Dustin Kidd

I'm working on a new book project. The research is question is both very long, and pretty simple: How do race, class, gender, disability status, and sexuality impact the content, production, and audience of film, television, music, print media, and the internet? The question is answered using a combination of secondary and primary data, but I also highlight the many ways the question remains unanswered and suggest ways that we could improve our sociological study of popular culture. If you have favorite studies that are relevant, send them my way!

http://dustinkidd.blogspot.com/ Last week's episode of Parks and Recreation, titled April and Andy's Fancy Party , had a nice illustration of Patricia Hill Collins's concept of controllingimages. Co ntrolling images are media images that function, whether by design or not, to remind marginalized groups of their position in the power structure and to justify that position to a wider audience, especially to those who are privileged by their position within that structure. Although stereotypes usually function as controlling images, many controlling images are not so widespread that they can be called stereotypes, and many actually seem positive at first glance. As a case in point, consider the character of Donna from Parks and Recreation. Donna is played by the Black female comedian Retta Sirleaf. In last week's episode, Donna is at a singles event when she is found by Ann Perkins. Ann is played by the biracial actress Rashida Jones, daughter of Quincey Jones ...

The fall 2010 primetime schedule is available on TV Guide's website: http://www.tvguide.com/special/fall-preview/fall-schedule.aspx 16 sitcoms 12 Reality Shows 3 Sports Shows 48 Dramas 4 animated comedies 5 news shows A lot of drama!

http://tvbythenumbers.com/ is a great resource for anyone studying the television industry. I'm particularly following their daily postings of the Nielsen overnights. http://tvbythenumbers.com/category/ratings/tv-ratings-nielsen-overnight-tv-show-ratings Until this site came along, TV ratings could actually be pretty hard to track down consistently.

http://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/ This is a good resource for studying women in popular culture. The research reports--The Celluloid Ceiling (film) and Boxed In (TV)--are particularly good. They are very basic but provide straight-forward analysis that is often hard to find. What the Center does well is track women's representation on both sides of the camera. It's very helpful to remember that female characters in TV and film are often authored by male writers, directors, and videographers.

I'm re-designing my course on popular culture for this fall to make it a research-intensive class. That's not a technical designation at Temple, the way that writing-intensive is, but it is a helpful way for me to think about bringing students into the data collection process. Until now, the course was always writing-intensive, so I guided students through the process of producing a sociology paper, but with a data set that included only 2 cultural objects--television shows, songs, magazines, films, etc.--that provided a useful comparison in terms of a sociological issue such as race, gender, or class. For the research-intensive version, students will be performing weekly content analyses of prime time television. I'm spending the summer writing the proposal, developing the protocols, and creating the coding sheet and codebook. I'm trying to develop a process for teaching research that--like my process for teaching writing--is transferable from one class to another...

dustinkidd.blogspot.com (videos will not appear in facebook, so click on the blog for the full post) Like my reason posts on popular culture, this is focused on Glee.  In last week's episode, Kurt came out to his dad, after joining the football team and scoring the winning field goal.  It's striking that the usual story of a painful coming out followed by endless abuse and mocking is here replaced with coming out as an inner torment that is greeted with support by surrounding characters.  In other words, the focus is less on presenting gay characters who can serve as role models to gay youth, and more on presenting positive straight characters who can offer a welcoming environment to the kid coming out.  These characters present new role models for straight people. In the first clip below (advance to the .55 second mark), Kurt pulls Finn aside to ask a question. Finn, not realizing that Kurt is asking for help with football, intercedes and says: "Thanks, but I already hav...

dustinkidd.blogspot.com CNN on Glee's pilot strategy: Glee banks on risky strategy LA Times on last week's episode: Glee: Ah, fellas! Calgary Herald on best fall bets: Fall Season Survival Fresh Air interviews the director and producer Ryan Murphy: From Nip/Tuck to High School Glee NYTimes on last week's episode: Glee, Brought to you by the letter C TV Guide on Fox's Use of Tweet-peats: Fox to Air Twee-Peats of Glee and Fringe TV Guide on the director's cut: Glee Director's Cut: What's to Come? And yes, you guessed it: The Gleeblog

dustinkidd.blogspot.com Glee feels like it was written by a graduate from my course on popular culture. I tell my students to look for the racial and ethnic minorities, look for the women, look for the disabled people, look for the gays and lesbians. On a many shows on television, these characters are not present or they appear very infrequently. A lot of hype surrounds the occasional exceptions, but they really are exceptions. Glee is one more of those exceptions, but it's striking for its inclusiveness. The initial Glee club--New Directions!--includes one kid in a wheelchair, one kid who is probably gay, one Black woman and one Asian woman (who is probably lesbian), along with the perfect straight White male and female leads. This isn't a show that argues that we're really all part of the mainstream. The key moment in the pilot episode is when Finn, the male lead who has been recruited from the football teams, declares that "we're all losers!" The show...

dustinkidd.blogspot.com This is a summary of my 2007 article "Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture" from The Journal of Popular Culture . I argue that the basic functions of popular culture today are the same basic functions of crime, as described by Emile Durkheim in The Rules of Sociological Method in 1895. Briefly, these social functions are to: produce social norms, establish social boundaries, create rituals that generate social solidarity, generate innovation, and pave the way for social change. It's tempting to give specific examples from film, television or music for each, but that would be misleading. Popular culture accomplishes these functions through blunt ubiquitous force, not through acute specificity. We don't turn to one TV show for our norms and another for our innovations. What Not to Wear may in fact tell us what to wear, but we also figure out how to dress ourselves from all of the other media we consume. Most people will never wa...

You don't see a lot of trans men and women in popular culture, except as rare one-off characters who are used as comic relief. But that is changing. When Mac, on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia , met a trans woman named Carmen, it initially felt like the same old shit. But things got more interesting as Mac started dating Carmen and struggled with the tension between his feelings and the pressures he felt from his friends. I really like the character Alexis on Ugly Betty , played by Rebecca Romijn. The show only occasionally focused on her identity as a trans woman, and didn't hesitate to make her beautiful and powerful. It did explore her dating life in one episode, as well as her friendships with other women, but it did this is a fairly nuanced and interesting way. The new trans woman on TV is Leiomy Maldonado, one of the dancers in Vogue Evolution , a group that is competing on MTV's America's Best Dance Crew . It will be interesting to watch how she pres...

The book project that I am working on now examines the relationship between popular culture and social inequality. When I think about social inequality, I think in terms laid out by Patricia Hill Collins, whose book Black Feminist Thought emphasizes the intersections between race, class and gender, as well as many other dimensions of identity. She calls this the 'matrix of domination and oppression' and in my work the key variables are race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and disability. When I think about popular culture, it seems the key sociological issue right now is the enormous amount of popular culture that we have (so many movies, books, CDs, websites, magazines, TV networks and shows), all produced by a tiny handful of massive corporations. We tend to assume that these corporations are competing, but a close analysis shows that they have far too many contractual relationships to truly be invested in competition (for instance, network studios frequently sell their s...

Tom over at I Hate Paper turned me on to this ABC show Wipeout . I don't wanna like it, but it's really fun to watch. I'm watching it on Hulu, which ABC wasn't really partnering with very much, but they seem to have stepped it up. Since I'm interested in both the business and content sides of popular culture, I thought I'd use my new love of Wipeout to do some exploring. Wipeout is a collaboration of Endemol Entertainment and Pulse Creative . Endemol was founded in Amsterdam in 1994 but its website says it is now owned by a "consortium consisting of Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, Mediaset Group and Cyrte Group." Its credits include Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Deal or No Deal, Big Brother After Dark (?), and Gay, Straight or Taken. Pulse calls itself a boutique agency and it has only 4 other shows to its credit. It is really a branding agency and it merged with Insite Media Group in 2007. Wipeout is distributed primarily by ABC , which is o...