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This paper analyzes three labor documentaries released from 1989 to 1991, which depict the United States' assumed transition from a Fordist to post-Fordist economy. Feminist textual analysis focuses on the depiction of workplaces and gender roles in Roger and Me, American Dream, and Fast Food Women. The analysis demonstrated that discourses of epochal change in the context only held true if one looked at a slice of the U.S. labor market largely dominated by White men. Focusing on feminine sex-typed labor demonstrated the worst elements of industrial Fordism remained in post-Fordist workplaces. Long-standing sexual divisions of labor were unambiguously repeated in post-Fordist work and intensified in a discussion of the family wage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music constitutes communities in an aesthetically distinct way because it relies so centrally on bodily innervations. Such bodily innervation resonates with cognition and affective life and creates communities of listeners and producers. Following Theodor Adorno’s critical theory of music, however, we must distinguish these musical communities within the political economy of late capitalism. I examine this communicative power of music by considering Adorno’s critique of popular music in the political-economic context of the “informatization” of popular music under post-Fordism. Informatization has changed popular music production and consumption in important ways, but I seek to demonstrate that Adorno’s critique of music can still help us understand these changes. I emphasize the community constitutive power of music and I consider the non-Culture Industry form of heavy metal music as resistant music in the Adornoian critical theory tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines reality television as a cultural form of what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘control societies.’ For Deleuze, the shift from disciplinary societies (enclosures, bounded spaces, institutions) to control societies (circuits, modulated spaces, networked relations) is marked by a change in the processes of subjectification. The ‘postindividual’ or the ‘dividual’ is characterized by interchangeability, flexibility, and mobility (in accordance with post-Fordist forms of labor). On reality TV (RTV), subjects now become variables to be replaced, reversed, and transformed. More specifically, individuals' subjective limits are often tested corporeally (challenges on Fear Factor) and affectively (prank shows). We can think of RTV less as a genre than as a loose assemblage of techniques and experiments. I examine a wide range of programs, concentrating on prank shows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]