Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 8
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Popular Culture Review
Against Same-Sex Marriage” (from Dobson’s book Marriage Under Fire: Why
We Must Win This Battle). In another vein entirely, H. Peter Steeves presents us
with a new look into the Disney film Beauty and the Beast in “Yep, Gaston s
Gay: Disney and the Beauty of Beastly Love.”
The rest of the journal offerings makes for a mixed bag of topics. Dina
Titus’s “Behind the Irony Curtain: Lenin Loses His Head in Las Vegas” is a
humorous look at a casino’s misstep in placing a larger-than-life statue of Lenin
in front of one of its themed restaurants. The only thing not explained is: How
did Lenin’s head end up in a Las Vegas thrift shop? While we are talking about
cities, ‘“ Sweet Desolation’ and Seduction in Toni Morrison’s Jazz," by Geta
LeSeur, tells us how a City is a character player on the cultural stage.
In “‘Self Matters’: Latter-Day Notes on the Culture of Narcissism,”
Steven Carter points out the dangers of too much introspection: the disturbing
trend of “the postmodern cult of victimhood.” While this article puts us squarely
in the present day, Eric Jarvis (in “The Comic Strip Pogo and Liberal Satire
During the Vietnam Era”) harks back to an earlier time to inform us that
political satire in the comic pages did exist before Doonesbury.
And, to wrap things up, Matthew Kapell and Suzanne Becker prove to
us in “Patriarchy, the Christian Romance Novel, and the Ecosystem of Sex” that
(in the world of popular culture) critique of the romance fiction genre carries
weight too. In the words of the authors: “Romance fiction is internationally
popular. No doubt, whatever any feminist epistemology purports, women who
read romance fiction will go on reading it for a long time to come.”
Romance matters too.
Mindy Hutchings
Associate Editor, Popular Culture Review
[email protected]