Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR45963

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 574-587).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 287-294).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 206-228). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Under the tensions of nationalization and globalization, mainland Chinese cinema has undergone tremendous changes in terms of industrial transformations, diversification of film language, style and genre, revenues, etc. in the new century. This is epitomized in a new surge of commercial entertainment cinema. This dissertation examines Lu Chuan and his films among this surge and as a representative of the new development of Chinese popular cinema. The study reveals a new political regime and a new popular imagination in China with its greater integration into the international system of global capitalism in in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I apply Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production to explore structural transformations in the field of Chinese cinema, and trace these changes to the shaping forces in the larger fields of Chinese power and economy. This structural examination is related to the agency of individuals as cultural entrepreneurs maneuvering their way within the state system through alliance of power, capital and talent, and forming their own voices and a public space. Theories of popular cultural studies help me analyze Lu Chuan’s films as a site where different international and domestic social, political, and cultural forces contend and negotiate with each other. I also draw upon theories of film studies to illustrate Lu Chuan’s application of international film language and styles including classical Hollywood cinema and the art film in rendering Chinese socialist stories in the age of globalization. Instead of treating Lu Chuan as an auteur or artistic creator, I look into his authorship as a site of different discourses and a technique of the self, which helps him distinguish his films from others and establish his position in the field. Trauma studies provide a useful tool in discussing Chinese cinematic representations of the national trauma, the Nanjing Massacre, during different historical periods, and Chinese nation’s continuing effort in grappling with this trauma. This textual analysis is to illustrate the newest development in Chinese cinema. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the historical transformation of Chinese society and to identify the forces that shaped Chinese cinema, which took form in a new alliance amongst power, capital, and art, and contributed to a post-socialist popular imagination in China in the first decade of the new century. / text

“Sonic Gentitud” brings American Indian and Chicana/o literatures into sound studies as testimonials to decolonial and transformative listening practices. I argue that the narrative forms and paratexts in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues (1995), and Nina Marie Martínez’s ¡Caramba!: A Tale Told in Turns of the Card (2004) remap the cognitive space of sonic (re)production by offering textual and graphic representations of sound and listening. Understanding this articulation of the literary to the sonic as a form of audile realism, I highlight the listening citizen as a prominent figure in literary renderings of enduring Laguna, Spokane, Chicana/o, and Greater Mexican community-formation and growth. A self-consciously aesthetic narrative depiction that links embodied practices of listening to the historical, material, and political contours and discourses of a specific locale, audile realism represents subversive and differential listening practices that transform social networks of sonic (re)production such that they serve the interests of the tribal nation or Greater Mexican community. Listening citizens are thus critical actors in the maintenance of gentitud, a form of community- and network-building that recognizes affiliation as always-already performed across differences of race, class, gender, and/or sexuality. / text

This thesis examines the recent production and consumption of television dramas in Taiwan in the context of Taiwan's complicated modem history, rapid social transitions, budding self-assertiveness and changing relationships with regional and global players. The detailed analysis in this subject matter contributes to wider debates in the media globalisation theory, reaffirming the continuing development of an East Asian cultural trading block and pointing to a formation of the distinctive regional popular culture that is more effective in shaping up the local production and consumption activities. The rising regional dynamism in Taiwan's television drama production and consumption since the late 1990s has been encapsulated in this thesis in three main points: 1. The findings from detailed content analysis on programming schedules of seven locally-run channels has shown that regional programming is more integrated with local business while global programming (mostly American) has shifted to be produced and distributed single-handedly by the transnational media corporations. 2. The first-hand audience interviews revealed a subtle difference in young people's viewing experiences of the global and the regional programming. Situated in a broader social context, their experience of the former has primarily crouched on a fantasy of liberal individualism while the latter provided a desirable template for emulation in everyday life. 3. The thesis also discussed the emergence of a new drama genre on Taiwanese television-Idol drama, which can be seen as the reactions to the widespread regional television deregulation, commercialisation and growing intra-regional cultural trade. Its late development has also epitomised An inevitable negotiation of local characteristic with regional forces.

In this report, I examine representations of women eating alone in various sites of American popular culture, including 1980s women’s magazines, mid twentieth-century lifestyle guides, and early twentieth-century popular literature. Exploring the resonances between these various moments and sites of culture through which the meaning of eating alone has been produced reveals a complex pattern of signification, one that demonstrates the centrality of this mundane and often overlooked element of our daily lives to some of the most fundamental narratives about the place of women, food, and family in American culture and society. Taking as a starting point the existing scholarship on the food practices of women in the United States that demonstrates the existence of strong historical and ideological correlations between food, family and femininity, I argue that, for women, eating alone is necessarily marked as a non-normative and potentially subversive behavior. A woman eating alone in effect upends the family dinner table through which an entire system of economic, social and personal relationships based around heteronormative domesticity is imagined to be constituted. The figure of the woman eating alone, then, is a powerfully charged – even dangerous – symbol, a condensed site of meaning through which dominant ideologies may be reified, reproduced and resisted. / text

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

By 1909, Mexico City had a little more than 720,000 inhabitants, 250 schools, and almost 1,000 pulquerías -drinking establishments serving pulque, a fermented beverage made of the maguey plant. Today, pulquerías have almost disappeared; but just a century ago, people enjoyed gathering there. Since their beginnings in the 1530s, pulquerías became an integral part of the life of Mexico City’s inhabitants. These taverns offered pulque to take out, but far more importantly, a space where men and women drank, talked, danced, and enjoyed themselves as a part of their daily social life. These spaces represented an important place in the city’s lower-class culture and daily life. In this dissertation, I explore the social and cultural development of these businesses. I focus my discussion on the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century when there was a constant effort of making of Mexico a modern nation like England, France, or United States. Under the influence of liberalism, authorities increasingly sought to control the behavior of the population, especially in the public arena with the goal of creating hardworking and moral citizenry. They saw pulque as the core of social evils, and pulquerías, as centers where inebriated urban masses abandoned their daily routine, procrastinated, and fought. Consequently, authorities strictly regulated schedules, facilities, and all activities taking place in pulquerías. Patrons and owners resisted those regulations in different ways; especially customers, through their everyday practices, developed a vigorous and multi-faceted response to the processes of modernization. 13 Within these places, alcohol consumption fostered an environment of free interaction and gave men and women a platform in which they could demand and contest explanations about the behavior of their neighbors, partners, and coworkers. Their discussions and fights prove to be significant to the understanding of the regulation of the neighborhood dynamics as well as valves of escape during changing times. By analyzing the historical intersections of popular culture, nation building and modernization programs, and lower class responses to these reforms this dissertation contributes to the study of the cultural and social history of Mexico.