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Julia Leyda

The Feminist Futures of American Studies: Addressing the Post-Weinstein Media and Cultural Landscape

This article reflects on the long-term and recent developments in the interdisciplinary field of American studies and its imbrications with its cultural and political contexts. Pushing back against premature assertions of feminism's obsolescence, I argue that scholars and teachers of American studies and media studies must take the popular seriously―popular film and television as well as popular political movements. Given the growing demand from students for a deeper and more sustained engagement with intersectional feminism, the article works through some short case studies to urge even the confirmed feminists to rethink and refresh their approaches to teaching and performing scholarship to best provide students with the theoretical tools to strengthen and define their feminism as a discipline as well as an attitude. Inspired by the popular 2014 movement, "The Year of Reading Women," the #metoo and #timesup phenomena, and the popularity of and backlash against celebrity feminism of Beyoncé and others, this article weaves together academic and pop-cultural sources such as Sara Ahmed and Roxane Gay to underscore our responsibility to maintain, nurture, and contribute to the progress made by previous generations of feminists.

Stefan Rabitsch

One Nation Under Many Cowboy Hats: Western Hats and American Studies—A Cultural-Historical Conspectus

Commencing with the polemic that "everybody has always worn cowboy hats," this article (re)conceptualizes western hats as significant, signifying, wearable, and thus nomadic manifestations of Americanness. Their material complexity lends itself to thinking through the cultural fabric of Americanness, which, depending on the vantage point, oscillates between dominant and arguably homogeneous permutations of predominately white Americanness, and the checkered, multicultural "felt" that is the American experience at large, and that of the American West in particular.

Katharina Wiedlack

'The Beast from the East': Mental Dis/Ability and the Fears of Post-Socialist Mobility in North American Popular Culture

This article analyzes characters in North American popular culture who migrated from the post-socialist world to the United States and other western countries. It focuses on the Anglo-Ukrainian clone Helena in the television show Orphan Black (Space/BBC America, 2013-2017), the Russian girl Esther in the horror movie Orphan (2009), and the psychopathic Russian assassin Villanelle in the television show Killing Eve (BBC America, 2018-2022). All these fictional characters are orphans. Moreover, they all share the same pathology: a mental disorder or disability that predestines them to become ruthless killers. I argue that the fictional killers embody North American fears surrounding the mobility of the Cold War Other in the aftermath of the fall of the so-called Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Alexandra Ganser, Leopold Lippert, Eva Maria Schörgenhuber, Helena Oberzaucher

American Studies as Im/Mobility Studies: Introduction

The introduction to the JAAAS special issue American Studies as Im/Mobility Studies maps the field of mobility studies in the context of American studies, framing the various contributions to the issue. By summarizing dominant mobility narratives in US culture (e.g. in the mythology of the Western frontier), Ganser, Lippert, Oberzaucher, and Schörgenhuber demonstrate how deeply ingrained the idea of freedom of mobility is in the American cultural imaginary. In the vein of critical mobility research across the humanities, the introduction critiques these dominant scripts of American mobility in light of recent movements like MeToo or Black Lives Matter, which implicitly highlight that the mythology of the “freedom of mobility” has been deeply gendered and racialized. Along with former President Trump’s securitization attempts at the US-Mexican border, these developments demonstrate, so the authors, how the immobilization of various groups of people runs equally deep US history but also complicates the equation of mobility with progress. In the second part, the article introduces the individual contributions to the special issue and demonstrates how they add to ongoing discussions around US im/mobilities.

Roxana Oltean

'Language ... Without Metaphor': Soundscapes and Worldly Engagements in Henry David Thoreau's Walden

Henry David Thoreau has been celebrated for his observation of the natural world. While noting Thoreau's skills of observation in relation to the natural world and his responsiveness to sensory experience, scholars have, however, tended to privilege sight over sound. Even though Thoreau was recognized by musicians such as Charles Ives and John Cage for having an exceptionally fine ear for the symphonies of nature, sound still remains a neglected aspect of Thoreau's Walden; Or, Life in the Woods. This article is a corrective to this status quo, as it reads Walden as a transmedial project in which Thoreau frequently tuned in to the sounds encountered during his sojourn in nature in order to figure the essential parameters of his experiment and to relate to the entire world of experience. The complex soundscape of Walden engenders a multifaceted awareness of modern space, as sounds of nature, sounds of progress, and the clamor of people intersect. Accordingly, this article explores how Thoreau uses a vast array of sounds to relate to the world; how he apprehended, and even appreciated, not only the harmonies of nature, but also dissonance—within nature, as well as between nature, modernity and rurality. In doing so, this article proposes a reading of Thoreau's auditory experience as a reflection on, and negotiation with, a multifaceted world where the pastoral and the industrial coexist.

David Bebnowski

Murray Rothbard's Populist Blueprint: Paleo-Libertarianism and the Ascent of the Political Right

In his 1992 pamphlet "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement," libertarian economist and intellectual Murray Rothbard drafted a strategy that foreshadowed the rise of populist politics that was to come some years later. Central to his populist vision was the idea of a "paleo-coalition" consisting of "paleo-libertarians" and "paleo-conservatives" that he saw coming closer to power by addressing the masses directly. This, Rothbard proclaimed, would be possible if a presidential candidate were able to short-circuit the traditional media and appeal to disgruntled parts of the population, namely the "rednecks" and Middle America. With Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election in 2016, Rothbard's ideas seem to have become reality. This article draws on the concept of flyover to describe this special populist framework by analyzing libertarians' appeals and politicizable connections to an imagined "real people" and by historically tracing populism in US conservatism. Based on a discussion of the social functions of pamphlets as contentious formats that are interwoven into social conflict, a close reading of Rothbard's 1992 pamphlet shows the decisive political edge that populists were able to gain by employing the strategies for the "paleo movement."

 

Barbara Gföllner

'The World Called Him a Thug': Police Brutality and the Perception of the Black Body in Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give

Widespread police violence, often targeted at black people, has increasingly entered public debates in recent years. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, various African American young adult novelists have addressed the topic of police brutality and offer counternarratives to the stories about black victims disseminated in the media. This article illustrates how prevalent debates of Black Lives Matter are reflected in contemporary young adult fiction. To this end, the first part elucidates substantial issues that have led to the precarious position of African Americans today and to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing on theoretical concepts such as Judith Butler’s notion of "precarious lives" and Frantz Fanon’s description of the black experience in a white-dominated world, I will analyze Angie Thomas's novel The Hate U Give in view of ongoing debates about racial inequality. As I will show, the novel features striking similarities to real-world incidents of police brutality while simultaneously drawing attention to the manifold ways in which society disregards black lives and continues to subject African Americans to racial injustice.

Cornelia Klecker

Childfree Female Characters: Narrating Pronatalism

On June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court officially overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision thus ending the constitutional right to abortion. Much of the subsequent mainstream media narrative has focused on the fact that this decision does not even carve out exceptions for victims of rape and incest, which, while important and horrifying, diverts attention away from the actual issue: a person's right to decide not to give birth for any reason. This reframing of the abortion debate around the most extreme cases is clearly informed by a pronatalist ideology that is still pervasive in US culture. However, it is not just the news media that frequently buys into this pronatalist narrative by evading the inclusion of, if not actively undermining, a woman's right to be childfree. Depictions of abortions are rare in popular fictional narratives, be it in television, film, or literature, and so are voluntarily childless female characters, not only but particularly when it comes to lead characters. This introduction to the special issue on childfree female characters in fictional narratives frames the issue of childfreeness, i.e., voluntary childlessness, in the still dominant pronatalist ideology and examines some stereotypical depictions in recent US-American television series.

Marina Zigneli

The Abortion Road Trip Film and the Pronatalist Discourse in the Post-Roe v. Wade US

With the overturn of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which protected the constitutional right to abortion for almost 50 years, women in America are now faced with extreme difficulties when seeking an abortion. Given this dramatic pronatalist shift that seems only to be getting worse, more and more women will now have to travel through "abortion deserts" in order to seek safe and legal abortion care. Cinema has sought to mediate the troubles and struggles of women "on the road" to safe abortion. Thus, in recent years, we have watched a surge in the representation of abortion within the realm of the road-trip film genre in US-American cinema. Since 2015, several films, such as Grandma (2015), Little Woods (2018), Never Rarely Sometimes Always(2020), Unpregnant (2020), and Plan B (2021), have tackled this issue. Interestingly, only one of those films was directed/written by a male individual, highlighting the way female filmmakers are currently reshaping reproductive health narratives. Additionally, three of these films, namely Grandma, Unpregnant, and Plan B, also fall under the comedy-drama genre, particularly the road trip-buddy comedy genre. This paper aims to explore how the road-trip film genre, which has featured predominantly male characters, is now helping women to share their stories and gain more visibility regarding reproductive rights and how comedy is being used to subvert the overtly dramatic representation of abortion that enhances the pronatalist ideology in most film and television narratives.

Joshua Parker

The Future of US Education

Review of
Kill It to Save It: An Autopsy of Capitalism's Triumph Over Democracy. By Corey Dolgon (Bristol: Policy Press, 2018, 320pp.)
The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies. By Susan Jacoby (London: Vintage Books, 2018, 364pp.)

Robert A. Winkler

"Out there in that cabin in the middle of nowhere in Montana": Narrating the Geographical and Mental Deviance of the Unabomber

In 1996, the mathematician-turned-terrorist Theodore J. Kaczynski, nicknamed the Unabomber, was arrested in his self-built cabin in the woods of Montana after having terrorized the nation for over 20 years. He had modeled his cabin after Henry David Thoreau's idealized Walden cabin. This article argues that the Unabomber's cabin in Montana, often considered a so-called flyover state, serves as the pivotal point for his geographical marginalization in the media coverage of the case. Its location in what is discursively constructed as a 'wilderness' makes it impossible to perceive his cabin through the perspective of the pastoral ideal – this imagined middle ground between nature and culture. The over-determination of this material form in its location apparently off the grid furthermore enables the othering and medicalization of Theodore J. Kaczynski. This article demonstrates that the media coverage of the Unabomber case displays these three tendencies which come together in the nexus cabinsanity, i.e., the conflation of pseudo-geographical, cultural, and medical discourses. Projecting cabinsanity, in turn, enables the dismissal of the Unabomber's critique of technologized society as delineated in his manifesto.

Emily Edwards

Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity. By Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 220pp.

Emily Edwards reviews Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes's book Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (2019)