1st Edition
Popular Culture, Social Media, and the Politics of Identity
Popular Culture, Social Media, and the Politics of Identity advances a novel methodological approach — pop culture as political object — to capture the centrality of popular culture as an object of a broad range of political contests and debates that constitute pop culture artefacts by generating and informing specific meanings and understandings of them.
It is no longer novel to claim that popular culture matters to world politics. The literature on Popular Culture and World Politics (PCWP) has demonstrated the cultural basis of political action and meaning-making. However, this book argues that in doing so, the PCWP literature has focused primarily on the traditionally narrow range of issues, actors, and things that mainstream International Relations regards as part of world politics. While PCWP challenges restrictive disciplinary understandings of the sites of legitimate inquiry where one can purposefully gain knowledge about world politics, comparatively little has been done to challenge constricted understandings of what world politics is, who it involves, and where it takes place. Methodological approaches in the literature largely treat popular culture and politics as separate and therefore focus on understanding how popular culture relates to and intersects with a relatively circumscribed notion of world politics. Focusing on the everyday politics of how audiences perceive and contest popular cultural artefacts, this book demonstrates that pop culture does not merely intersect with or reflect discrete political processes, it is also directly situated as an object of politics. The author analyses current debates over identity politics across a range of contemporary pop cultural artefacts including films and video games.
This book will be of interest to scholars and students of International Relations, Political Science, and Cultural and Media Studies.
1. Introduction
Introducing Pop Culture as Political Object
The Ethics of Internet Research
Method
Structure and Case Studies
2. Audiences and Everyday Politics: Popular Culture as Political Object
Existing Approaches in PCWP
The Limitations of PCWP
Expanding PCWP Methodologies: Pop Culture as Political Object
Conclusion
3. Digital Technologies, Social Justice Activism, and Identity Politics
Web 2.0 and Social Media: The ‘Battleground’ of Contemporary Identity Politics
‘Get Woke’: The Evolution of Social Justice Activism
Fighting Back: Reclaiming Pop Culture for the ‘True Fans’
Conclusion
4. Gamergate, (Anti)Feminism, and the Horizon Series
#Gamergate
The Horizon Games – Plot, Themes, Representations
Politics, Feminism, and SJWs are Ruining Gaming (and HZD/HFW)
HZD and HFW are Pretty Good (But I Still Hate Feminism)
The Embodiment of Gender in Video Games
Race and Cultural Appropriation
Conclusion
5. ‘Who You Gonna Call? Not Women’: The 2016 Ghostbusters Reboot
Furore and Controversies Surrounding Feig’s Ghostbusters
Feminist Conspiracies, Forced Politics, and Wokeness Have Destroyed Ghostbusters
Trump, the 2016 Election, and Ghostbusters
Racism and Attacks Against the Cast
Conclusion
6. Social Justice Activism in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Controversies of The Last Jed
‘I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This’ – Online Reactions to TLJ
Rey the ‘Mary Sue’ and Unwanted Feminism in Star Wars
You Can’t Have Racial Diversity in a Galaxy of Trillions of Humans and Aliens
‘May the Forced Diversity Be With You’
Conclusion
7. ‘Elves and Hobbits Don’t Look Like That’: Racial Diversity, White Fragility, and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Tolkien, Race, and the Furore Over a Racially Diverse Middle Earth
White Fragility and Middle Earth
White Precarity, Cultural Theft, and the ‘End of the White Race’
Conclusion
8. Conclusion
References
Biography
William Clapton is Associate Professor in International Relations in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Australia.
