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