Popular culture/sacredness

A huge billboard faces me as I crawl down Punt Road Melbourne, its wild purple and yellow-daubed sports fan (male) leering over the northbound traffic. Its message: 'Sport is a Religion, so pray for Yamaha Stadium Sound'  Canny advertising, hooking into aussie culture, selecting an aussie take on religion/ sport (fun, serious, primitive, fanatic, central). Next, there's the Next fashion ad, with its larger than life-sized photograph of a gorgeously dressed young female eying off the pope's long white robe, comparing outfits. Fashion as religion, or better than, really, is the inference-she looks mildly
amused, and he looks a little nonplussed. And then there are the many Qantas advertisments for 'Spirit of. Australia' featuring Aboriginal figures, with backdrops of Dlum and the red desert. As cultural tour businesses know, there's money to be made in taking urban, nonIndigenous tourists to visit their 'spiritual other', the Aboriginal.1 Or there's the multicultural, children's version of the ad, with all the little global travellers of the future featured in wonderful locations. Spirit of Australia.

Cyborgs and Barbie dolls : feminism, popular culture and the posthuman body

Bringing a lively and accessible style to a complex subject, "Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls" explores the idea of the 'posthuman' and the ways in which it is represented in popular culture. Toffoletti explores images of the posthuman body from goth-rocker Marilyn Manson's digitally manipulated self-portraits to the famous TDK 'baby' adverts, and from the work of artist Patricia Piccinini to the curiously 'plastic' form of the ubiquitous Barbie doll, controversially rescued here from her negative image. Drawing on the work of thinkers including Baudrillard, Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, "Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls" explores the nature of the human - and its ambiguous gender - in an age of biotechnologies and digital worlds.

Popular culture, the 'victim' trope and queer youth analytics

This article offers a joint reading of two cultural texts that reflect the contest over victim-oriented characterizations of queer youth in contemporary culture. The first text is a representation of queer youth taken from the popular UK television series Shameless (2004). The second text is an online discussion about representations of gay and lesbian characters on television that was recently posted on the Queer Youth Network website. Through my reading of these two texts, I explore the rise of explicit mainstream representations of gay and lesbian characters and the emergence of an identifiable queer youth audience as key characteristics of the contemporary 'after-queer' moment. Through a reflection on the queer youth analytical techniques observable on the Queer Youth Network site, I conclude by outlining some key implications for future educational research in the field of youth, sexuality and popular culture.

Popular culture : a resource for writing in secondary English classrooms

This chapter explores how a secondary English teacher working with students aged 14-15 enabled them to use their popular culture practices as a resource for writing. The chapter provides examples of conventional classroom situations in which this teacher created a space for students to bring their own semiotic resources to bear on the curriculum. It argues the need for English teachers to become sensitized to the complex literacy practices in which their students engage outside school and to the ways these practices are bound up with their social relationships and sense of identity. The discussion challenges conventional understandings of ‘reading’, ‘writing’, ‘speaking’, and ‘listening’ as components of the English curriculum, arguing that a more contemporary understanding of literacy must take into account the multi-modal practices in which students engage in beyond school.

Queer breeding: historicising popular culture, homosexuality and informal sex education

Through an analysis of gay protest music (1975) and an educational kit for students (1978), both sponsored by the Campaign for Homosexual Equality in the UK, this paper brings into focus a history of gay rights activists' efforts to marshal popular culture in the development of informal sex education for young people in the second half of the 1970s. Through a reparative critique of prevailing therapeutic research methodologies, and through a theoretical deployment of notions of methodological reconciliation and queer breeding, it makes the case for the importance of historical methods in contemporary sex education research.

Elite girls' schooling, social class and sexualised popular culture

Young women’s identities are an issue of public and academic interest across a number of western nations at the present time. This book explores how young women attending an elite school for girls understand and construct ‘empowerment’. It investigates the extent to which, and the ways in which, their constructions of empowerment and identity work to overturn, or resist, key regulations and normative expectations for girls in post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultural contexts. The book provides a succinct overview of feminist theorisations of normative femininities in young women’s lives in western cultural contexts. It includes familiar sexist discourses such as sexual double standards, as well as more recent commentary about the regulation of young women’s subjectivities in neoliberal, post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultures. Drawing on ethnographic research in the context of an elite girls’ secondary school, the author explores how empowerment for young women is constructed and understood across a range of textual practices. From visual representations of young women in school promotional material, to students’ constructions of popular celebrities, the question of how girls’ resistance to normative femininities begins to develop is examined. This rich empirical work makes a unique contribution to the study of elite schooling within the sociology of education, drawing on important insights from the field of critical girlhood studies, and posing a challenge to popular feminist notions about media literacy, young women and empowerment. It will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in the areas of gender studies, sociology, education, youth studies and cultural studies.

The glitterbomb: designing curriculum and identity with girls’ popular culture

This thesis contributes to the academic fields of gender and education through an empirical account of how female teachers design curriculum around girls’ popular culture in a contemporary coeducational setting. The thesis argues for reflexivity around curriculum, and also for the re-articulation of curriculum theory with feminist and poststructuralist perspectives.

Still in the LEGO (LEGOS) room : female teachers designing curriculum around girls’ popular culture for the coeducational classroom in Australia

While the issue of boys’ dominance of the curriculum has a long history, the article examines this phenomenon in a contemporary context, through an empirical study with female teachers designing English curriculum around girls’ media in a coeducational secondary school in Victoria, Australia. In this space, teachers, and the researcher, produce and perform both individual gendered identities and plans for the identities of future student subjects, while negotiating subject positions made available to girls and women in broader social contexts. In this instance, negotiations that take place during the development of a unit of work on Mattel's Barbie website form the basis of feminist discourse analysis, enabling us to ‘take stock’ in thinking about what curriculum design is, about where the past is situated in relation to the present, and to question why, within a discursive feminist/postfeminist entanglement, the heritage of feminist intellectual thought in this area seems absent.

Transnational citizenship: problems of definition, culture and democracy

There is widespread disagreement over whether transnational citizenship provides defensible extensions of, or meaningful complements to, national citizenship. A significant strand of criticism relies upon empirical arguments about political motivation and the consequences of transnationalism. This paper addresses two questions arising from empirical arguments relating to the nation state and democracy. Do the alleged cultural requirements for effective political action provide an insuperable barrier to transnational citizenship? Does transnational citizenship necessarily require a commitment to transnational democracy? I argue that these largely empirical criticisms do not succeed in casting doubt upon the normative plausibility or practical viability of transnational projects. On the first question, I point to a growing transnational political culture that serves to motivate transnational citizens. On the second question, I argue for a legitimate category of transnational citizenship that, although inspired by cosmopolitan morality, is different from it, and that does not require transnational democracy.