Popular Culture Review Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer 2006 | Page 7

From the Editor’s Desk As I look over this issue of PCR, I am struck once again by how diverse the faces of popular culture study are and how important it is to recognize them if we are to attempt to understand ourselves in our popularculture-saturated environment. Sex, gender, transgender, race, the media, comics, environment and athletics in our love/hate affair with mountains, architecture and the worldwide gaming culture, and an ancient people in India transmitting gentle values through their music have all found their places in this issue. In our lead essay “Pomumentaries and Sexploitation: The Cultural Signs of Sex,” Daniel Ferreras continues the discussion that made his keynote address at the 18th Annual Conference of the FWPCA/ACA one of the most praised and talked about in our history. In it, he argues that the increasingly explicit sexual representations that we see around us every day are an unhealthy result of “our current neo-conservative climate,” drawing on film, literature, and television as well as Christian iconography to make his point. Writing from Thailand, Arthur Saniotis in "Gendered Ambivalence: Representations of kathoey in Thailand” discusses the ways in which kathoey (lady-boys) influence their society, setting an ideal for female beauty yet often discriminated against, something often reflected in film. A number of his points reinforce those of Ferreras in another social context. In “’It’s My Body and I’ll Show It If I Want To’: The Politics of Language in the Autobiographies of Dorothy Dandridge, Diahann Carroll, and Whoopi Goldberg,” Kwakiutl Dreher tackles race and gender, stressing Goldberg’s refreshing in-your-face style as it attacks head-on the sorts of hypocrisies that Ferreras deplores and ambivalences that Saniotis describes in the kathoey>world. * A different kind of popular culture comes to the fore in Satish Sharma’s “Carriers of Popular Indian Culture: The Bauls of Bengal.” Far from Bollywood, the Bauls (“free people” in Sanskrit), live happily unbothered by the hypocrisies of the larger world, eschewing false piety, earning their living by singing and dancing in the streets, showing by example the resiliency of their form of popular culture. Their ancient songs can be a lesson to us all. Moving in another direction, Robert Duff and Larry Hong examine the growth of Macau’s gaming industry in “Recreating Macau in the Image of Las Vegas: Will Cultural Globalization Come Home to Roost?” As Macau has been busily recreating itself as Las Vegas since an influx of big money after the Chinese takeover in 2002, the authors wonder if Las Vegas will be forced to reinvent itself to remain competitive with Asian gamblers. Moving to the natural environment in "Man(kind) Vs. Mountain,” adventurer-scholar Armand Singer gives a succinct, but comprehensive, look at