As the New Deal order crumbled in the 1960s and 1970s and conservatism ascended, what happened to American liberalism? My dissertation finds the answer to that question in an unexpected place: Sesame Street. Created in 1969, Sesame Street became a template for a new liberal politics that maintained a fealty to individualism and opportunity, had a desire to be inclusive and represent a diverse body of Americans, believed in merit and social uplift, and was devoted to New Deal-era ideas about the government’s role in promoting social reform. I call this politics “fuzzy liberalism.” Understanding Sesame Street’s production of fuzzy liberalism contributes to an emerging historiography on post-1960s liberalism. My chapters explore how fuzzy liberalism operated by exploring themes of the urban crisis and revitalization, race and colorblindness, nonprofits and commercialism, family values and feminism, the culture wars and heteronormativity, and public television and privatization. Drawing on archival sources, like production documents and viewer mail, and a close reading of popular culture, my dissertation blends the cultural and the political in innovative ways to argue that we cannot understand the history of U.S. political culture since the 1960s without giving serious scholarly attention to the politics of Sesame Street. / History

Yes / The concept of the stiff upper lip stands as a cultural metaphor for the repression and figurative 'biting back' of traumatic experience, particularly in military contexts. For men born in the first half of the 20th century, maintaining a stiff upper lip involved the ability to exert high levels of cognitive control over the subjective, visceral and emotional domains of experience. In the most common forms of dementia, which affect at least one in five men now in their 80s and 90s, this cognitive control is increasingly lost. One result is that, with the onset of dementia, men who have in the intervening years maintained a relative silence about their wartime experiences begin to disclose detailed memories of such events, in some cases for the first time. This article draws on narrative biographical data from three men with late-onset dementia who make extensive reference to their experience of war. The narratives of Sid, Leonard and Nelson are used to explore aspects of collective memory of the two World Wars, and the socially constructed masculinities imposed on men who grew up and came of age during those decades. The findings show that in spite of their difficulties with short term memory, people with dementia can contribute rich data to cultural studies research. Some aspects of the narratives discussed here may also be considered to work along the line of the counter-hegemonic, offering insights into lived experiences of war that have been elided in popular culture in the post-War years.

This dissertation examines professional wrestling in the U.S., in particular, live and television shows produced by the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). Through the examination, it addresses complex issues of authenticity, audience, commodification, and discipline in contemporary popular culture and media. I use three approaches in this study. First, I apply the theory of culture industry, developed by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, to understand WWE wrestling. I examine how the WWE thoroughly stylizes its products to attract fans and condition them to repeat the same calculable reactions. However, contemporary fans often refuse to react as the WWE wants them to. By analyzing the complex interplay between the WWE and fans, I update and re-contextualize Adorno and Horkheimer's idea that the culture industry exerts total control over consumers. Second, I examine the recent rise of "nonfictional" narratives in professional wrestling, narratives that candidly acknowledge wrestling's scripted nature. I demonstrate how the WWE uses nonfictional narratives to present fans new ways of finding realness in wrestling and respecting wrestlers. I also point out that, by utilizing both fictional and nonfictional narratives, the WWE has developed clever ways of balancing between offering controversial products and transmitting conservative and respectable messages to enhance its populist appeal. Third, I look at the history of professional wrestling through theories of modernity and postmodernity. I grasp it as a dynamic process in which wrestling has expressed its challenge against and ambivalence towards dominant ideologies, values, and masculinities of modernity in multiple ways. I also examine the predominance of obsessed subjectivities in contemporary WWE wrestling as a unique form of postmodern expression. I argue that obsessively competitive and self-destructive performances of WWE wrestlers illuminate the contradiction of the construction of modern "disciplined" subjects described by Michel Foucault. They also reveal that in the culture where pain and destruction of human beings are among the most desired objects, the WWE has to endanger real live bodies of its wrestlers in order to survive and thrive. WWE is a rich, problematic, and compelling cultural phenomenon that illuminates issues and contradictions of itself, and the system it belongs to.

Women's movements and feminisms in Brazil have taken various forms throughout the years, contributing significantly to socio-political actions that favor gender justice. However, Brazilian feminisms remain on the margins of American academic discourse. In the United States, conceptualizations of feminism are often complicated by epistemological practices that treat certain political actions as feminist while dismissing others. The invisibility of Brazilian feminisms within feminist scholarship in the United States, therefore, justifies the need for further research on the topic. My research focuses on feminist articles published by Revista Estudos Feministas, one of the oldest and most well known feminist journals in Brazil. Using postcolonial, postmodern, and critical race feminist theories as a framework of analysis, my thesis investigates the theories and works utilized by feminists in Brazil. I argue that Brazilian feminisms both challenge and emulate the social, economic, and geopolitical orders that divide the world into Global North and South. / by Renata Rodrigues Bozzetto. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

This study argues that the interfaith symbolism present in the works of American author Jean Toomer undermines dominant Christian justifications for racism in the United States. It also discusses the ways in which Toomer's interfaith symbolism promotes the establishment of a race Toomer called the "American" race, a group of interracial, interreligious people whom Toomer hoped would change the way race was viewed in the United States. The multireligious references in Toomer's works challenge constricted definitions of both religion and race by highlighting interchangeable religious ideals from several world religions. / by Laura Gayle Fallon. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Chan, Siu-han. / Thesis submitted in: July 2004. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 184-193). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / ABSTRACT --- p.i / 論文摘要 --- p.ii / ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS --- p.iii / CONTENTS --- p.v / INTRODUCTION / Chapter 1.1 --- Empirical Puzzles and Theoretical Concern --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- The Cultural Scene in Hong Kong --- p.5 / Chapter 1.3 --- Defining the New Wave Cinema --- p.8 / Chapter 1.4 --- The Objectives of the Thesis --- p.12 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- In Quest of Theoretical Perspective and Analytical Framework / Chapter 2.1 --- Existing Studies of the New Wave Cinema --- p.13 / Chapter 2.2 --- The Study of Popular Culture in Hong Kong --- p.21 / Chapter 2.3 --- Culture Industry: The Approach of the Frankfurt School --- p.28 / Chapter 2.4 --- The Elective Affinity of Culture Industry with Hong Kong Society --- p.33 / Chapter 2.5 --- Analytical Framework --- p.36 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- The Anxiety of Political Subjectivity / Chapter 3.1 --- Prelude --- p.45 / Chapter 3.2 --- The Perturbed Hong Kong People --- p.50 / Chapter 3.3 --- The Hong Kong Diaspora --- p.57 / Chapter 3.4 --- The Negative Projection on the Colonizers --- p.60 / Chapter 3.5 --- The Ambivalence Towards the Motherland´ؤChina --- p.66 / Chapter 3.6 --- Discourse on Political Modernization: The Anxiety of Political Subjectivity --- p.86 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- The Contradiction of Societal Modernization / Chapter 4.1 --- Prelude --- p.89 / Chapter 4.2 --- Looking back at the Pre-modernized Social Order --- p.91 / Chapter 4.3 --- Rethinking the Entanglement of the Old and the New --- p.102 / Chapter 4.4 --- Representing the Modernized New Social Order --- p.110 / Chapter 4.5 --- Discourse on Societal Modernization: The Contradiction of Societal Modernization --- p.123 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- The Fragility of Hong Kong Cultural Identity / Chapter 5.1 --- Prelude --- p.126 / Chapter 5.2 --- Historical Memories as Cultural Receptacles --- p.128 / Chapter 5.3 --- The Spatialized Cultural Consciousness --- p.136 / Chapter 5.4 --- Urbanism as the Quality of Hong Kong society --- p.144 / Chapter 5.5 --- The Chinese Tradition in Present Day Hong Kong --- p.151 / Chapter 5.6 --- The Hybridized Everyday Popular Culture --- p.157 / Chapter 5.7 --- Discourse on Cultural Modernization: The Fragility of Hong Kong Cultural Identity --- p.164 / CONCLUSION / Chapter 6.1 --- The Planned Tragic Vision in Culture Industry --- p.167 / Chapter 6.2 --- The Aestheticization of Social Reality in Culture Industry --- p.171 / Chapter 6.3 --- The Demise of the New Wave Cinema in Hong Kong Culture Industry --- p.178 / New Wave Cinema: A Listing --- p.182 / REFERERNCES --- p.184

Throughout history, comic books and the media they inspire have reflected modern society as it changes and grows. But women’s roles in comics have often been diminished as they become victims, damsels in distress, and sidekicks. This thesis explores the problems that female characters often face in comic books, but it also shows the positive representation that new creators have introduced over the years. This project is a genealogy, in which the development of the empowered superwoman is traced in modern age comic books. This discussion includes the characters of Kamala Khan, Harley Quinn, Gwen Stacy, and Barbara Gordon and charts how these four women have been empowered and disempowered throughout their comic canon. It rejects the lens of postfeminism and suggests that an intersectional feminism is still needed in today’s ever-evolving and diversifying world. Popular culture must be representative of everyone, and today’s women authors will be the driving force of diversity in comic books.

The purpose of this study was to take a piece of popular culture, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and use it as a pedagogical tool in a graduate criminal theory course to serve as a pilot study. Evaluation data showed that using the Sorcerer's Stone is an effective way to teach students how to apply criminological theory hypothetical examples of behavior.

How people think about the end of the world greatly affects how they live in the present. This thesis examines how popular American thought about “the end of the world” has been greatly affected by Hal Lindsey’s 1970 popular prophecy book The Late, Great Planet Earth. LGPE sold more copies than any other non-fiction book in the 1970s and greatly aided the mainstreaming of “end-times” ideas like the Antichrist, nuclear holocaust, the Rapture, and various other concepts connected with popular end-times thought. These ideas stem from a specific strain of late-nineteenth century Biblical interpretation known as dispensational premillennialism, which has manifested in various schools of premillennial thought over the last 150 years. However, Lindsey translated this complicated system into modern language and connected it with contemporary geopolitics in powerful ways which helped make LGPE incredibly popular and influential in the 1970s and beyond. This paper includes an introduction to some essential concepts and terms related to popular premillennialism followed by a brief history of popular prophecy in America. The second half of this thesis examines the social, religious, and political climate of the 1970s and how Lindsey’s success connects to the culture of the Seventies, specifically conservative reactions to the various social movements of the 1960s. The last major section discusses Lindsey’s malleable theology and the power of interpreting the Bible “literally.” In the 1970s, conservative theologians and denominations won the battle to define certain concepts within Christianity including terms like “literal,” “inerrant,” and related terms, and Lindsey’s treatment of “the end times” reflects these definitions and how they affect Biblical interpretation. Finally, the conclusion fleshes out the appeal of popular premillennialism in the 1970s and into the present day.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 268-284). Also available on the Internet.