Browsing by Author "Hernsberger, Brandon K."
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Item THE LIVING TELEVISION: ALLOY ENTERTAINMENT AND THE BRAND NEW GIRL(2014-05) Hernsberger, Brandon K.; Wingard, Jennifer; Backus, Margot G.; Zebroski, James Thomas; Butler, Paul; Riedner, RachelAlloy Entertainment has fundamentally changed the landscape of teen media (YA fiction and the television adaptation) by decentering the teenager (especially the teenage girl) and instead focusing squarely on how the teenager in media can help promote Alloy’s own brand mission of advertising itself as a marketing corporation within the spaces of its products (books and television programs). Alloy does this through the semiotic marking of gender in and through its products to resemble the way that it, Alloy Entertainment, markets itself as well as through the repetition of seven brand principles (of Alloy’s design) seen especially in Alloy’s three most popular (and most socially shared) book to television properties: Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and Pretty Little Liars. These properties can be seen as three separate parts of the same thing—that is, different versions of one singular brand mission: the promotion of a real company within the fictional spaces of narrative. The Alloy girl is: (1) sexually depraved; (2) terrorized; (3) highly dependent on a male counterpart for self-actualization; (4) surveilled; (5) marked by class and/or race; (6) representative of a nationalist gender identity (a social agent); and (7) a child acting as an adult. These brand principles can all been in the three properties mentioned above, though not all seven are always used at the same time. Alloy Entertainment has all but taken away the possibility for the televisual teenage girl’s exploration of her own liminality (this exploration was always possible in teenage television of the past, up until Alloy eliminated it in its first television property: Gossip Girl); and because of this, the teenage girl in the audience likely has a more difficult time understanding her own liminal position given how much time young people spend with various media as a way to, at least partly, learn what it looks like to grow up. There is no such thing as a teenage girl on television anymore; there is only the Alloy teenage girl, the branded teenager.Item THE RISE OF THE KICK-ASS GIRL: EXAMINING NEOLIBERAL, POST- FEMINIST INFLUENCE IN CONTEMPORARY YOUNG ADULT DYSTOPIAN FICTION(2022-05-02) Stigall, Natalie Marie; Wingard, Jennifer; Backus, Margot G.; Gonzalez, Maria C.; Hernsberger, Brandon K.Contemporary girlhood is marked by the purported end of gender inequality in our society. Rather than address the impact of gender bias and gender-based oppression on girls, post- feminist, neoliberal messaging instead positions girls as powerful agents of social and economic capital, encouraging an individualized approach to empowerment rooted in personal success and achievement over social change. Popular culture products coming out of and contributing to contemporary girl culture therefore champion empowered, “feminist” girl heroines whose gender never prevents them from kicking ass, but whose commitment to heteropatriarchy is evident in the regressive, traditional gender roles and exercises they participate in and reproduce despite the characteristically rebellious traits and narratives that earn them praise. This “kick-ass girl” heroine is especially prominent in the young adult dystopian series that dominated girl culture and popular culture of the early 2000s. Katniss Everdeen of the Hunger Games trilogy, Tris Prior of the Divergent trilogy, and Lena Holloway of the Delirium trilogy embody the neoliberal, post-feminist figure of the kick-ass girl in that they are lauded as empowered, feminist role models for young girl readers even as they conform to heteropatriarchal roles concerning gender and sexuality and fail to make any meaningful social change to their societies despite their rebel statuses. And as representatives of rebel girls in popular culture, these kick-ass girls and the Girl Power messaging that shaped them impact the way contemporary society approaches girls’ empowerment as well as how it views girl activists. The influence of such forces leads to girls’ empowerment programs that reproduce neoliberal, post-feminist values of personal success and self-esteem, failing to acknowledge the systemic oppression that hinders many girls from achieving in a neoliberal social structure. This ultimately leads to a social construction of girl activists as heroic, lone of contemporary society, isolating them from the potential support of collective movements for social change while heaping the responsibility of saving the world on their shoulders.