Slut Narratives in Popular Culture explores representations of slut shaming and the term “slut” in U.S. popular media, 2000–2020. It argues that cultural narratives of intersectional gender identities are gradually but unevenly shifting to become more progressive and sex positive. Moving beyond prior research on slut shaming, which exposes problematic conflations between women’s morality and a sexual purity associated with White economic privilege, this book examines how narratives that perpetuate slut shaming are both contested and reinscribed through stories we circulate. It emphasizes effects of twenty-first century developments in digital communication and entertainment. The rapid evolution of genres combined with increased access to the consumption and production of texts stimulates more diverse storytelling. The book’s analyses demonstrate twenty-first-century changes in how slut shaming is depicted and understood while encouraging consumers and producers of pop culture to attend to cultural narratives as they reify or challenge the subordination of vulnerable populations. Aimed primarily at an academic audience, this book will also engage general readers interested in intersectional feminism, pop culture, new media, digital technologies, and sociolinguistic change. Readers will become more adept at deconstructing assumptions embedded in popular media, especially narratives informing slut shaming.

In this study of representations of children and childhood, a global team of authors explores the theme of undeadness as it applies to cultural constructions of the child. Moving beyond conventional depictions of the undead in popular culture as living dead monsters of horror and mad science that transgress the borders between life and death, rejuvenation, and decay, the authors present undeadness as a broader concept that explores how people, objects, customs, and ideas deemed lost or consigned to the past might endure in the present. The chapters examine nostalgic texts that explore past incarnations of childhood, mementos of childhood, zombie children, spectral children, images and artefacts of deceased children, as well as states of arrested development and the inability or refusal to embrace adulthood. Expanding undeadness beyond the realm of horror and extending its meaning conceptually, while acknowledging its roots in the genre, the book explores attempts at countering the transitory nature of childhoods. This unique and insightful volume will interest scholars and students working on popular culture and cultural studies, media studies, film and television studies, childhood studies, gender studies, and philosophy.

The Multiverse as Theory in Postmodern Speculative Fictional Narratives considers the concept of the multiverse beyond the immediacy of being merely an excuse or scenario for the development of stories, instead positioning the multiverse as a theoretical method in which speculative fiction narratives can explore diverse issues to bridge ideas across cultural, social, and philosophical analysis. Taking a cross-cultural approach, the book centres around the critical engagements that literary and media texts have with the representations of the multiverse, beyond considering this subject as a mere rhetorical flourish or a passing fad. A diverse and international team of authors engage with the multiverse from the point of view of “other worlds,” understanding it not as the appearance of another independent world, but as the collision of two or more different worlds into one of them. From this key finding, the multiverse encourages us to pay attention to the influence that fiction exerts on narratives and world-building, providing possible frameworks to rethink critical aspects of temporality, space, self, society, and culture in contemporary times. This pioneering work will interest students and scholars working in the areas of media and cultural studies, comparative literature, popular culture studies, speculative fiction, and transmedia studies.

"Slut Narratives in Popular Culture explores representations of slut shaming and the term "slut" in U.S. popular media, 2000-2020. It argues that cultural narratives of intersectional gender identities are gradually but unevenly shifting to become more progressive and sex positive. Moving beyond prior research on slut shaming, which exposes problematic conflations between women's morality and a sexual purity associated with White economic privilege, this book examines how narratives that perpetuate slut shaming are both contested and reinscribed through stories we circulate. It emphasizes effects of twenty-first century developments in digital communication and entertainment. The rapid evolution of genres combined with increased access to the consumption and production of texts stimulates more diverse storytelling. The book's analyses demonstrate twenty-first changes in how slut shaming is depicted and understood, while encouraging consumers and producers of pop culture to attend to cultural narratives as they reify or challenge the subordination of vulnerable populations. Aimed primarily at an academic audience, this book will also engage general readers interested in intersectional feminism, pop culture, new media, digital technologies, and socio-linguistic change. Readers will become more adept at deconstructing assumptions embedded in popular media, especially narratives informing slut shaming"--

This book explores how Latin American young people engage with nostalgia and grasp a sense of nostalgic representations of the 1970s and 1980s through contemporary media. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Costa Rica, this book analyses how young audiences make sense of nostalgic representations of transnational pasts, thus creating a link between media reception practices and the engagement with broader social, cultural, economic, and political structures. It also brings to the fore new insights concerning the role media has in fostering senses of national memory by highlighting the key role of everyday media engagements in comprehending the past. This comprehensive empirical study will be of interest to scholars, researchers and students of media and communications studies, Latin American studies, sociology, digital culture, memory studies, social and cultural anthropology, youth studies, cultural studies, and readers interested in popular culture, television, and cinema.

This collection explores the impact of Covid-19 on the production and consumption of television and film content in the English-speaking world. Offering in-depth analysis of select on-screen entertainment, the volume addresses entertainment’s changing role during and following the Covid-19 pandemic. It also studies the pandemic’s incorporation into the narrative of numerous series, films, and other televised formats, capturing the moments and contexts in which these developments emerged. Chapters examine the pandemic’s impact both on a micro- and macro level, focusing on the content as well as form of TV shows and films. Bringing together an international team of scholars, the book offers a range of perspectives, exploring phenomena such as the ‘YouTubification’ of audience-reliant late-night television, as well as films and TV shows such as Superstore, Grey’s Anatomy, and The Good Fight. Given the pandemic’s lasting impact on the film and television industries, this book will be a valuable read for scholars studying audience and viewer reception of on-screen content, and the impact of crises on cultural industries. It will also appeal to researchers in cultural studies, popular culture studies, television studies, internet studies, film studies, and media studies more broadly.

Viewers spend years laughing, crying, celebrating, and mourning with their favorite TV characters, but when those characters are promiscuous women, different viewers may have very different reactions. Both sexual freedom and sexual shame run deep in the cultural waters, so as TV's promiscuous female characters navigate those choppy waters, what unfolds onscreen reflects--and ultimately shapes--perceptions of promiscuous women as liberated and adventurous, damaged and destructive, or even sick and gross. This work examines fifteen promiscuous female characters and identifies trends in those portrayals--from what motivates their promiscuity to the reproaches they face, the revelations they have, and the redemption it seems they must undergo as a result of their "slutty" ways. This book aims not to promote promiscuity but to fight against the stigmatization of promiscuous women, which is a fight against puritanical patriarchy that benefits everyone.