Unit 7: Genres, Zombies, and Fandom

Question 1

Distinguish the main genres of print and visual media.

Answer 1

Print:

• penny dreadfuls: cheap sensational fiction printed on pulp; targeting young males; injects racist, sexist, class based ideology; creates social constructions of masculinity/femininity;
• science fiction
• war
• romance
• gangsters

Visual Media

• horror
• western
• romance
• science fiction
• comedy

Question 2

Inoculation

Answer 2

• Proposed by Roland Barthes
• a small amount of a socially unacceptable topic is accepted into the mainstream to remove its threatening elements.
• inoculations occur in relation to race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, technology, class, generation gaps, and other anxiety-producing topics in society.

Question 3

Identify works and moments in works that show self-consciousness of genre.

Answer 3

Night of the Living Dead:

• Character Ben confronts the sheriff and his posse. In the 1960s, audiences would have connected the illegitimate reassertion of social norms (the sheriff’s authority) in the film with their feelings of conflict over authority figures, such as those violently quashing civil rights.
• Barbra demonstrates Romero’s subversion of the tropes of femininity in horror genre films.
• There is good reason to imagine the death and destruction of the film in juxtaposition to the images of the Vietnam war on the nightly news.
• The struggle with zombies (communists, outside powers, or other external foes) can be seen as a mirror of internal conflicts between groups of Americans.

Twilight Series:

• erotic but also mildly engaged with BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, and sadism/masochism)
• emphasis on pre-marital chastity paired with sexual curiosity, and its heteronormative focus on traditional gender roles and power relations

Fifty Shades of Grey:

• it is heteronormative, and contrasts a dominant, wealthy, and sophisticated male character with an innocent, virginal, and relatively poor female protagonist, who eventually decides she must live a more traditional life

Question 4

Analyze common mythic elements that cut across the genres.

Answer 4

• a group of characters, marked by various differences and conflicts such as class and gender, who ultimately must transcend their personal problems.
• love as a conquering element
• the hero’s journey

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Question 5

Form a theory of the development, change, and death of genres.

Answer 5

• While there are strong indications that genres tend to be restrictive and conservative, there are also indications that they are continually self-editing and re-editing, appearing and disappearing, and sometimes persevere as anachronisms.
• Cyclical patterns in a genre
• Development creates the generic conventions associated with a particular genre.
• Genre is a cultural practice that attempts to structure some order into the wide range of texts and meanings that circulate in our culture for the convenience of both producers and audiences.
• The market response to a cultural commodity is notoriously hard to predict, and updating or modifying a previously successful genre can minimize this unpredictability.
• Genres are popular when their conventions bear a close relationship to the dominant ideology of the time.
• Genres rise and fall in popularity as popular taste shifts with social and historical changes.

Question 6

Reading - “Intertextuality”

Answer 6

• Proposed by John Fiske
• Intertextuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text. These references are sometimes made deliberately and depend on a reader’s prior knowledge and understanding of the referent, but the effect of intertextuality is not always intentional and is sometimes inadvertent.
• Provides us with valuable clues to the readings that a particular culture or subculture.
• Fiske describes two types of intertextuality: horizontal relations, those between primary texts that are more or less explicitly linked (usually genre, content or character), and vertical relations, between a primary text and other texts of a different type that refer explicitly to it (secondary sources).
• Conventions are the structural elements of genre that are shared between producers and audiences. They embody the crucial ideological concerns of the time in which they are popular and are central to the pleasures a genre offers its audience. It is social and ideological.
• Three main strategies for constructing generic categories: aesthetic (textual characteristics), ritual (conventional repeated exchange between industry & audience), ideological (deliver audiences to advertising).
• Formulas is an industrial and economic translation of conventions that is essential to the efficient production of popular cultural commodities and should not be evaluated by aesthetic criteria that dismiss it as mere lack of imagination. It is industrial and economic.
• Example: Madonna’s Material Girl & Marilyn Monroe’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes provides intertextuality on the meaning of “the blonde” in our culture.

Question 7

Reading - “Slashing the Romance Narrative”

Answer 7

• critics can “take this fandom as an exemplary case of female appropriation of, resistance to, and negotiation with mass-produced culture,” particularly, the patriarchal elements of Star Trek that are subverted for female pleasure.
• The Renegade Slash Militia (RSM) are a group of slash writers and readers who form a community.
• Slash fan fiction refers to stories, written by amateur writers, that involve placing two television or film characters of the same gender, usually male, into non-canonical romantic relationships with one another.
• Slash offers its own particular challenge to normative constructions of gender and romance, as it allows women to construct narratives that subvert patriarchy by reappropriating those prototypical hero characters who usually reproduce women’s position of social disempowerment.
• Originally applied to the Star Trek series.
• Slash fulfils a desire that’s either extremely extensive or cannot be fulfilled elsewhere.
• Fan fictions can be understood as a return to early communal storytelling practices. The minor changes that each storyteller adds to these tales leave a mark of their authorship on the narrative. It is both interactive and communal.
• Question the dominant ideology of a patriarchal, capitalist society by offering counter-representations that reflect the material conditions of their own lives.
• Excorporation refers to the appropriation of commodities in order to make new, resistant meanings.