Leda Cooks

Beyond the satire: Selective exposure and selective perception in “In Living Color”

This study uses selective exposure and selective perception theories to analyze both the viewership and the reaction to ‘In Living Color.”; Created, produced, and directed by an African American, this controversial prime‐time satire uses traditional racial stereotypes to look at the African American community. Two studies were conducted to test the selective exposure and perception hypotheses. In the first study, a survey was used to measure viewership and reaction to the program. The second study used focus groups to explore perceptions of the show in more depth. Several themes concerning the show (negative stereotyping, potential for learning about African American culture, reality vs. parody, comparison to similar shows, and economic vs. societal value of the show) are presented and discussed.

You are What You (Don't) Eat? Food, Identity, and Resistance

This essay connects personal, social, and cultural frames of resistant performances and performativities. Specifically, it focuses on the politics of food resistance and of autonomy and individual/collective change. Through Foucault, the essay traces the history of technologies of self as they relate food to the performativity of everyday life. Borrowing from de Certeau, the essay outlines strategic performances around food that recenter positions of dominance in society, as well as those that offer openings into alternative positions relative to the center. Two metaphorical linkages, body as food and body as land, are explored for their uses and possibilities as strategy and tactic and their representation as either social problems or social movements.

Voicing Silence and Imagining Citizenship: Dialogues about Race and Whiteness in a “Postracial” Era

Narrating and reflecting on our experiences as organizers and facilitators of campus dialogues about race, we perform the possibilities of silence to speak about, with, and to matters of race and citizenship in the United States today. Starting with our own experiences of silence in the context of dialogue, we open them to readings and responses. This article offers our reading, but ends with the silence of a punctuation—a dash—leaving the space for readers’ responses to contribute to exploration of how pedagogies of silence can work toward social justice.

A Feminist Approach to the Empowerment of Women Mediators

The focus of this paper is on power and empowerment as experienced by women mediators. The approach to the topic is seated in phenomenology and feminist scholarship. The authors argue for the appropriateness of these perspectives in examining the ways in which women mediators come to understand their experiences and exercise their roles. The three phases of phenomenological research (i.e. description, reduction, interpretation) are employed in analyzing individual interviews and a focus group interview. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for women and for the dispute resolution context of mediation.

Northern Exposure's Sense of Place: Constructing and Marginalizing the Matriarchal Community

This essay explores the symbolic creation of place in popular television programming through the analysis of an episode of the CBS program, Northern Exposure. The episode utilizes its actors in dual roles to create a history of their towns founding. That history depicts Cicely, Alaska as a matriarchy established by lesbian lovers Rosalyn and Cicely. The program breaks new ground in popular television with this construction of community, but it also makes that community appear less threatening by imposing hegemonic themes and structures on it. The collision of the construction and imperfections of the community illustrates two theories of place and reaffirms McGees (1990) view of audience members as text producers.

Different Paths from Powerlessness to Empowerment: A Dramatistic Analysis of Two Eating Disorder Therapies.

Using dramatistic analysis, this study examines the rhetorical elements of two therapies designed to help women cope with eating disorders. It found that each therapy has the same key terms, but they serve different functions and encourage different interpretations. The representative anecdotes implicit in each discourse were superficially alike, but closer inquiry showed one to be a quasi‐religious narrative and the other to be mainly secular. The featured pentadic elements likewise varied, as did the respective philosophical orientations of each therapys discourse.

Zonians in cyberspace: The imagining of individual, community and nation on the Panama‐L listserve

This paper traces the ways the diasporic (albeit relatively privileged) identities of Zonians are positioned as part of a larger Panamanian national discourse on the Panama‐L listserve. The paper looks at modern, postmodern and postcolonial theoretical debates on space, nation, identity and authenticity in order to focus on the articulation and performance of these ideas in cyberspace. Critical and performance ethnography is utilized to study the text‐based, imagined community created on the Panama‐L listserve. In the movement from theory about identity and nation within the frame of social action to the articulation of such in cyberspace, I hope to find the connections and disjunctures between the “account”; of identity as it occurs in discourse and the accounting for as a product of theorizing about identity in the larger frame of (the end of) nationalism and the democracies of cyberspaces

Hands in the dough: bread and/as a pedagogy of performative remembering

ABSTRACT In this paper, we consider our experiences in a community bread-baking project, part of the international Bread Houses Network. We explore the performative and narrative power of food memories – as recounted and created during Bread House gatherings – to serve as sites where inter/cultural identities, differences, and dis/connections are made and negotiated. We propose the processes of food remembering and creation that we facilitate at the Bread House as a performative and critical pedagogy that “enables and encourages us to form solidarities, address current problematics, and build a better future in a more concrete sense” (Alexander, Bryant Keith, et al. “Identifying Key Intercultural Urgencies, Issues, and Challenges in Today’s World: Connecting Our Scholarship to Dynamic Contexts and Historical Moments. ”Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 7.1 (2014): 38-67. Print).

Theorizing Interracial Communication in the Former Yugoslavia

Abstract Whiteness and nationalism underlie configurations of race globally, yet “race” is often recognized and performed as hierarchies of ethnicity in nations where skin color is not optically differentiated. This paper examines this phenomenon in the former Yugoslavia in order both to contextualize these shifting dynamics of power as well as to theorize how postsocialism and postcolonialism might figure into the construction of ethnicity as the primary marker of difference. Our central concern is how these constructions and performances of ethnicity, in turn, impact the ways we might study interracial communication nationally and globally. In other words, we analyze the racialization of identity in a space without bodies of color in order to ask what is or can be interracial? How might such analysis posit possibilities for interrupting power in transnational and global contexts? Drawing on the Bosnian genocide and experiences from living in the former Yugoslavia, we point to a few contexts to ground the discussion. We draw parallels between the former Yugoslavia and the US to analyze how interracial communication travels, often violently, across borders. We argue that critical analysis of the manifestation of race on bodies is integral to resisting the precarious effects of global capitalism.

A Feminist Postsocialist Approach to the Intercultural Communication of Rape at the ICTY

This article argues for postsocialism as an added consideration to postcolonial theory in analyzing and enacting intercultural and international relations of/for social justice. We theorize the need for feminist and communication studies of rape and sexual assault that consider how rape occurs in relation to institutions, bodies, and times that offer varying positions and possibilities to different identities, cultures, and groups. Our study of an international rape trial asks how survivors of rape can have their experiences validated in androcentric international judicial systems. Theorizing Yugoslavia through the prism of rape, we center our analysis on women as property. Utilizing concepts of relationality and performativity, we imagine how the temporal, cultural, and geographic positionalities of women’s experiences of rape can critique patriarchy and global capitalism.