. As speech acts aimed at reaching understanding, testimonials capitalize both on the binding and bonding aspects of illocutionary force in the hope to secure with their audience an ongoing dialogue over issues of social justice. The volumes, as unofficial public spheres, mobilize the normative and practical dynamics at work in social movements. These dynamics express as two narrative guiding threads: an aesthetic based on impact, and an ethics based on responsibility. The texts’ aesthetic develops a form of perlocutionary realism instantiating a sense of authenticity and sincerity embodied in the narrators’ voices. The resulting impact is coupled to moral concerns based on a polysemic understanding of social responsibility, on which narrators seek to build their narratives’ ethical potential. A series of case studies allowed to demonstrate that both narrative threads are realized as an appropriation of four paradigmatic forms of rhetorical ethos, each based on a specific realm of the social world: intimacy, justice, spirituality and activism.<p> / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished