New Books in Popular Culture

What does music tell us about society? In Connecting Sounds: The Social Life of Music (Manchester University Press, 2020), Nick Crossley, Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, introduces a relational sociology of music. The book thinks through the social and individual practices of music, the music industry, and the music ‘worlds’ of mainstreams, alternatives, and subcultures. The book also considers music’s relation to inequalities, including of patterns of taste, politics, and the public sphere. As well as the sociological perspective, Connecting Sounds discusses the role of individuals, as they use music for meaning and sense of identity, and as practitioners and consumers. Packed with examples, as well as a rich range of theoretical discussions, the book is essential reading for social science and music scholars, as well as for anyone interested in the role of music in our social world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

For a year, B. J. Hollars traveled the Midwest, or Flyover country as he refers to it, in search of monsters, aliens, and oddities. Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in Flyover Country (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) documents his encounters with the weird and wonderful. Hollars examines aliens who share pancakes with a plumber, Mothman, Hodag, and other strange creatures and experiences in small town America. In Midwestern Strange, Hollars shares his visits with the people who have experienced and study these creatures. His goal is not to debunk the mysteries but instead to seek them out as a way to show the importance of these stories and experiences to small towns and the people who are part of the lore. Hollars deftly combines memoir and journalism offering informative and often humorous stories of the monsters, Martians, and weird that may encourage you to take a road trip through flyover country and visit some unusual Midwest landmarks.Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

 Art Spiegelman's Maus is the story of an American cartoonist's efforts to uncover and record his father's story of survival of the Holocaust. It is also a cartoon, where the Jews are mice, the Nazis cats, the Poles dogs, and the French, well, you'll have to read it.It's a story of survival and also a story of silences, and how the next generation can find and make sense of stories that seem to defy representation in their sheer horror. It's also a triumph in story-telling and a serious meditation on good and evil; on the nature of Romantic; familiar and filial love; on America's legacy of absorbing immigrants who arrive with often unspeakable traumas in a past that finds little resonance in a culture obsessed with entertainment and fast news.Maus upended the conventions of representing the Holocaust and historical trauma for a far greater audience than the American Jewish communities. It broke several rules: it spoke about past suffering to outsiders, it used low-culture to represent catastrophes, and it refused to turn the catastrophe of the Holocaust into a redemptive tale.It charted a way for others to take possession of their parents' stories without betraying them but also without letting them overwhelm the next generation, analogous to Alex Haley's magisterial Roots. I spoke with Hillary Chute, a scholar of cartoons and American literature and Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University.Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

What can online social spaces like Reddit’s r/gaming reveal about gender attitudes, masculinized spaces, and turning points in gamer communities? In their new book Gender, Masculinity and Video Gaming: Analysing Reddit’s r/gaming Community (Palgrave Pivot, 2019), Marcus Maloney, Steven Roberts, and Timothy Graham utilize computational and qualitative methods to explore conversations happing on the social media platform Reddit’s gaming subreddit. They explore masculine and feminine gendered comments and discourse using the online platform’s functions like upvoting and downvoting, in addition to textual analysis of comments. Maloney, Roberts, and Graham reveal a continuum of discourses from marginalization to inclusion and contribute to our greater understanding of gendered discourse online.This book would be a great addition to any gender course, both undergraduate and graduate, as it provides clear theoretical analysis of a popular social media platform. This book will be of interest to Sociologists of gender and culture, as well as scholars of media studies, gender studies, and cultural studies.Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Christian imagery, symbols, and motifs have long been used and incorporated in fashion. Famous designers such as Coco Chanel, Gianni Versace, and Dolce and Gabbana have made Christianity trendy and fashionable. But there is a history that precedes the seemingly recent fusion of Christianity and fashion. Lynn Neal traces this history in Religion in Vogue: Christianity and Fashion in America (NYU Press, 2019). Through an analysis of fashion magazines and the designs of prominent fashion designers, Neal examines the history of Christianity and fashion starting in the mid-twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Neal convincingly demonstrates that the history of Christianity and fashion provides an avenue through which to study Christianity in the United States more broadly.Lynn Neal is Professor of Religious Studies at Wake Forest University.Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Erika Engstrom is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her latest book, Feminism, Gender, and Politics in NBC’s Parks and Recreation (Peter Lang, 2017), analyzes the various ways the series presented feminism as a positive force, such as the satirical portrayal of patriarchy; alternative depictions of masculinity; the feminist ideology and political career of main character Leslie Knope; the inclusion of actual political figures; and depictions of love and romance as related to feminist thinking.A much-needed treatment that adds to the literature on feminism in media and popular culture, this book serves as an ideal resource for instructors and scholars of gender and mass media, women’s studies, and media criticism by investigating Parks and Recreation’s place in the continuum of other feminist-leaning television programs.Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

As someone who grew up watching All in the Family and Sanford and Son, I’ve long been familiar with Norman Lear and his work. What I didn’t know, as a young child sitting cross-legged in front of the TV set in the 1970s, was how prominent a political figure Lear was at the time. In his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Politics, Television, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 2019), Professor L. Benjamin Rolsky makes the case for understanding Lear as a key protagonist in the culture wars of the late 20th century. As a religious liberal, Lear was committed to engaging politics on explicitly moral grounds in defense of what he saw as the public interest. Other players in the culture wars—including television networks, Hollywood, the FCC, televangelists, and Ronald Reagan himself—had their own interpretations of what constituted the public interest. As a result, Rolsky’s interdisciplinary analysis concludes, prime-time television itself became a contested political space and the site of some of the definitive cultural clashes of our fractious times.Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment. Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To contact her or to suggest a recent title, email clane@fullerton.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Today we are joined by Roger Gilles, Director of the Honors College and Professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University, and author of Women on the Move: The Forgotten Era of Women’s Bicycle Racing (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the rise of women’s velodrome racing in the American Midwest in the 1890s, the business of six-day cycling, and the gender politics of women’s racing.In Women on the Move, Gilles recovers the history of women’s cycle racing in the 1890s. Female scorchers like Tillie “The Terrible Swede” Anderson, Lizzie Glaw, and Dottie Farnsworth barnstormed across the Midwest from Oklahoma City to Pittsburgh. Their sport proved to be popular, even more so than men’s endurance six-day events. They raced on steeply banked short tracks, pedalled at speeds up to 30 miles per hour, braved severe injuries from crashes, dealt with wardrobe malfunctions, and won enormous prizes. They were America’s first famous female athletes.Gilles’ work traces the intersections that gave rise to women’s bicycle racing in the 1890s. Tillie Anderson and the other racers navigated the cycling boom, which followed the invention of the safety bike; the rise of the suffrage movement; the increasing industrialization of midwestern cities; the migration of millions of Europeans to the United States; and the gender politics of the Victorian era.The craze ended almost as quickly as it began in the early 20th century – replaced by automobile racing, undermined by charges of fixing, undercut by lower revenues, and damaged by the increasingly strategic and tactical insight of the racers that made the sport more professional but less exciting for spectators.Women on the Move restores women’s racing to the pantheon of 19th century American sport and will appeal to readers interested in the overlap between cycling, sports business, migration, and gender.Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Professor Blain Roberts of California State University, Fresno, talks about intersections of race, identity, and memory in the South in a wide-ranging discussion that starts in the segregated beauty parlors of the Jim Crow era and ends with remembrances of slavery in modern-day Charleston, South Carolina.From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American communities, it is easy to see the ways beauty is enmeshed in southern culture. But as Blain Roberts shows in this incisive work, the pursuit of beauty in the South was linked to the tumultuous racial divides of the region, where the Jim Crow-era cosmetics industry came of age selling the idea of makeup that emphasized whiteness, and where, in the 1950s and 1960s, black-owned beauty shops served as crucial sites of resistance for civil rights activists. In these times of strained relations in the South, beauty became a signifier of power and affluence while it reinforced racial strife.In Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Roberts examines a range of beauty products, practices, and rituals--cosmetics, hairdressing, clothing, and beauty contests--in settings that range from tobacco farms of the Great Depression to 1950s and 1960s college campuses. In so doing, she uncovers the role of female beauty in the economic and cultural modernization of the South. By showing how battles over beauty came to a head during the civil rights movement, Roberts sheds new light on the tactics southerners used to resist and achieve desegregation.Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture