Monsters, mashups, and popular culture
Megen de Bruin-Molé Photos from the Winchester School of Art launch of Gothic Remixed are now available in this event report on the MA Global Media Management blog. Thank you to everyone who could join us! It was wonderful to celebrate with you, and to hear more about the other book presented at the launch, Fashion Crimes: Dressing for Deviance (ed. Jo Turney)
Since the publication of Gothic Remixed on 31 October, I have been doing some local publicity. You can read an interview I did with the University of Southampton’s media team at this link. A brief excerpt from the interview is below:
“We have this idea of monsters as ‘others’ and as objects of cult fandom but actually in the last 10-20 years they’re not cult anymore but more mainstream,” Dr de Bruin-Molé explains. “I want people to think about what it means that monsters are now mainstream – is it even possible for a monster, which is inherently peripheral, to be mainstream? What do we do with that? What does that say about our contemporary culture?” [read more here]
On 14 November, The Second Shelf feminist bookshop will also welcome myself and Dr Liz Gloyn to talk about monsters, metamorphoses, and modernity (and for a small launch party). In Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture, I look at what the current popularity of the ‘monster mash’ can reveal about our assumptions regarding originality, monstrosity, authorship, and historiography; Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture takes Liz on a journey around the contemporary world to explore why the monsters of ancient myth continue to survive in our world. Liz and I will read extracts from our books before a short discussion around the continuing power and meaning of monsters.
I’m thrilled to announce the official publication of Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture!
This book explores the boundaries and connections between contemporary remix and related modes, including adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, and postmodernism. In it, I argue that popular remix creations are the ‘monsters’ of our age, lurking at the limits of responsible consumption and acceptable appropriation. Taking a multimedia approach, case studies range from novels like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series, to television programmes such as Penny Dreadful, to popular visual artworks like Kevin J. Weir’s Flux Machine GIFs.
Are you interested in gender and/or technology? I am co-organising an interdisciplinary symposium next week at Winchester School of Art called ‘Technologies of Gender’. It aims to explore the ways in which technology shapes (and is shaped by) our constructions of gender identity, and also to offer a space in which scholars from different fields and faculties can share their perspectives on this topic. Speakers will include artists and industry professionals, as well as academics from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
The event is open to all, and lunch will be provided, so please do come along! Registration is free, but you are strongly advised to book ahead, so we can ensure there is enough food for everyone. Click here to access the registration portal.
You will find a brief description of the event and programme below. More information is available at the symposium website.
In UK academia, opportunities for discussion with people working outside your discipline have become increasingly rare. Even rarer is the chance to speak about your research with people from other industries. This is why I was especially eager to attend the ‘Bioethics and the Posthumanities’ workshop on 28th March 2019, which included presentations from researchers in … Read more
As part of this year’s programme of events under the theme ‘Gendering Technology’, my students on the MA in Global Media Management took a study visit to London’s Victoria & Albert museum. In the morning we visited the special exhibition ‘Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt’, which was prefaced by an introduction from exhibition curator Marie Foulston. In the afternoon we were introduced to the V&A’s brand new Photography Centre by Dr Mihaela Brebenel.
It’s official! Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture is now with Bloomsbury Academic’s production team, and will be coming to a bookshop near you in October. The book is already available to preorder at this link.
If you’re teaching or researching the Gothic, adaptation studies, or popular media, please do consider requesting Gothic Remixed for your library! Alternately, if you have deep pockets you can spring for a hardback edition of your very own (currently retailing at £76.50 on the Bloomsbury website). A paperback edition will hopefully follow shortly.
Remix has often been called the first modern art form. Enabled by modern copy-paste technologies, by the wealth of material opened up for recycling by the information age, and by the legal and ethical provisions of fair use, remix has been given a central place in the history of the digital revolution. It has also been hailed as an inherently egalitarian practice, open to anyone with a computer or a pair of scissors, indiscriminate in its mixing of media, its combination of high art with low art, and its appropriation of both proprietary materials and those in the public domain.
Continuing on from my previous research on Star Wars (and other related activities), I’ve had an article published in a special issue of the open access journal Film Criticism. I write about the Forces of Destiny Star Wars series on YouTube, addressing the tensions between Disney’s presentation of this girl-focused arm of the Star Wars universe and its reception by fans and consumers. In particular, I look at the ‘Adventure figure’ line of toys marketed with the series, tracing its ‘plastic representation’ within the broader contexts of Star Wars transmedia, commodity activism, and paratextual erasure.
The article is open access and free to read—you can find it at this link. You can also read a short excerpt from the article below:
Few films are more iconic and widely recognized than Star Wars (1977).[1] Now an international franchise with a forty-year history and a multi-billion-dollar box office and merchandising legacy, Star Wars has become a global phenomenon. Amidst ever-intensifying waves of film and television content, transmedia tie-ins, and merchandising outreach, it has become common to speak of Star Wars as though it is a universal constant. Not only can it be found everywhere, the reasoning goes, it is also something that can be enjoyed together by people of diverse ages and backgrounds. As Rogue One (2016) reviewer Rohan Naahar writes for the Hindustan Times, “Star Wars is for everyone; every boy or girl who has ever looked up at the night sky and wondered if there are other worlds out there. It’s for every kid who has ever pretended to be a hero, saving the day, with his friends by his side. Star Wars belongs to us now.”[2] But what parts of the franchise are we talking about when we speak of Star Wars? And is it the franchise’s omnipresence that allows it to appeal to the kid—or the boy, as Naahar’s use of personal pronouns suggests—in everyone?
At the beginning of December, students and staff at Winchester School of Art (where I work) took part in a series of Critical Media Practice workshops, focused around the theme of ‘Gendering Technology’. The workshops developed practical skills, but also explored the gendered dimensions of technology’s access and use, and the framing of debates around gender identities and technology. Together with digital media scholar Mihaela Brebenel, I ran one of these workshops, and the topic of our session was ‘Zine-Making as Feminist Practice’. You can find the session slides here. The workshop was inspired by my previous experiences with zine-making at Feminist Archive South, by the fabulous work done by Anti-Precarity Cymru to raise awareness about casualisation and neoliberalisation in academia (including a 2019 calendar!), and by an article by Carly and Jennifer Jean Bagelman.