Browsing by Author "Whaley, Ben"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemEmbargo
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Beyond Subcultural Community: A Sociological Analysis of Japanese Animation Fans and Fandoms
    (2019-04-05) Robles Bastida, Nazario; Young, Kevin M.; McLean, Scott; McCoy, Liza; Beaty, Bart; Atkinson, Michael F.; Whaley, Ben
    The study of media fandom has emphasized the subcultural nature of fans’ practices and relationships. The work of Henry Jenkins (2013) was especially influential in this regard. Proposing that media fans constituted both a subculture and an interpretive community, Jenkins reified fandoms as bounded, subcultural groups composed of nomadic readers. The current dissertation constitutes a powerful critique of this traditional approach to the study of media fandom. Through ethnographic research on Japanese animation fans in Mexico and Canada and a theoretical framework informed by the oeuvre of Pierre Bourdieu, I propose that Japanese animation fandom is not a bounded group, but rather a field of consumption, that is, a space of consumer positions articulated around particular tastes relating to Japanese animation and its associated texts and characters. While some of these positions correspond to local and trans-local communities, individual media consumers occupy others. From this perspective, in a similar manner to Bourdieu’s “field of cultural production”, Japanese animation fandom is much more complex and fluid than implied by the fandom-as-community paradigm. To approach this complexity, this dissertation explores knowledges, practices, localities and objects that are appropriated and deployed by Japanese animation fans in order to be closer to their favorite narratives and characters. In doing so, fans’ tastes and consumption practices become the core of a new approach to the study of media fandom.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Bridging The Boundaries of Genres, Culture, and Language in North American K-Pop Fandom
    (2021-08-23) Kuk, Bryan Cho Hang; Patterson, Matt; Whaley, Ben; McLean, Scott
    K-pop is currently one of the most popular genres of music in the world. K-pop is not the first Korean product to make it over to North America, but rather, it is an extension of the “Hallyu”, a term coined by scholars to describe the period where there was an increase in Korean exports. Korea reverses the usual flow of cultural diffusion, competing with major cultural exports such as North America, Europe, and Japan through the exportation and diffusion of K-pop (Choi and Maliangkay 2015). Existing research shows that K-pop has established a following in North America and across the globe in places such as Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. Inspired by DeNora's (2000) focus on music and identity, this research examines how consumers engage in the consumption of K-pop through qualitative interviews with self-proclaimed fans. This is to observe why North American fans consume a product that is external to their culture, and how is consuming K-pop related to identity construction and distinction from other fans. Building off previous research that did not include how the Korean language affects K-pop consumption, this study bridges the gap through the addition of a sample comparison between English and Korean-speaking audiences to observe themes and patterns of consumption practices. First, K-pop’s appeal is tied to its ability to transcend the boundaries of genre and media, which can procure fans from a wide range of interests. Second, K-pop consumption is an expression of cosmopolitan identity. Third, K-pop fandom is a subcultural community, and its members conduct a variety of fandom practices, deal with potential stigma, and distinguish themselves from extreme or obsessive fans known as “sasaengs”. The thesis ends with examining possible ways to improve the study and how it can be replicated to expand upon existing literature in the sociology of culture and K-pop studies.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Doomed Hybrids: Three Cases of Fatal Mixing in the War Comics of Tezuka Osamu
    (International Journal of Comic Art, 2014-06) Whaley, Ben
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Failure is the Name of the Game: Queer Failure in Video Game Novels
    (2020-08-27) Brooks, Laura; Mason, Derritt; Whaley, Ben; Prud'homme-Cranford, Rain
    Considering the important process of using queer theory as a mode of resisting the ableist white cisheteropatriarchy of mainstream video games, Failure is the Name of the Game: Queer Failure in Video Games Novels seeks to bring this work into the literary sphere. I use the theoretical frame of queer failure to examine a quickly expanding subgenre of fiction, the video game novel, where video games serve as key elements of a novel’s plot and setting. Each chapter examines a phenomenon of real-life video games and compares how these phenomena have manifested themselves or been challenged in literature. Chapter One challenges the persisting heteronormativity of classic video game culture to queer Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game by proving that there is reparative queer content in these otherwise heteronormative texts. Chapter Two examines the heteronormative impulse of e-sports through the example of Riot Games’ League of Legends and how Marie Lu’s Warcross queers this gaming genre. Finally, Chapter Three examines the racism embedded in Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft and the massively multiplayer online role-playing game genre and explores how Brittney Morris’s SLAY responds to this tradition by creating a gaming space for only Black players which begins to empower Black transgender gamers. Ultimately, my thesis demonstrates that not only have video games always been queer, as games scholar Bonnie Ruberg suggests, but so have video game novels. I assert that video game novels and the practice of reading video game novels queerly should become part of the conversation surrounding queer game studies. Further, I argue that these literary works have the potential to provide direction to real-life video games as the genre begins to imagine answers to the issues of the dominant gaming community and the development process to create alternative worlds and futures for video games.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    The Interactional Structure of Nominals: An Investigation of Paranouns
    (2021-07-30) McDonald, Brittany; Ritter, Elizabeth; Storoshenko, Dennis Ryan; Whaley, Ben; Ritter, Elizabeth
    Pronouns are often thought to be a uniform syntactic class both inside and outside of linguistics. Despite this, comparing languages like Japanese and English reveals striking differences between their pronoun paradigms. English pronouns express contrasting sets of person, number, and gender features (i.e., phi-features), but Japanese pronouns encode far more content like the relative age, gender, and social status of the speaker, addressee, and other referents. Ritter & Wiltschko (2019) propose that the Japanese and Korean so-called pronouns are actually a different type of nominal called paranouns. This thesis takes Ritter & Wiltschko’s conceptual description of paranouns and develops a set of explicit diagnostics for distinguishing pronouns and paranouns and tests a sample of six East and Southeast Asian languages whose so-called pronouns have similar properties to those of Japanese and Korean (namely: Burmese, Khmer, Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, and Malay/Indonesian). It also tests the broader syntactic distribution of paranouns in the context of binding theory. This thesis concludes that five of the six languages tested have paranouns rather than pronouns while one language, Malay/Indonesian, appears to be transitioning from having pronouns to having paranouns. It also determines that the binding theoretic properties of paranouns are distinct from those of pronouns.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Phonetic variations of F0 range in L1 and L2: a Comparison Between English and Japanese Native Speakers
    (2019-07-25) Qiu, Mingyu; Winters, Stephen; O'Brien, Mary; Whaley, Ben
    This study analyzed pitch range production in English and Japanese sentences uttered by native and non-native speakers. I conducted two experiments: 1) pitch range production in L1 (Experiment One); 2) pitch range production in L1 and L2 (Experiment Two). My research questions focused on the pitch range in L2, testing whether it is characterized by a narrower pitch range compared to L1. I also tested the effect of elicitation method and the effect of transfer from L1s. Experiment One showed that Japanese has a higher pitch level than English but the pitch range did not differ significantly. The results of Experiment Two supported the hypothesis that pitch range is narrower in L2, except for female English speakers. The effect of elicitation method was confirmed, with L2 speakers using a wider pitch range after hearing a native prompt than after reading from text materials. The effect of L1 transfer needs further investigation.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    When Anne Frank Met Astro Boy: Drawing the Holocaust through Manga
    (Duke University Press, 2020-11-01) Whaley, Ben
    This article examines the evolution and impact of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl on postwar manga (print comics) and Japanese visual culture. The author argues that Anne’s enduring legacy in Japan, dating back to 1952, owes much to the ways in which the content of her Diary capitalizes on certain hallmarks of shōjo (girls’) manga culture, such as affective storytelling and character interiority. Moreover, as shown through a primary analysis of two emonogatari (illustrated story) versions of the Diary from 1964 and two manga versions from 1967, among others referenced, Anne Frank’s life and legacy inspires a hybridized narrative and visual style in manga that blends the emotionality and interiority of shōjo with the more graphic depictions of violence common to shōnen manga for young boys. In so doing, it encourages a reevaluation of the shōjo mode and its ability to bear witness to the physical violence and psychological trauma of the Holocaust.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    "The world speaks, I can only listen": Representations of Indigenous Collective Trauma through Film Sound Design
    (2020-04) Cancino González, Berenice Isabel; Dueck, Cheryl; Tepperman, Charles; Whaley, Ben
    This research project investigates the role of film sound design in the representation of collective trauma in films about experiences and issues faced by Indigenous peoples. In filmmaking, sound is not only fundamental in providing an aura of realism and in evoking affective forces. It can also provide spectators with imagined sound worlds that represent diverse experiences through aural aesthetic elements that in turn create shades of meaning. A transcultural approach in this study integrates the corpus, placing film representations from different countries in conversation through the analysis of their aural compositions. The project analyzes three contemporary films released between 2013 and 2015: Charlie’s Country by director Rolf De Heer (Australia 2013), Rhymes for Young Ghouls by Jeff Barnaby (Canada 2013) and El Abrazo de la Serpiente by Ciro Guerra (Colombia 2015). The findings of this project establish the connection between aural elements, sound mixing, and factors in the representation of collective trauma, such as issues of space, memory, emotion, and expressions of physical pain. By addressing sound not as an isolated subject, but rather as embedded in a context that produces political representations of trauma, this project contributes to the growing understanding of the evocative potential of film sound.