Cassie McQuater is a Los Angeles-based artist who works with digital media, developing and designing video games and other interactive pieces and installations. This spring, McQuater won the Nuovo Award (plus an honorable mention for Excellence in Design) at the 2019 Independent Games Festival for her browser-based game Black Room. Black Room trailer/game play from […]
Figure 1: Screenshot of Tumblr search results for “thinspo” Figure 2: Screenshot of Tumblr search results for “black thinspo” Figure 3: Screenshot of “unmarked” thinspo profile and post, demonstrating “real girl” selfie style imagery Figure 4: Figure 5: Screenshot of black thinspo Tumblr profile and post Figure 6: Black “fitspo” style thinspo Figure 7: Pro-anorexia […]
The interdisciplinary comics studies journal, ImageText, just released a new special issue examining gender in comics. The issue, “A Comic of Her Own: Women Writing, Reading and Embodying through Comics” is co-edited by one of my favorite professors from the Popular Culture department at Bowling Green State University, Dr. Jeff Brown, and features a bunch […]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pQQHnqBa2E&w=560&h=315] Scarface was released in 1983 as a reimagining of a 1930s gangster film of the same name. Directed by Brian De Palma and written by Oliver Stone, Scarface transposes the crime drama onto a contemporary setting in Miami, with over-the-top violence and a B-movie aesthetic sensibility. Despite its mixed critical reception at the time, the movie […]
For this week’s post about folk traditions, I wanted to take a totally different route and focus on a food experience that is mainstream and central to my upbringing in northwest Ohio: the potluck. I discussed this at length with my mother, Tamara, trying to get an understanding of her experiences attending and cooking […]
Home ownership represents many quintessentially American ideals: land ownership, individualism, and the frontier mythos. Interestingly, these mainstream American understandings of domestic space and property have created a unique opportunity for music performance in contemporary youth subcultures. The idea of the house show is simple. It refers to the musical performances that take place for an audience within the home. The […]
A quick google search for Ayn Rand shows the enormity of her influence in popular culture. The texts that have commented on her in the past month, for instance, include personal posts on radical blogs, articles in nationally distributed newspapers, cable comedy news shows, and dozens of memes. Paul Ryan’s response to this video, which […]
In case anyone is interested in seeing my presentation from San Diego Comic-Con, I thought I would upload my powerpoint here. I don’t have a lot of text in the presentation–I tried to keep it image-heavy, as my analysis is primarily visual–but there is a bit of information here and there to help guide the […]