A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations

A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations PDF Author: Cintra Wilson
Publisher: Wilberforce Codex
ISBN: 0990574326
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Whether you lust after it, loathe it, or feign apathy toward it, fame is in your face. Cintra Wilson gets to the heart of our humiliating fascination with celebrity and all its preposterous trappings in these hilarious, whip-smart, and subversive essays. Often radical and always a scream, Wilson takes on every sacred cow, toppling icons as diverse as Barbra Streisand, Ike Turner, Michael Jackson, and-for obvious reasons-Bruce Willis. She exposes events like the Oscars and even athletic jamborees as having grown a "tumescent aura of Otherness." Wilson's scathing and irresistible dissections of Las Vegas as "the Death Star of Entertainment," and Los Angeles as "a giant peach of a dream crawling with centipedes" pulse with her enlightened rejection of all things false and vain and egotistical. Written with her trademark zeal and intelligence, A Massive Swelling is the antidote for the fame virus that infects us all.

A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations

A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations PDF Author: Cintra Wilson
Publisher: Wilberforce Codex
ISBN: 0990574326
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Get Book

Book Description
Whether you lust after it, loathe it, or feign apathy toward it, fame is in your face. Cintra Wilson gets to the heart of our humiliating fascination with celebrity and all its preposterous trappings in these hilarious, whip-smart, and subversive essays. Often radical and always a scream, Wilson takes on every sacred cow, toppling icons as diverse as Barbra Streisand, Ike Turner, Michael Jackson, and-for obvious reasons-Bruce Willis. She exposes events like the Oscars and even athletic jamborees as having grown a "tumescent aura of Otherness." Wilson's scathing and irresistible dissections of Las Vegas as "the Death Star of Entertainment," and Los Angeles as "a giant peach of a dream crawling with centipedes" pulse with her enlightened rejection of all things false and vain and egotistical. Written with her trademark zeal and intelligence, A Massive Swelling is the antidote for the fame virus that infects us all.

A Massive swelling

A Massive swelling PDF Author: Cintra Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fame
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description


Out

Out PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
Out is a fashion, style, celebrity and opinion magazine for the modern gay man.

Natural Born Celebrities

Natural Born Celebrities PDF Author: David Schmid
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226738701
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Jeffrey Dahmer. Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Over the past thirty years, serial killers have become iconic figures in America, the subject of made-for-TV movies and mass-market paperbacks alike. But why do we find such luridly transgressive and horrific individuals so fascinating? What compels us to look more closely at these figures when we really want to look away? Natural Born Celebrities considers how serial killers have become lionized in American culture and explores the consequences of their fame. David Schmid provides a historical account of how serial killers became famous and how that fame has been used in popular media and the corridors of the FBI alike. Ranging from H. H. Holmes, whose killing spree during the 1893 Chicago World's Fair inspired The Devil in the White City, right up to Aileen Wuornos, the lesbian prostitute whose vicious murder of seven men would serve as the basis for the hit film Monster, Schmid unveils a new understanding of serial killers by emphasizing both the social dimensions of their crimes and their susceptibility to multiple interpretations and uses. He also explores why serial killers have become endemic in popular culture, from their depiction in The Silence of the Lambs and The X-Files to their becoming the stuff of trading cards and even Web sites where you can buy their hair and nail clippings. Bringing his fascinating history right up to the present, Schmid ultimately argues that America needs the perversely familiar figure of the serial killer now more than ever to manage the fear posed by Osama bin Laden since September 11. "This is a persuasively argued, meticulously researched, and compelling examination of the media phenomenon of the 'celebrity criminal' in American culture. It is highly readable as well."—Joyce Carol Oates

Sporting Pedagogies

Sporting Pedagogies PDF Author: Michael D. Giardina
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820471341
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Focusing on such varied sites as British cinema, global celebrity, racialized education policy, and Disney, Sporting Pedagogies illustrates how trans/national sporting cultures, intermediaries, and institutions actively work as pedagogical sites to hegemonically re-inscribe and re-present neo-liberal discourses on sport, culture, nation, and democracy throughout the ascendant global capitalist order. Written in the progressive tradition of Norman K. Denzin, Henry Giroux, Lawrence Grossberg, and Peter McLaren, Michael D. Giardina poignantly - and at times, devastatingly - captures the shifting terrain of social and political contestation and negotiation at play in the modern world. This book is a must-read for students in cultural studies, communications research, sport studies, and globalization.

The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture

The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture PDF Author: Mark D. Jacobs
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119250684
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
This collection of original, state-of-the-art essays by prominent international scholars covers the most important issues comprising the sociology of culture. Provides an invaluable reference resource to all interested in the cultural structures and processes that animate contemporary life Contains 27 essays on the most important issues comprising the sociology of culture, including art, science, religions, race, class, gender, collective memory, institutions, and citizenship Reflects and analyzes the “cultural turn” that has transformed scholarship in the social sciences and humanities.

OverSuccess

OverSuccess PDF Author: Jim Rubens
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
ISBN: 1929774761
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
Why are one in three American adults pervasively dissatisfied with their lives? Why is major depression seven times more likely among those born after 1970 than their grandparents? Why are one in four of us addicted to at least one substance or behavior? Why is America drowning in record personal and public debt? Why did over 100,000 people humiliate themselves this year auditioning for Fox's American Idol? Why are 80 percent of women unhappy with their bodies? What is it about contemporary America that connects the swelling incidence of depression, behavioral addictions, eating disorders, debt, materialism, sleep deprivation, family breakdown, rudeness, fame fixation, ethical collapse, mistrust, and monstrous acts of personal violence? Drawing from emerging science in several fields and insights about our transformed social lives, Rubens explains how genes, commercial culture, and global hyper-competition have locked tens of millions of Americans into an unwinnable success benchmarks race and unleashed an epidemic of status defeat. OverSuccess shows how and why the resulting social and psychological pathologies are different for baby boomers, men, and women. Offering hope for our future, Rubens outlines 20 ways that individuals, businesses, and voluntary organizations can satisfy the American drive for recognition and personal achievement without the toxic burdens of OverSuccess. These cures range from holding the door for strangers and somatic cell gene therapy, to responsible displays of wealth and building village-scale social and business organizations.

Vital Signs

Vital Signs PDF Author: Gregg Levoy
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
ISBN: 0399174982
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
Explores "what inspires passion and what defeats it. How we lose it and how we get it back. And, ultimately, [examines] the endless yet endlessly fruitful tug-of-war between freedom and domestication, the wild in us and the tame, our natural selves and our conditioned selves"--

Zero Break

Zero Break PDF Author: Matt Warshaw
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156029537
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
An anthology of literary pieces and essays on surfing is complemented by classic and modern photographs and artwork and includes Mark Twain's nineteenth-century description in "Roughing It" and Susan Orlean's essay on girl surfers in Maui.

Islands of Privacy

Islands of Privacy PDF Author: Christena E. Nippert-Eng
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226584542
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Everyone worries about privacy these days. As corporations and governments devise increasingly sophisticated data gathering tools and joining Facebook verges on obligatory, concerns over the use and abuse of personal information are undeniable. But the way privacy functions on the virtual frontier of the Internet is only a subset of the fascinating ways we work to achieve it throughout our everyday lives. In Islands of Privacy, Christena Nippert-Eng pries open the blinds, giving us an intimate view into the full range of ordinary people’s sometimes extraordinary efforts to preserve the border between themselves and the rest of the world. Packed with stories that are funny and sad, familiar and strange, Islands of Privacy tours the myriad arenas where privacy battles are fought, lost, and won. Nippert-Eng explores how we manage our secrets, our phone calls and e-mail, the perimeters of our homes, and our interactions with neighbors. She discovers that everybody practices the art of selectively concealing and disclosing information on a daily basis. This important balancing act governs a wide range of behaviors, from deciding whether to give our bosses our cell phone numbers to choosing what we carry in our wallets or purses. Violations of privacy and anxiety about how we grant it to each other also come under Nippert-Eng’s microscope as she crafts a compelling argument that successfully managing privacy is critical for successfully maintaining our relationships with each other and our selves. Roaming from the beach to the bank and from the bathroom to the bus, Nippert-Eng’s keenly observed and vividly told book gives us the skinny on how we defend our shrinking islands of privacy in the vast ocean of accessibility that surrounds us.