Tanya Horeck

#AskThicke: “Blurred Lines,” Rape Culture, and the Feminist Hashtag Takeover

@LaurenHarsh1: #askThickeu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202c If one of your songs played in a forest and no one was around to hear it would it still be sexist and gross?1@JoLiptrott: #AskThickeu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202cu202c When youre ...

‘A film that will rock you to your core’: Emotion and affect in Dear Zachary and the real crime documentary

This essay explores the affective impact of contemporary real crime documentaries through an examination of Kurt Kuenne’s 2008 documentary Dear Zachary: a letter to a son about his father. In its dramatic use of home video footage in the context of crime reconstruction, Dear Zachary exemplifies the contemporary crime documentary and its mediated re-enactment of the past. Looking at the deployment of real crime images across different platforms, the author analyses how the crime documentary circulates as a cultural object, and explores how the emotional and affective attachments it solicits from viewers foregrounds the new contexts in which questions about judgement and the law, crime and ethics are being formed. Exploring its online reception on websites such as IMDB.com and Amazon, the essay considers how Dear Zachary calls upon the affective labour of spectators to reaffirm dominant social values regarding crime, victimhood and the family. Tracing the affectivity of the crime image as it is routed through the remediated home video footage in Dear Zachary and then, through the ‘extras’ on the DVD format, the essay suggests that the vehemence of the emotional response to Dear Zachary is ultimately not only about the horrible crimes it reveals but about the anxieties it raises regarding what is at stake in the public circulation of ‘private’ family images.

The affective labour of One Born Every Minute in its UK and US formats

This article examines the relationship between the British and American versions of the hit reality television birthing show One Born Every Minute (OBEM) in order to consider how the representation of different national childbirth practices invites a different kind of affective labour from the spectator. It argues that OBEM UK attempts to position the spectator in an ethical relation of care towards the subjects depicted. By contrast, on the US version, any such intimacy is forestalled by the use of distancing techniques, including an external voice-over and a heavy-handed dramatic shaping of the material through comedic devices.

#ReneeZellweger’s face

‘Renee Zellweger: what has happened to her face?’ (Singh 2014) – this, or a variation on it, was the question that launched a thousand tweets following the actress’s appearance at the Elle Women in Hollywood Awards in October 2014. Simple, cruel and to the point, it exemplifies the ‘hyper scrutiny’ of female celebrity, as described by Kirsty Fairclough (2012), which has come to flourish in the digital age. But just as I was scrutinising the images myself and, admittedly (and somewhat sheepishly), wondering what had happened to Zellweger’s face, a welcome flurry of articles contextualising the media’s treatment of the story in relation to feminist concerns and debates was shared and distributed on my Facebook feed. Articles by Anne Helen Petersen (2014) and Melissa Silverstein (2014) made sensitive and salient points regarding the cultural fascination with, and repulsion of, the aging female body. It is the speed and immediacy of this kind of response and counterresponse that is so indicative of the current, post-cinematic digital moment, which has galvanised the ways we as ‘users’ now engage and interact with stars (and indeed they with us). In the digital era, stars – to borrow Nicholas Rombes’ words regarding movie images more generally – ‘are shrunken down to inches and made portable – detached from their theatrical classical-era surroundings, and displayed on screens that are themselves privately owned markers of style’ (2009, p. 47). And so, even as Renée Zellweger’s face appears smaller and physically reduced on my iPad and iPhone, her face is also easily magnified and expanded as I tap, pinch and spread to enlarge the image and inspect her face even more closely. The tactile and the visceral – as well as the cerebral and the discursive – ways in which we now experience stars as media flows and processes is fundamental to any understanding of their cultural and affective import. Indeed, what struck me most about this cultural brouhaha over Zellweger’s face is how it serves as an exemplar of twentyfirst-century digital stardom and the new kind of (inter)face-objects that stars have become. Writing in 1957, Roland Barthes began his essay ‘The Face of Greta Garbo’ by noting that Garbo:

Rape in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Beyond

With its powerful images of rape and revenge, Stieg Larssons bestselling Millennium trilogy has made a major impact on the contemporary crime novel. This collection explores the role that rape pla ...

Broken Bodies/Inquiring Minds: Women in Contemporary Transnational TV Crime Drama:

This special issue concentrates on a dominant trend in contemporary transnational crime television: quality dramas featuring serial criminals who break the bodies/psyches of young women or children, thereby attracting the inquiries of female detectives who have suffered trauma themselves. This trend has generated resources, industrial partnerships, avid viewers, and, importantly for the authors here, feminist commentary across continents. We reframe the debate over whether these shows are feminist or misogynist by exploring staples of transnational language that underwrite their popularity in disparate national markets. In fact, we address the paradoxical gender-based violence and female empowerment at their core as crucial to their transnational legibility by tracking recurring elements that circulate a gendered and raced lingua franca rooted in fundamentals of media aesthetics: strategies of storytelling and genre, modes of perception, and the production of affect. Ultimately, these programs raise questions about cultural currencies of televised feminism in the digital era.

Screening Affect: Rape Culture and the Digital Interface in The Fall and Top of the Lake:

Although it often goes unremarked, digital screens are a key point of commonality across the many different transnational renditions of the story of violence against girls and women found in contemporary TV crime drama. The Fall (United Kingdom, 2013–) and Top of the Lake (United Kingdom/Australia/New Zealand/United States, 2013–) are two striking examples of TV crime dramas that frame their self-conscious interrogation of rape culture through digital media. Considering the mutual imbrication of feminist politics and the deployment of new media technologies on these shows, this essay considers how the digital interface functions as a way of mediating viewer response to violence against women. Resisting a reading of digital technologies as either inherently oppressive or inherently liberatory, the essay explores how these TV series navigate the tension between the simultaneous violence of new media and its investigative/feminist/affective potential.

Women and Death in Film, Television, and News: Dead But Not Gone

In particular, more could be said with respect to questions of race, especially whiteness. The After School Specials, for example, presumed a “middle-class white (and likely suburban) audience of ‘normal’—able-bodied and heterosexual—youth viewers” (p. 69)— what does this erasure mean in the context of rehabilitation? What does this suggest about perceived threats to whiteness in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s? Relatedly, Elman notes how the Specials narrate an individual will to overcome disability as resulting in racial harmony (p. 89), where difference—racial, gender, or ability—are overcome and thus depoliticized, but does not elaborate on this point. Further, attending to neoliberalism’s effects on the self, Elman suggests that rehabilitative citizenship refashioned individual citizenship as “an endless ‘contractual negotiation’” based on “healthy (read: normative) behavior” (p. 16). More could be said about the racialized dimensions at work here, particularly in a theorization of citizenship as earned rather than entitled, based on race (Lisa Marie Cacho 2012). Ultimately, Chronic Youth is a rich and important text that opens significant avenues for scholarship and makes a sorely needed contribution to media studies.