Panel Abstract: In the famous 1964 Jacobelis v. Ohio case, Justice Potter Stewart famously claimed to know obscenity “when I see it.” Like obscenity and pornography, transgression is often taken for granted as a cultural “given.” As we become increasingly surrounded by cultural productions that blur any sense of coherent mainstream, alternative, corporate, state, or independent images, videos, music, and writing, it seems harder and harder to understand what transgression really means. In an age of online communities based on a free exchange of personally videotaped, exhibitionist pornography, websites that post embarrassing or illegal acts by powerful corporate interests, networks of political blogs that rival even the best print journalism, and the circulation of incredibly popular short films that range from the horrific to the banal, by what means do we measure how and when something transgresses what used to be known as the “dominant” culture? Breaking away from discussions of the internet, digital culture, and networks as either positive or negative characteristics of the contemporary public sphere, Transgression 2.0 brings together a variety of perspectives and case studies to find contemporary locations of cultural opposition, both on and offline. It suggests that the “prurient interest” of a culture, to borrow Justice Brennan’s terminology from another obscenity trial, is in fact to seek out those places in which it is forced to evolve. Far from an easy process, in the digital age transgression becomes increasingly essential even as it becomes harder to define, discover, and protect.Panel Rationale:Despite the constant attention paid to defining and redefining the field of Communications, and in particular the “keywords” that form the focus of this process, the concept of “transgression” has been largely avoided.  There are many reasons for this; the term is often associated with particular movements (e.g. battles for recognition in gay rights movements), specific theories (e.g. Bakhtin), and an ambivalent politics centered more on opposition than on what is commonly considered to be a progressive agenda.  This panel will attempt to bypass these issues, as they ultimately limit the usefulness of the concept of transgression.  More importantly, it will question whether or not transgression can exist in the contemporary moment, defined by increased information flow, increasingly shifting terms of personal and social identification, and political and economic systems that seem to co-opt and reappropriate areas of what would formerly be considered to be transgressive even before they are fully formed.  Focusing on transgression not as a personal act, therefore, but as a social act mediated in large part by technology, the panelists will discuss the (im)possibilities of transgression and its place in communication theory.David Gunkel, Northern Illinois University (Chair and Respondent)Ted Gournelos, Maryville University of St Louis”Hacking the News: Transgressing Performative Control Systems”Rather than presuppose the desirability of sincere, cohesive, or “positive” communication, this paper will examine how ironic and dissonant cultural productions can redefine the limits of the public sphere.  In a conflict-based view of what Henry Jenkins has called “convergence culture,” I argue that, in the search for new areas of exploitation, systems of control within late capitalism often internalize transgressive culture.  Informed by new media scholarship, the paper analyzes three primary case studies, each a performance within U.S. news productions.  In The Yes Men’s “pranks,” news organizations are forced to operate outside of existing control parameters; in faux articles and internet broadcasts by The Onion, the process of news appropriation (and thus consolidating journalism in massive conglomerates) becomes an absurd spiral of self-referentiality; finally, the judicial furor over the wikileaks project exposes the difficulty in controlling iterative discourse, particularly when it has “real world” implications and consequences.  I contrast Couldry’s “media rituals” and McNair’s “cultural chaos” to demonstrate the need for alternative methods through which we might understand transgression, departing from Habermasian fantasies of an open, power-free public sphere in favor of multiple, conflicting, and nomadic communities.  The paper argues that a model in which community and social change are embodied in a series of ontological “hacks” allows a space for a new, productive ethos of change even while operating within oppressive or stagnant system.  It culminates by trying to answer whether or not performance disrupts the everyday conceptual stasis of the news, or whether it simply acts to spice up an otherwise incestuous regime.Peter Krapp, University of California Irvine”Attention will be paid. Social media and economy of distraction”"Social media,” heralded as web 2.0, pivot on rampant monetization of attention and distraction. It depends on persuading a mass audience that participation in that dual market is not merely serving them up to advertisers, but empowers them individually to become content generators. This paper will argue that this is the most serious transgression in new media culture; it has become “the only division possible in a world now emptied of objects, beings, and spaces to desecrate.” From the vantage point of a dialectic of attention and distraction, the bundling of otherwise splintered audiences into advertising categories is an ill-concealed attempt to divert your attention from something and onto something else - or inversely, to distract you into thinking what I want you to think about. If we live in an attention economy, it is paramount to protect our freedom of decision on how attention is “paid”, and to observe closely how manipulations of the parameters of memory aid a “culture” industry.Grant Kien, California State University East Bay”Global Capitalism as Art: The case of Brendan Lott’s non-memory”This chapter explores several case studies in which conventional transgressions serve as the starting point for an entirely new common-sense understanding of agency and self-identification. Recent online phenomena such as Wretch.com and Stickcam.com circulate self-exploitative images and videos that reestablish traditional notions of transgression in a consumer base, evacuating them of any self-conscious opposition. How then to identify transgression in a world rooted in the self-management of one’s own exploitation? The work of Brendan Lott’s installation  Memories I’ll Never Have born out of online images reveals the transgressive juncture, the point at which unequal relations of global capitalism are revealed for what they are. This critical analysis of online/offline behavior is rooted in ethnography informed by Actor-Network Theory, taking web sites and Lott’s installation as sources of found data treated as narrative texts.Richard L. Edwards”Breaking Conventions: Political Video Mashups as Transgressive Texts”Political video mashups are an increasingly important part of transgressive political discourse in a digital age. Video mashups combine pop cultural knowledge, avant-garde techniques, the latest digital DIY tools and remix aesthetics into a media practice that is also increasingly driven by Web 2.0 logics and user-generated content. Using key examples of popular video mashups, this paper will examine how political video mashups are being used to affect contemporary politics and how they can play a subversive role in political discourse.As opposed to earlier modes of video activism that sought to signal their difference from mainstream, dominant media forms, a political video mashup embraces popular culture as its starting point. The formal properties of a political video mashup—frequently in line with larger trends in remix culture—are inherently transgressive. Mashups take existing media texts (many of them copyrighted and used without permission) and re-edit them and recombine them into new texts. A political video mashup can subvert official campaign media, attack mainstream news reports, reconfigure or decode the meaning of a candidate’s speech, or extend unofficial meanings latent in a video clip.But key questions remain about their transgressive potential. Can any practice that firmly embraces popular culture, even if it is subverting it on some level, operate as an oppositional practice for real-world political change? Do mashups use of certain cultural texts undercut claims of alterity or political resistance? In this paper, several case studies—including examples from mainstream shows and user-generated content—will be explored in an attempt to answer those questions.presented at the annual Popular Culture Association conference, New Orleans, April 2009

Panel Description

 Following the deeply divisive and traumatic aftermath of the September 11^th attacks and the subsequent Adorno-derived calls for the “end of irony,” it seems time to interrogate how rhetoric surrounding the attacks was destabilized rather than mobilized.  Humor, following Freud, is one of the most advanced and intricate rhetorical and aesthetic of social strategies, and as such is an ideal entrance into this discussion.  This panel will attempt to interrogate how humor has been used in various ways to engage the September 11^th attacks, focusing on the ways in which instability and disruption are productive socio-political interventions.  From alternative print (The Onion) to animation (South Park) to live-action television (The Colbert Report), humor has been one of the most powerful, and perhaps one of the only, strategies which has successfully challenged dominant media discourse on the topic.  Therefore the papers in this panel will demonstrate humor in cultural production not only as a source of entertainment or catharsis, but as an essential component in politics and cultural memory.

Panelist and Chair:  Ted Gournelos, PhD Candidate, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

“A Neo-Con Parade:  South Park and the Call to War”

This paper is intended as an aggressive critique of neoconservative ideology, specifically as it relates to the “war on terror” and its portrayal in the media.  Primarily an examination of the relationship South Park has with post 9/11 politics (i.e. “Ladder to Heaven,” “Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants”), the main focus of the paper will be to demonstrate how political discourse as constructed by the Bush administration, as well as its mobilization in the media, can be decentered and denormalized through a humorous, disruptive approach to narrative.  A partial rebuttal to Brian Anderson’s South Park Conservatives, it is also meant to demonstrate how dissonant popular culture can be aggressively conceived to operate in what are often considered to be conservative domains.  It will also briefly discuss the movie Team America: World Police, one of the examples of “conservative” ideology Anderson celebrates in Parker and Stone’s work as an example of how a disruptive strategy can result in a text that is at once reactionary and progressive.  Through a discussion of neoconservative and neoliberal rhetoric surrounding 9/11, drawing primarily on Judith Butler, Susan Willis, and Wendy Brown as well as Slajov Zizek and Stuart Hall, the paper concludes that dissonant visual culture assimilates both types of discourse in order to produce a critical, and perhaps anarchic, sensibility. 

Panelist:  Marina Levina, Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley

“In Truthiness We Trust: “The Colbert Report” as a Postmodern Response to the Post-9/11 World.”

In one short year “The Colbert Report,” which features Stephen Colbert as a pompous right-wing commentator, transcended its role as an O’Reilly Factor caricature to become a cultural phenomenon in its own right.  Beginning with his coining of the word “truthiness” and culminating in a blistering speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner, Stephen Colbert has not only proven that irony did not die in the ashes of the World Trade Center, but has, in fact, become an essential weapon through which to critique the politics and policies of the post 9/11 world.  This paper argues that “The Colbert Report” relies for its existence, humor, and political poignancy on the context of the post-9/11 political landscape.  It is ironic that the attacks that reintroduced the rhetoric of “good vs. evil” and a political response reminiscent of the crusades became both a Baudrillardian “absolute event” and an atmosphere capable of giving birth to Stephen Colbert’s unabashedly and unapologetically postmodern performance.  In order to fully understand the role of irony in the post 9/11 world, this paper argues, we need to examine how one of its most shining examples straddles the boundary between modern and postmodern narratives and social conditions, resulting in an anarchically playful sensibility with remarkable cultural capital.  

Panelist:  David Monje, Visiting Assistant Professor, Northeastern University

“Hummer Rhymes with Dumber: The Political Cartoons of Jeff Danziger after 9/11”

Jeff Danziger’s political cartoons following September 11, 2001 are exemplary of the critical capacity of visual culture and irony. This paper argues that not only did 9/11 not signal “the end of the age of irony,” as predicted by Roger Rosenblatt in the New York Times, among others, but that the attacks in fact renewed the use of irony as a critical, rhetorical tool. Political cartoons, in addition to often being funny, are a longstanding, but often overlooked, means of identifying political rhetoric that dissimulates. They are, in this sense, a means of exposing lies and contradictions by juxtaposing, visually, metaphorically, and semantically, the inconsistencies in political discourse. Danziger’s cartoons following 9/11 have zeroed in on the Bush administration’s responses to the attacks by, literally, drawing connections between the Bush and Bin Laden families, between Enron, Halliburton, big oil, the rise in popularity of gas-guzzling Hummer SUVs, and finally the invasion of Iraq. As a Vietnam veteran, Danziger was one of the first pundits to articulate the worrisome, and indeed ironic, parallels between that war and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Using selections from his work over the last five years, this paper argues for the enduring—and exigent—criticality of irony and humor in visual culture, especially after 9/11.

Panelist:  Ryan Wepler, PhD Candidate, Brandeis University: Department of English and American Literature

“History Hits the Funnies Page: Memory, Rupture, and the Response to 9/11 in The Boondocks and Get Your War On”

 Within weeks of 9/11, comic strips The Boondocks and Get Your War On turned their attention to its cultural aftermath.  By focusing on such a traumatic and decidedly unfunny event, the authors of these series were able to transform the humor of the traditional 3-4 panel comic strip and transcend the apolitical tradition of “the funnies.”  In addition to breaking with the conventions observed by other comic strip authors, The Boondocks and Get Your War On counter the historical rupture created by the trauma of 9/11 by using humor to emphasize incongruity within their own forms.  Aaron McGruder’s fictionalized replacement of his dissenting comic strip The Boondocks with the patriotic “Adventures of Flagee and Ribbon” calls attention to political attempts to fill in the ruptured space created by the events of 9/11 with ideology and, in turn keeps this space open for individual memory.  In the less mainstream Get Your War On, David Rees further expands the space for individual memory by forging his humor almost solely from polyvalent and incongruous juxtapositions of language, idea, and image.  Despite Henri Bergson’s claim that “laughter has no greater foe than emotion,” Rees and McGruder rely on his idea that humor is created from the recognition of “something mechanical in something living.”  This paper explores the ways in which The Boondocks and Get Your War On create space for individual emotion by exposing the mechanicism of culture and ideology in the wake of the national trauma of 9/11. 

 presented at the annual American Studies Association conference, Boston, April 2007

Sponsor: Undergraduate Honors Conference, Central States Communications Association, April 2009

Chair: Ted Gournelos, Maryville University of St Louis

Participants:

“Nike and the Oppressive Construction of ‘Disability’” – Jennifer Drier, Maryville University of St Louis

“Communicating about Disordered Eating: Always a private matter?” – Sylvia Ogilivie, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

“Feminism, Sex, and the Shifting Construction of the American Cheerleader” – Sarah Paulus, Maryville University of St Louis

“Predator, Prey, and the Reification of Gender through Pedophilia in Hard Candy” – Andrea Stolzer, Maryville University of St Louis

“CNN Presents…Nothing New: A Look at the Black in America Documentary Series” – Kerry Wilson, St Louis University

Rationale:

This panel investigates various ways in which identity and representation have become institutionalized in contemporary popular culture. Its papers examine multiple constructions of identity, some intentionally marginalizing, some unwittingly reactionary, and some oppositional.  They foreground the shifting and often obscure politics of television, film, the internet, and advertising, suggesting that scholars should see representation as a field of conflict rather than coherent or stable tropes. 

Addresses and Paper Abstracts:

Jennifer Drier

“Nike and the Oppressive Construction of ‘Disability’”

In recent years, Nike has become a brand focused and driven on showcasing athletic achievement through struggling athletes. In doing so, the company has been able to flourish into a top retailer of sports apparel, distinguishing their brand from competitors. By using professional athletes to target their consumer market, Nike has implemented a massive amount of brand loyalty, and created a lifestyle branding image. However, in recent years Nike has steered away from presenting the world with the “All American Athlete”, but is now presenting the struggling athlete who has not only made it to the top, but has been “handicapped” in some way, e.g. race, gender, physical setbacks. Today these “handicaps” have been a main focus for Nike, allowing the company to profit off of the imagery and narratives presented about today’s professional athletes. In the end, the brand is able to target everyday athletes with the notion that everyone faces certain impairments, but by creating a lifestyle containing drive and the Nike brand, anything is possible. This paper will focus on the athletic individualism commonly publicized by the Nike brand by examining its place in the consumer market through a content analysis of televised ads from 1972 to 2008, a brief discussion of lifestyle branding in athletics, and a textual analysis of Leave Nothing to argue how Nike profits from the use of individual handicaps in promoting its brand.

Sylvia Ogilivie

“Communicating about Disordered Eating: Always a private matter?”

The introduction of the web has allowed people to express often-stigmatized identities in a safe environment. In an examination of identity on a pro eating disorder website, I utilized Goodnight’s (1982) theory of spheres to illustrate some of the complexities that are inherent in issues related to health and illness. ProAnorexia is a Live Journal community, the largest of its kind, with over 19,000 members and an average of 800 posts daily, and these numbers are rising still. Although similar communities exist in forums such as Facebook, MySpace, and Yahoo!, ProAnorexia is a unique case for analysis because it does not promote unhealthy eating habits or behaviors and views disordered eating as a serious, life-threatening illness. Pro eating disorder communities like ProAnorexia span the three spheres Goodnight outlines (i.e., private, technical, and public). In this paper, I specifically focus on the private and technical spheres, and suggest that more attention be paid to the grey area between them. Goodnight’s concept of spheres can be usefully applied to whether pro eating disorder communities such as ProAnorexia rightfully belong in the private or technical sphere, as the issues they pertain to span technical and private matters.

Sarah Paulus

“Feminism, Sex, and the Shifting Construction of the American Cheerleader”

Gender categories divide most high school and collegiate athletics, a separation that relies on social constructions of masculine and feminine, and in turn, contributes to the constructed gender identity associated with each sport.  In many cases, specific sports are deemed solely “women’s” activities; for example, volleyball, field hockey, and cheerleading are often considered only appropriate for female athletes. Of the sports listed, however, only the athleticism of cheerleading is questioned.  Since the feminists’ movements in the 1960s and the introduction of Title IX policies in 1972, cheerleading has evolved from simple cartwheels and yelling girls to the physically demanding and dangerous sport it is today.  During this process, the “cheerleader” has become a cultural icon representing, athleticism, femininity, and sex, and as a result contributed to the mythology of the “feminine.”  This myth suggests an “ideal woman” as thin, attractive, athletic, and heterosexual, a role commonly attributed to cheerleaders in magazines, on television, and in movies. The mythologies frequently associated with cheerleaders inhibit the fight for recognition as a sport while reinforcing the pre-existing sexual stereotypes.

Andrea Stolzer

“Predator, Prey, and the Reification of Gender through Pedophilia in Hard Candy”

In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, sexual crimes involving minors took the foreground in the media.  Vigorous protesting and numerous legal battles reflected the general public’s animosity toward illegal sexual acts specifically against children, and stricter child protection laws resulted in efforts to give children greater protection and their offenders fewer legal loopholes.  While serving to help keep the adolescents of America safer from a range of abuse, these laws have unexpectedly made child pornography a sort of trump card to excuse an entire spectrum of moral inconsistencies and outright criminal behaviors.  In the thriller Hard Candy (Korenberg, 2006), the roles of predator and prey undergo vastly different treatments due to the inclusion of the issues of child pornography and pedophilia.  This paper discusses the double standards allowed regarding the maturity, sexuality and violence of the accuser and the accused during cases involving kiddie porn and other child-related allegations.  Using examples from the film, the paper also explores the possibility of a presupposed “predator” shifting to the role of “prey” in such cases.

Kerry Wilson

 “CNN Presents…Nothing New: A Look at the Black in America Documentary Series”

 The study is a neoclassical analysis of the relationship between the second episode of CNN Presents…Black in America, entitled “The Black Woman and The Family” and The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, commonly known as the Moynihan Report. The thematic relationships between these two texts are important to study due to the claims made by the Black in America series that suggest the show is presenting an entirely new perspective on the African American family while it simultaneously repackaged stereotypical representations of African American families that originated by Moynihan Report. Similar to the Moynihan Report, “The Black Woman and The Family” concluded that African Americans could not begin to solve the problems in their community until a family structure that echoes the dominant ideology of the traditional White family. The conclusion reached by the Black in America series is a counter-narrative to CNN’s claim of presenting the African American family from a fresh perspective.

In recent years, particularly after the 2004 presidential elections in the United States, sexuality has become an increasingly charged location for political articulation.  Often not centered in traditional identity politics, such articulations actively use sexuality to accentuate or reinforce institutional, socio-political, and economic norms.  Primarily centered in what intellectuals such as Michael Warner, Lisa Duggan, Wendy Brown, and Judith Butler see as a disturbing unity between neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies, political discourse has retained traditional public/private emphases while simultaneously relying on the breakdown of such binaries for much of their currency.  Mass media have of course played a large role in this process, as the “gay fad” becomes a multi-billion dollar industry with such shows as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Will and Grace.  However, because the rhetoric involved relies on both the division between “public” and “private” and its breakdown, it becomes simultaneously easier and more important to locate instances of instability and discursive flux.  Through a historical genealogy of sexuality in television, followed by specific case study analyses of V for Vendetta, South Park, and the vampire film, this panel will chart various ways in which sexuality is developed, used to destabilize or reinscribe the dominant, and is ultimately a site through which representation and political action are negotiated.

Society for Cinema and Media Studies National Conference, Chicago 3/11/2007 2:15-4:00 pm