The act of laughing, which is thought to be related with the body rather than the mind and identified with rudeness, has been attributed to outcast segments of society, such as women, children, slaves, or the common-people, while humor requiring supremacy of the mind is believed to be associated with the ruling elite class of society, and mostly…

Popular culture is omnipresent in the lives of young children. The mass media, movies, television, and product advertising all carry messages about acceptability and desirability, deeply entangled with traditional stereotypes about gender, sex-roles, and sexuality. The intersection of discourses of media, gender, and performativity and their…

While the issue of boys' dominance of the curriculum has a long history, the article examines this phenomenon in a contemporary context, through an empirical study with female teachers designing English curriculum around girls' media in a coeducational secondary school in Victoria, Australia. In this space, teachers, and the researcher, produce…

Excluding Hip Hop culture and rap music from music education misses opportunities for addressing key aspects of popular culture, society, and students' lives. This article addresses intersections of Hip Hop, gender, and music education to forward potential Hip Hop praxis. After tracing related scholarship, I discuss and problematize…

Not even the first lady of the most powerful nation in the world is immune to stereotypes that have plagued Black women since first setting foot on American soil. Stereotypes of being the "angry Black woman" and curiosity about differences in appearance still persist from the academy to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. As African-American women rise in…

Stubborn societal prejudices persist that inhibit this enlargement of gender roles for boys and men. Portrayals of men in popular culture tend to be brutish, ignorant, and violent--often in sexual and predatory ways. Boys in school are subjected to homophobia, racism, classism, and shame, as a means of policing their burgeoning identities and…

Women's bodies have often been positioned in art and popular culture as monstrous or defiled and women's bodily products (e.g., menstrual fluid, breast milk) as disgusting. This framing has led to the stigmatization of aspects of women's bodies (e.g., leaking fluids, lumps of fat, and lines in the skin that indicate aging), especially those…

During the late twentieth century, Kanaka Maoli have struggled to push back against these representations, offering a rewriting of Hawaiian history, quite literally. Infused by Hawaiian nationalism and a growing library of works that investigate the naturalization of American colonialism in Hawai'i, innovative Kanaka Maoli representations in the…

This paper is concerned with expanding knowledge of how femininity/sexuality intersections are constituted in secondary schools. Existing studies have drawn upon Judith Butler's notion of a "heterosexual matrix" in order to understand how intersections of femininity/sexuality are produced in schools through normative discourses of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of popular culture, especially prime-time television, on women viewers' identity development. More specifically, this study explores one television show, the 1962-1964 Cathy Gale episodes of "The Avengers," as a portal to adult learning. We explored how television, as a form of public…

In this article the authors provide a general overview of the controversies associated with urban street fiction, a brief introduction to the genre and an introduction to the complex representations of Black adolescent femininity within two contemporary titles, "Black and Ugly" (Styles, 2006) and "Bitch" (King, 2006). The authors provide a…

The authors investigate the nearly ubiquitous cultural icon for girls' play, the princess. They survey historical instances of princess play from the beginning of the American republic to the New Millennium, look at the literature concerning princesses in various periods, and discuss the individual recollections about princess play of a number of…

The images of fat professors encountered in popular culture are few in number and negative in depiction. In this article, the author discusses on how will the professorial body affect the way in which students perceive the professor's teaching abilities. The author concludes that bias against fat professors, professors of color, and other…

This book explores how women have been portrayed in various forms of American popular culture over the years. In an introductory section, it is suggested that popular culture has generally used women to represent a social mythology that is built around women's subordinate status, a position that current feminists reject. Chapter 1 reviews books…

Describes the relationship among the social movements of the 1960s, particularly the feminist movement and the mass media. Analyzes the nature of the rhetoric of social activism in that period which is characterized by the ego-defensive responses to media-created reality and by ego-building responses to media's reality-creating potential. (JMF)