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open access

It's All Coming Back to You: 1980s Retro Film Culture and the Masculinity of Cult

Description: The 1980s is a formative decade in American history. America sought to reestablish itself as a global power and to reassert the dominant ideology of white, patriarchal capitalism. Likewise, media producers in the 1980s sought to reassert the dominance of the white, male, muscled body in filmic representations. The identity politics of the 1980s and the depictions of the white, muscled body once prominent in the 1980s have been the site of conservative nostalgia for a young, male-dominated, cult… more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Collins, Ryan William
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

What Does It Mean to Go Super Saiyan: Gender Identity and Fandom in the Toonami Release of Dragon Ball Z (1998-2003)

Description: The intention of this thesis is to analyze the representations of masculinity in the anime series Dragon Ball Z as it aired on Cartoon Network's programming block Toonami, specifically the nature in which they were framed and how oppositional interpretations in the fandom became prevalent as a result. The series emphasizes the evolution of its central characters Goku, Vegeta, and Gohan into performing a sensitive masculinity, but there are a prevalence of images in the series that discredit thi… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Liverett, Nicholas
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Saint Sony: Deliverer of Christian Content for the Evangelical Market

Description: Many evangelical Christians distance themselves from the mainstream commercial culture, because they perceive mainstream media and popular culture to promulgate immoral messages through representations such as sex and violence. This disconnect from Hollywood have made evangelicals a tough audience to market. Sony, however, has been able to connect with the evangelical market by producing a line of contemporary Christian films through their in-house division Affirm Films. By prioritizing the nar… more
Date: August 2018
Creator: Patino, Stephen
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Let's Bump Up the Lights: Exploring The Carol Burnett Show as a Cultural Antecedent to Feminist Media Studies

Description: This thesis argues that textual and historical analysis of The Carol Burnett Show reveals that the program utilized slapstick, women's comedy and feminist humor to create comedic parodies of television commercials, melodramas and women's films, and soap operas. Their television commercial parodies reflect Second Wave feminist critiques of media advertising contemporary with the program. Comparison of the work of early feminist film theorists and media critics to the program's parodies of film a… more
Date: August 2019
Creator: Hoover, Jessica
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Nine Lives: A History of Cat Women, Subversive Femininity, and Transgressive Archetypes in Film

Description: The intention of this thesis is to identify and analyze the cat woman archetype as a contemporary extension of the transgressive witch archetype, which rampantly appears over the course of cinema history, working as a signifier of a patriarchal society's fear of autonomous and subversive women. The character of Catwoman is the ultimate representation for this archetype on grounds of her visibility, longevity, and ability to return again and again. More importantly, Catwoman and her sisterhood o… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Barnett, Katrina
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Crying for Change: Examining the Use of Period Melodrama and the Melodramatic Mode in Contemporary Queer Representation

Description: This thesis illustrates how Melodrama and the melodramatic mode have been adapted within contemporary cinema as both a means of commenting on prior LGBTQI representation, and of exposing mainstream audiences to the issues still faced by many within this spectrum. Through my analyses of Carol (2015), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and A Single Man (2009), I examine how filmmakers have drawn on Melodrama as both an aesthetic form, and as a reference to the broader field of generic history and critici… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Bonthuys, Justin
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

"Reality" while Dreaming in a Labyrinth: Christopher Nolan as Realist Auteur

Description: This thesis examines how the concept of an auteur (author of a film) has developed within contemporary Hollywood and popular culture. Building on concepts from Timothy Corrigan, this thesis adapts the ideas of the author and the commercial auteur to examine how director Christopher Nolan's name, and film work, has become branded as "realist" by the Hollywood film industry and by Nolan's consistent self-promotion. Through recurring signatures of "realism," such as, cinematic realism (immersive f… more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Cowley, Brent
Partner: UNT Libraries
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