Emily West

“Hands on Hips, Smiles on Lips!” Gender, Race, and the Performance of Spirit in Cheerleading

Cheerleading has long been synonymous with “spirit” because of its traditional sideline role in supporting school sports programs. In recent decades, however, cheerleading has become more athletic and competitive—even a sport in its own right. This essay is an ethnographic exploration of the emotional dimensions of cheerleading in light of these changes. We argue that spirit is a regulating but also flexible concept that is deployed in order to manage and uphold ideologies of emotion, and that these ideologies are central to the ways in which cheerleading reproduces racialized gender difference. On the one hand, the performance guidelines for spirit stabilize the emotional dimensions of cheerleading in the face of the activitys shifting priorities. On the other hand, the performance framing encourages participants to distance themselves from cheerleadings emotional script, allowing them to abdicate responsibility for it. The ambiguity surrounding the performance of spirit—whether it should be read as “real” or “play”—facilitates this dynamic.

Expressing the self through greeting card sentiment Working theories of authentic communication in a commercial form

As mass-produced vehicles of sentiment, greeting cards draw attention to the use of socially constructed codes for communicating, even feeling, emotion. This article describes the results of interviews with 51 greeting card consumers, focusing on what makes greeting cards ‘personal’ for them, despite their mass-produced nature. Consumers negotiate their relationships with pre-printed sentiments differently depending on whether their allegiance is stronger to an expressive individualist understanding of authenticity or a ritual perspective, and these allegiances tend to reflect cultural capital. Specifically, suspicion of pre-printed sentiments is common among people with higher cultural capital, while this is the feature of greeting cards that is most important to other greeting card consumers. I argue that scholars should avoid taking an expressive individualist understanding of authenticity as a standard against which we evaluate mass culture and its consumption.

When you care enough to defend the very best: how the greeting card industry manages cultural criticism

The American greeting card industry, in particular industry leader Hallmark Cards, makes substantial efforts to deflect cultural critiques in its communications with the public, demonstrating how culture industries actively manage their negative associations with mass culture as well as the public’s fears of an advancing ‘commodity frontier’. Hallmark frames its cultural production as creative while de-emphasizing its industrial nature, and, whenever possible, aligns itself with the legitimating cultural categories of art and the folk to counter the idea that greeting cards are false, manufactured sentiment. Hallmark also argues that the consumer is sovereign in order to contradict critics’ claims that it imposes its mass-produced cards on the public. The way the greeting card industry seeks to manage cultural anxiety about industrialized culture is discussed, as well as the limits of their response.

Scolding John Q.: Articulating a Normative Relationship between Politics and Entertainment

The 2002 hostage drama John Q. triggered a discussion among journalists, the public, and the policy community about the proper relationship between politics and entertainment. In this debate the criteria for good journalism and good political discourse were frequently invoked to evaluate this Hollywood film. This discussion, which spilled out of the film criticism pages into news and commentary pages, shows how public-sphere models of political discourse are privileged even though they may not be a good fit for fictional media. John Q.’s success in triggering public discussion and awareness about health policy issues seems to illustrate DeLuca & Peeples’s (2002) claim that the “public screen” is a more useful metaphor for thinking about politics than the public sphere (Habermas, 1989). John Q. seemed to particularly raise the ire of critics because of its unambiguous critique of domestic policy and its implicit suggestion that collective solutions are needed. The author would like to thank Michael Delli Carpini and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this manuscript.

A taste for greeting cards: Distinction within a denigrated cultural form:

Greeting cards are a denigrated product category in the USA, and yet consumers use them at high rates across taste formations. Consumers with relatively high cultural capital place a premium on originality in their self-expression, hence greeting cards present a consumption problem because they are a mode of expressing the self through mass-produced means. Based on interviews with 46 women, I show that consumers with higher cultural capital are more likely to prioritize card design over sentiment; select smaller, simpler designs and sentiments; prefer cards that are handmade, look handmade, or remind them of fine art; and are more likely to use cards ironically. In this way, consumers perform exclusivity through their taste, even through a form of mass culture. However, the social embeddedness of greeting card communication means that many consumers balance considerations of taste with the requirements of effective interpersonal communication. The ability to self-consciously modulate signifiers of taste is itself an indication of cultural knowledge and therefore of cultural capital.

Mass Producing the Personal: The Greeting Card Industry's Approach to Commercial Sentiment

The greeting card industry manages the challenge of mass-producing images and texts for use in interpersonal communication through both specific production techniques and narratives that “make sense” of this seemingly paradoxical task. The mass production of the personal is negotiated in the processes of writing sentiments and creating designs, as well as in identifying sending situations for cards. At Hallmark, the approach to creating emotional, relational communication for anonymous others is captured by the phrase “universal specificity,” which suggests that peoples emotions are essentially universal, and that the industry can meet the nations social expression needs by customizing these core insights. This view justifies the high level of concentration in this cultural industry. “Universal specificity” as a logic of cultural production conflicts with other, arguably more dominant theories of what constitutes authentic communication, in which emotional expression should be original, unique, and emanating from the speaker.

Consumer subjectivity and U.S. health care reform.

Health care consumerism is an important frame in U.S. health care policy, especially in recent media and policy discourse about federal health care reform. This article reports on qualitative fieldwork with health care users to find out how people interpret and make sense of the identity of “health care consumer.” It proposes that while the term consumer is normally understood as a descriptive label for users who purchase health care and insurance services, it should actually be understood as a metaphor, carrying with it a host of associations that shape U.S. health care policy debates in particular ways. Based on interviews with 36 people, patient was the dominant term people used to describe themselves, but consumer was the second most popular. Informants interpreted the health care consumer as being informed, proactive, and having choices, but there were also “semiotic traps,” or difficult-to-resolve tensions for this identity. The discourse of consumerism functions in part as code for individual responsibility, and therefore as a classed moral discourse, with implications for U.S. health care policy.