Display of disagreement in a public space under the form of strikes, rallies and not only, is not the sole form of protest. Popular culture can easily be used to send messages of discontent. The paper focuses on popular music by looking at one of the most representative music charts in the world: The Billboard Chart. By screening the Year End Billboard Rock Chart for a period of 5 years the paper tries to identify songs that can be labelled as protest songs and see what they are protesting against, what themes they address, what are their characteristics and how are the messages transmitted in both textual and visual narratives, in order to draw a picture of the contemporary protest song that is present in a popular chart. The theoretical framework of the paper discusses popular culture, the classical image of the protest song, the creational process of music within the music industry and its politic and economic sides. After a first screening of the charts with the help of content analysis, by using the concept of narrative, the paper examines the stories presented in the lyrics and, where possible, the videos made for the songs. The findings of the paper show that even if not respecting the theoretical characteristics of the classical protest song, The Year End Billboard Rock Chart has several songs with strong political messages either in lyrics or videos or in both at the same time.

Gay male culture is suffused with indications of the importance of women and bonds with women. Indeed the Stonewall riots, mythologised moment of the birth of modern gay politics, are often said to have been catalysed by gay male grief at the death of Judy Garland. Why should a culture apparently founded on same-sex desire be so preoccupied with relationships across gender difference? The thesis attempts to map the shape and effects of bonds with women by using a materialist analytical framework in relation to texts and their critical retinue. The first chapter looks at A Streetcar Named Desire, a play that has engendered significant cultural contest which spans key historical and political shifts in the nature of gay male identity. This chapter attempts to show how a diverse range of critical engagements with Tennessee Williams's work, including authoritative and resistant, heterosexual, homosexual and queer ones, exhibit considerable investment in the proposition that the playwright's sexuality not only structures a libidinous desire, but a gender identification. The second chapter situates gay men within the homosocial gender bonds mapped by Eve Sedgwick, and draws attention to the dissident opportunities gay male culture has exploited within this narrative system. It goes on to examine the potential political and cultural links between such strategies and the resistance of straight women who are also organised as homosocial subjects. This chapter includes a reading of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction as homosocial text and looks at a number of autobiographical and journalistic writings which identify a predominant dissident strategy which I refer to as heterosocial bonds. The latter part of the thesis comprises two complementary chapters. The first of these, chapter three, assesses the plausibility of heterosocial bonding in the representations of relationships between straight women, lesbians and gay men in the American situation comedy Roseanne. Chapter four conducts a similar inquiry in relation to Pedro Almodovar and the representational alignment he makes with women in the film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The analysis conducted in both of these chapters attempts to treat the texts not only as generic and formal representations,but as attempted acts of bonding. The thesis attempts to judge the political expediency and effectiveness of heterosocial bonding, and locates the difficulty and contingency of such endeavours within the fabric of homosocial structures.

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My thesis is both an oppositional history and a (re)definition of British Underground Cinema culture (1959 - 2(02). The historical significance of Underground Cinema has long been ideologically entangled in a mesh of academic typologies and ultra leftist rhetoric, abducting it from those directly involved. The intention of my work is to return definition to the 'object' of study, to write from within. This process involves viewing the history of modem British culture not as a vague monolithic and hierarchic spectrum but rather as a distinct historical conflict between the repressive legitimate Art culture of the bourgeoisie and the radical illegitimate popular culture of the working class. In this context, Underground Cinema can be {re)defined as a radical hybrid culture which fused elements of popular culture, Counterculture and Anti-Art. However, the first wave of Underground Cinema was effectively suppressed by the irrational ideology of its key activists and the hegemonic power of the Art tradition. They disowned the radical popular and initiated an Avant-Garde/Independent cinema project which developed an official State administrated bourgeois alternative to popular cinema. My conclusion is that Underground Cinema still has the potential to become a radical and commercial popular culture but that this is now frustrated by an institutionalised State Art culture which has colonised the State funding agencies, higher education and the academic study of cinema. If the Underground is to flourish it must refuse and subvert this Art culture and renew its alliance with radical, experimental and commercial pop culture. My methodology is an holistic interactive praxis which combines research, writing, film/video making, digital design, performance and political activism. My final submission will be an open and heterodox mesh of polemic, history and entertainment. Its key components will be a written thesis which will locate this praxis within its intellectual context and a web site which will integrate my research and practice 1997-2003.

The thesis places Wales within a postcolonial framework, and uses postcolonial theory to analyse the emergence of Welsh identities. Positioning ‘Wales’ and the ‘Welsh’ as subjects of study in relation to the British Empire suggests how discursive processes of power in Wales take place parallel to those in other areas of the Empire. In analysing these processes, the thesis illustrates the different effects of power in different local contexts. Welsh identities are shown as emerging and being produced by these discursive processes, and are found to be often resistant and complicit with dominant discourses in the same movement. In the central chapters of the thesis, the emergence of Welsh identities is analysed with reference to particular discourses and events: education, ritual, literary criticism and popular culture. These are, in Chapter 1, the Blue Books controversy; in Chapter 2, the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1911 and again in 1969; and, finally, in Chapter 3,the construction of different theories of literary criticism and the role of play and authenticity in Welsh popular culture. Using the work of Michel Foucault, the thesis rejects the notion of an original and essential Welsh identity and takes power to be fluid and productive of subjects. Various articulations of Welsh identity appear as dynamic, hybrid and linked to particular discourses, allowing us to understand the emergence of such identities without reference to a pre-given Welsh identity.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2007. / Document formatted into pages; contains v, 232 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Buffalo, 2005. / Appendices missing. "Quicktime and a TIFF decompresser are needed to see this picture" (p.217-239). Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Globalization trends and treaties, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), have increased the access and flow of United States media and popular culture products in Mexico. Limited research has been done examining the exposure of Mexican audiences to U.S. media products and the possibility of mass media’s impact on Mexican cultural identity. This qualitative study examines how twenty college-educated Mexican women identify and engage with the transnational popular culture text of Sex and the City (SATC). A multi-disciplinary theoretical approach, mainly from cultural studies and media studies, provides the backbone for my study of a foreign audience’s identification and engagement with a U.S. popular culture text. Thematic categorization of my interview data showed that genre, gender, class and location all played a role in the media engagement process. SATC enabled these twenty women to examine their lived experiences in Mexican society and be exposed to alternative viewpoints. The women interviewed were active audience members that discussed their experiences as college-educated, career driven women associated with modernity but living in the traditional, patriarchal society of Mexico. The women interviewed preferred watching television from other countries, such as the U.S., because it resonated with their lived experiences more than the telenovelas, which are the most common form of television programming in Latin America. In terms of discussing the representation of women on SATC, women talked about the gender roles, myths and structural forces of Mexican society to engage in resistive pleasure and to talk about gender politics. For these Mexican women, discussing SATC allowed them to express concerns over the representation of women in telenovelas, the importance of having alternative viewpoints available to women, and the experiences that have allowed them to foster spaces for change based on SATC’s content and characters. While factors, such as education, socioeconomics and geographic location framed the respondent comments, SATC was a source of strategic knowledge and cultural capital for women to open up new discussions with friends and family, new ways of looking and living out their sexuality, and ideas of the female body.

Globalization trends and treaties, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), have increased the access and flow of United States media and popular culture products in Mexico. Limited research has been done examining the exposure of Mexican audiences to U.S. media products and the possibility of mass media’s impact on Mexican cultural identity. This qualitative study examines how twenty college-educated Mexican women identify and engage with the transnational popular culture text of Sex and the City (SATC). A multi-disciplinary theoretical approach, mainly from cultural studies and media studies, provides the backbone for my study of a foreign audience’s identification and engagement with a U.S. popular culture text. Thematic categorization of my interview data showed that genre, gender, class and location all played a role in the media engagement process. SATC enabled these twenty women to examine their lived experiences in Mexican society and be exposed to alternative viewpoints. The women interviewed were active audience members that discussed their experiences as college-educated, career driven women associated with modernity but living in the traditional, patriarchal society of Mexico. The women interviewed preferred watching television from other countries, such as the U.S., because it resonated with their lived experiences more than the telenovelas, which are the most common form of television programming in Latin America. In terms of discussing the representation of women on SATC, women talked about the gender roles, myths and structural forces of Mexican society to engage in resistive pleasure and to talk about gender politics. For these Mexican women, discussing SATC allowed them to express concerns over the representation of women in telenovelas, the importance of having alternative viewpoints available to women, and the experiences that have allowed them to foster spaces for change based on SATC’s content and characters. While factors, such as education, socioeconomics and geographic location framed the respondent comments, SATC was a source of strategic knowledge and cultural capital for women to open up new discussions with friends and family, new ways of looking and living out their sexuality, and ideas of the female body.