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Since the early 2000s, major domestic theater chains in the United States and Canada have responded to economic pressures and the existential threat of home and mobile entertainment options by dramatically reshaping the industry: pursuing aggressive consolidation of chains, introducing new technologies and services as premium screening options, and diversifying their holdings in areas parallel to and outside the exhibition sector. Simultaneously, these theaters have become outlets for global technology providers, like IMAX, RealD, Dolby, and CJ 4DPLEX, and assets in the exhibition empires of international companies including China’s Dalian Wanda and the UK’s Cineworld. Driving these parallel currents of change is a historical transformation of the cultural status of theater chains, negotiated, maintained, and mediated by the industrial activity of film exhibitors. Focusing on the activities of the top four exhibitors in the US-Canada market—AMC Theatres, Cinemark Theatres, Regal Cinemas, and Cineplex Entertainment—my dissertation seeks to examine how the twin positions these “exhibition giants” occupy as powerful actors in the domestic exhibition industry and one member of globally dispersed exhibition circuits and distribution flows makes them crucial nodes mediating between the levels of global industry, domestic market, and local cultural experience in this transformed context.Examining this emerging cultural-industrial landscape, my research asks: How have major US and Canadian exhibitors reconfigured the cultural value of movie theaters through shifts in their industrial practices and discourses since the early 1990s? How have structural transformations within the exhibition sector enabled and influenced these changes? What investments has this transition prompted from global technology brands and exhibition empires and how have these actors redefined the activities of domestic exhibitors within their own projects?Drawing from research on media industry studies, my dissertation challenges these divisions to offer an account of film exhibition as a globalized industry, in part by focusing on major exhibitors whose size makes them crucial industrial influences and assets, situates them in and across localities, and implicates them in highly heterogenous practices. With this understanding, I examine emerging exhibitor activities using methodologies of textual and economic analysis within media industry studies. I analyze information from industrial sources including trade and popular periodicals, press releases, and financial reports. Through these materials, I establish historical trajectories of emerging exhibition practices and assess the common-sense ideas exhibitors deploy as they legitimate these activities among themselves, with partners and owners, and to the public. This analysis also involves tracing the way these economic and cultural activities create cultural distinction between and through audience members through the dynamics of taste within consumer culture. Finally, I will examine the way these intertwined aspects of economy and culture are shaped and constrained as they move across the registers of the local, national, and global, and how they in turn contribute to the construction of these spatial dimensions.I argue that the development of a domestic oligopoly in the US-Canada market, developing out of the overlapping interests of private equity investors and large corporate theater chains in the 1990s and 2000s, set the stage not only for the restructuring of the exhibition industry, but for the most transformative developments in 2000s and 2010s exhibition practice. Domestic exhibition giants established dominant national circuits and used their scale, power, and capital to establish new revenue streams, facilitate the transition to digital cinema, standardize new premium screening options, and attract affluent cinemagoers, using each step to further cement their control of the domestic exhibition industry. Their effectiveness in this aim, during a period of retraction from international expansion by US exhibitors, made them the acquisition targets of foreign exhibition companies Wanda and Cineworld, ushering in a new stage of international connectivity in the exhibition industry and completing the integration of domestic film exhibition into the networks of global media and capital.

This dissertation project explores the convergence of museum and themed entertainment design through the lens of Deep Time—a concept that has important implications for connecting mass communication to scholarship on the Anthropocene. Based on case studies that represent a variety of exhibition contexts, I consider how paleontology, evolutionary theory, art history and archaeology function as public histories that structure and mobilize our understanding of the remote past. I examine several US-based sites: the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, the Evolving Planet exhibit at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and the Dinosaur attraction at Disneyʼs Animal Kingdom Theme Park in Orlando, Florida. In France, I conduct research on the replicated cave paintings of Lascaux IV and Caverne du Pont-d'Arc, at the International Centre for Parietal Art in Montignac and Grotte Chauvet 2 in Ardèche.These sites explore Deep Time as a theme that links media, temporality and ecology; I consider how this theme is implemented in designed spaces, and how these spaces go on to shape our shared scientific imagination. I conduct in-person research at each site; this entails formal analysis of attractions and their host institutions, ethnographic observation and consultation with attraction personnel. This in-person research is framed by spatial and temporal approaches to film and media theory, as well as key texts in museum and themed entertainment studies. The research sites represent distinct approaches to spatializing and temporalizing information, and each uses a unique combination of aesthetic and performative strategies in order to construct unique relationships between visiting publics, institutions and industries. These relationships imply a range of social, cultural and political contexts for exploring the intersection of media, temporality and environment, and each site proposes novel reconstructed environments and experiences as a basis for engaging the remote past and ultimately the Anthropocene

A key concept in critical media infrastructure studies is infrastructural invisibility, which means technological systems go unnoticed by users until there is an unplanned break, disruption, or malfunction in optimal operation. This study complicates the notion of invisibility by examining the often-overlooked infrastructures of Black body trafficking in the 19th century Atlantic World to consider an instance in space and time when the optimal functioning of infrastructures depended upon the planned excommunication of unwanted (Black) bodies and what this integrated operational exclusion—not a break or disruption—means for the concept of path dependency or grafting. Black Cells of Ships utilizes an interdisciplinary case study method to focus on an infrastructure of ships sponsored by the American Colonization Society (ACS) to make the case that technology mediates Black humanity, shaping who belongs in the category of the human with rights such as citizenship, freedom of mobility, and land protections. To answer questions about the ACS infrastructure, the ACS archival documents from approximately 1818 to 1847 were examined and visits to historical sites were conducted.The chapters of Black Cells of Ships examine the mediating processes that enabled the excommunication of free Blacks carried out by an infrastructure of ships. Chapter One, “Infraction: In-Between,” explores how the ACS constructed free Blacks as an infraction, helping the planned exclusion of Black bodies via infrastructure to go unnoticed. Chapter Two, “Refraction: To Excommunicate” maps out the mediations, meaning the specific logical processes, of the ACS infrastructure that facilitated the removal of free Blacks from the United States, the displacement of Indigenous Liberians, and the creation of a new place called Liberia. The third chapter, “Contraction: Black Translucence,” examines specific ways infrastructures of Black body trafficking in the 19th century and electronic signal traffic in the 20th and 21st centuries share an infrastructural purpose. And finally, the fourth chapter, “Extraction: In Dark Medias Res,” investigates how media constitute generative settings for the construction and representation of racialized subject positions.

This dissertation project explores the idea of matrilineal genealogies and analyzes how 20th and 21st century Spanish films and texts expand the notion of motherhood to encompass unexpected figures and formulate unique kinship formations. Contemporary Spanish fiction serves as a particularly rich area of analysis for these research questions since the texts and films I evaluate in my project reject any type of universalizing prescription of maternal experience by offering alternative forms of knowledge production through nuanced interpretations of maternal practice. This stands in stark contrast to the prototypical figure of the Spanish mother which evokes imagery of the Catholic woman who, taking inspiration from the Virgin Mary, gladly and selflessly engages in domestic work and childcare at the service of her family and country. I consider the process of memory retrieval through writing and narration as integral to this sharing of maternal memory along matrilineal lines. This process manifests as a complication of the Demeter-Persephone myth in which the daughter and mother both speak, searching for each other, either through her memories or in substitute figures. The idea of intergenerational inheritance between women establishes the role of language of the mother and recognizes the ways that feminine subjectivity is formed and challenged by maternal practices. In this project, I also ask what factors can hinder the flow of matrilineal wisdom, creating gaps in the generational archive of maternal knowledge such as the influence of institutional motherhood, the absence of the mother, and patriarchal hegemony. All these topics are central elements for my research project which identifies how fictional representations of maternal practice can serve to fill in archival gaps as well as how reconfigurations of matrilineal genealogies constitute an alternative form of knowledge production. I first explore the idea of institutional motherhood and patriarchal motherhood before turning to the figure of the substitute mother, the concept of ghostly mother, and the potential for intergenerational narratives. My aim is to articulate a contribution to modern and contemporary Peninsular literary and film studies as well as motherhood studies.

This dissertation examines the meanings and feelings of Maoist and post-Mao China through rural cultural practices and productions. Against the backdrop of urban-rural inequalities in twentieth and twenty-first-century China, as well as the uncertain future of agrarian societies worldwide, I reveal why the rural matters through literary and cinematic narratives of rural matters. My study takes a historically contingent approach to explore how cultural forms reflect upon and respond to social contents, challenging the urban-centered mentality regarding questions of modernity and crisis in Chinese studies. The stories of rural China, informed by varying ideological persuasions and cultural institutions, have oscillated between tales of success and crisis throughout the twentieth century and since, with the figure of the peasant alternately portrayed as a progressive vanguard or a conservative laggard. My study moves beyond this binary abstraction to explore rural issues as historical formations and emotional processes. In doing so, it reveals the contingencies in aesthetic framings that at once elucidate allegorical meanings and exude structures of feeling. Taking “rural matters” as the analytical node where social, epistemic, aesthetic, and affective issues are constructed and contested, this project makes three key contributions to interdisciplinary Chinese studies and broader humanistic inquiries. First, by foregrounding agrarian society vis-à-vis the interpellation of global capitalism, it enriches the growing body of scholarship on combined and uneven development. Second, by approaching realism as both a conceptual framework and a cultural form, this study accentuates Chinese articulations for exploring the global revival and rediscovery of realism. Third, it contextualizes affect studies within the sensorium and material conditions of rural China.In four chapters, I explore the complex processes of knowledge formation and emotional fluctuation in rural China through a diversity of media and genres, including fiction, film, popular magazines, and folk performances. Specifically, Chapters 1 and 2 scrutinize the shifting discourses on subjectivity and morality across the Mao/post-Mao divide. Highlighting the dialectic of cultural form and social content, I investigate how Chinese realists navigate between critical orientations and utopian impulses. Chapters 3 and 4 trace the contingencies and contradictions in the transformation of rural storytelling, addressing the potential and limitation of elite-folk coordination during the dynamic processes of transmedial borrowing, adaptation, and revision. Together, with each chapter historicizing an epistemological node pertaining to rurality—namely revolution, migration, justice, and folk—my project grapples with the structures of feeling that manifest as “obsessions with rural China.” By analyzing cultural formulations and social sentiments in the Maoist and post-Mao countryside, I argue that the rural form of the reform era not only mediates China’s marketization but also carries the birthmark of Chinese socialist realism. As such, my dissertation conceptualizes and contextualizes Chinese rurality both within and against capitalist modernity, reterritorializing the rural for envisioning alternatives to the current developmental impasse in China and beyond.

The primary focus of this dissertation is a documentary titled We Are Not Your Savages (2024), written, directed, produced, filmed, and edited by Haley Rains (Mvskoke). The written component of this dissertation supports the themes and issues presented in the documentary, contextualizes the film, and outlines the methodology and framework for each stage of the production process. This dissertation sets out to answer the question: How can Native American art, oral and visual histories, traditional values, and environmentally sustainable cultural and economic practices work to deconstruct the "myth of the American frontier" and offer a new (Indigenous) perspective on the American West that encourages its inhabitants to embrace cosmologies centered on respect for each other and the planet? With the expansion of the United States into the American West in the 19th century came the romanticization of the West and the simultaneous peripheralization and vilification of Native Americans. Early American photographs, paintings, performances, and imagery depicted the American West as an abundant, unoccupied Garden of Eden and Native Americans as both hostile opponents to American progress and members of a mythical, vanishing race. These narratives supported the Euro-American settlement and economic development of the American West at the expense of its Indigenous populations. These early American narratives, beliefs, and values persist in contemporary American society and are devastating the Native American and non-Native American communities of the American West – economically, socially, racially, geographically, and climatically. This dissertation puts the work of Native American artists, historians, scholars, and knowledge-keepers into conversation with prominent historians of the American West and the frontier mythology, bridging the gap between American history and Native American history and creating a more inclusive historical narrative about this majestic and problematic region.

Sinfonia Gojira: Ifukube Akira’s Musical Narratives of Nationalism and Anti-Modernity in Godzilla Films discusses the Japanese composer Ifukube Akira (1914-2006) and explores how his philosophies of Japanese/Asian nationalism and anti-modernity are made manifest in his musical works, especially his original scores in daikaijū eiga, or Japanese giant monster films, such as Godzilla (1954) and King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962). Through his daikaijū eiga music, Ifukube asserts himself beyond the role of a mere provider of passive “background music” and engages as a self-determined auteur, an active commentator who employs an array of carefully curated musical techniques and signs—an aesthetic practice I refer to as the primordial-folkloric—to articulate within his monster movie scores his philosophies of nationalism and anti-modernity. In Ifukube’s auteurist musical narration of these films, what I designate as his practice of interventional narrative commentary, he links monsters like Godzilla to his conception of Japanese and Asian ethno-cultural purity and thus recharacterizes them from invasive, malevolent creatures to deity-like beings—protectors—that seek to halt Japan’s misguided march toward postwar modernity and the resultant erasure of indigenous cultural identity. The composer’s ultimate goal, therefore, is to employ his musical scores to provoke or indeed manipulate his audiences into viewing—or more precisely, hearing—daikaijū eiga in a nationalist context, to perceive the monsters as representative of national ethos. Through Ifukube’s interventional narrative commentary, daikaijū eiga consequently transform into cultural productions that advocate for Japanese nationalist and anti-modern ideals in the tumultuously transitional postwar/post-Occupation era.By engaging with daikaijū eiga through a variety of academic frameworks such as film studies, musicology, and semiotics, Sinfonia Gojira argues that the cinematic composer must be situated as one of the many auteurs responsible for the production of a film. By emphasizing and examining the auteurism of a film’s composer, cinematic productions are consequently (re)positioned to be analyzed and interpreted using the musical score, imbued with the philosophical and political concerns of its composer, as a point of departure for novel hermeneutic praxes, thus revealing urgent and exciting new insights into how films may be conceptualized and read as truly audio-visual media.

This dissertation explores reformulations of screen acting at the juncture of technological and social transitions. In a hybrid format that combines theory and practice, it investigates the ontological status of the figure of the film actor during key moments of change: the conversion to synchronized sound in 1920s American cinema, the adoption of body-worn cameras in the 2010s, and the political shifts in Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Each of the three chapters focuses on the constitution of actors as subjects through the engagement with cinema’s technologies in the different stages of the production process. Employing a multimodal methodology that includes film history, media theory, performance studies, and screenwriting, the dissertation highlights how cyclical reformulations of screen acting seek to advance notions of cinematic realism and authenticity. This project places actors’ work at the center of the conversation about embodiment, challenging the field of film and media studies to grapple more directly with the craft, presence, and technological complexities of acting for the screen.

Our imaginations of calamity inform our attitude toward precarity. How does visual culture respond to traumatic cultural moments and shape our complicated feelings toward those moments? What are the ethics of living in an unstable world? These questions are more relevant today as we navigate a post-pandemic world marred by global conflicts.I argue that public memories of turbulent historical events give culturally recognizable texture to (post)apocalyptic imaginations, making them allegorical. In turn, the (post)apocalyptic setting becomes a productive site for working through precarious social realities. Additionally, these imaginations traffic in gender metaphors, which sustain patriarchal configurations of power and control and, as a result, limits our ability to picture a future without dominance or mastery.I believe a closer look at Japanese visual culture allows us to ruminate on the ethics of living in a precarious world. This dissertation closely examines Japanese animated films, television series (broadly as anime), and video games produced between the 1990s and 2010s. The 1990s saw the end of the Cold World and the start of the Heisei period (1989 – 2019). The bursting of the asset price shattered the myth of Japan's miraculous economy and a sense of security slowly built up since WWII. In this period, Japanese popular media engage with this new modern precarity. What stands at the center of these texts is a giant woman who overwhelms the beholder's senses with her large scale and immense power.I identify a “perpetually apocalyptic” setting within the objects examined in this dissertation. A perpetually apocalyptic setting pictures an eerily mundane world sandwiched between a catastrophic past trauma and an apocalyptic future calamity. Inhabitants of a perpetually apocalyptic world reference past events to prepare for the inevitable disaster. A perpetually apocalyptic setting recognizes existence as precarious. This dissertation demonstrates different mediums’ strategies for facilitating cultural reflections by challenging the neutral façade. I use the giant woman as a cipher for Japan in the 1990s through the sublime as an aesthetic condition, a political apparatus, and a psychoanalytic framework. My intervention challenges the universality and apolitical façade of imaginations of precarity, apocalypse, and civilization.

As a mediatized spectator sport, American tackle football has never been more popular. At the same time, football’s undeniable connection with traumatic brain injuries and degenerative brain disease has spurred a decline in youth participation and an existential predicament. Fewer kids are playing the sport, but will Americans ever stop consuming football? If not, why not? Who remains to fulfill America’s insatiable desire for football and what does this reveal about the economic and racial structures of the National Football League (NFL)—the most profitable sports league in the world? This dissertation details how we reached this point (of peak football, and of a mounting public health crisis), and considers what America’s fascination with football has wrought. Football’s embodiment of American economic, social, and political values has helped to naturalize the game as American myth. Reflecting on the visual, aural, and rhetorical sources of football’s power, I first historicize the creation of America’s football mythology, paying close attention to the role moving images and narrational devices have played in the sport’s popularization; from its appearance in early cinema, newsreels, and narrative features to the promotional documentaries of NFL Films. Using an interdisciplinary framework of textual analysis, contextual cultural history, visual culture studies, critical theory, and Black feminist thought, I closely analyze a cross-section of media objects, including narrative and documentary films and television programs as well as experimental media works, to explicate the dominant ideologies embedded in American football. But my reading is also attentive to signs of resistant and oppositional articulations, ruptures, and pleasures. I locate these counterhegemonic articulations and counternarratives in unconventional nonfiction and avant-garde films, but in mainstream dramatic offerings as well. This research asserts that in American sports media, the labor and performance of football is regularly transfigured as narrative, with unscripted reality (the playing of a game) and dramatized spectacle fused into one, which in turn creates a distancing effect. This disavowal, of football’s arduous physicality, is one of the constitutive elements underpinning football’s success as a media sport. This century’s data-driven turn in sports management and analysis has added a further layer of abstraction and distance, as athletes’ bodies become increasingly perceived as data points and profiles to be atomized, parsed, and controlled. I maintain the consequences of this disembodiment are not yet fully understood or appreciated. In counterpoint to the game’s ideologies of conquest, racial capitalism, hegemonic masculinity, coercive entitlement, and white supremacy, I also contemplate football through a lens of tenderness, intimacy, and care, bringing forward more utopian potentials.

This dissertation rigorously examines the transformative potential of Social Impact Entertainment (SIE) within the Brazilian audiovisual sector, focusing on the work of Maria Farinha Filmes as a pivotal case study. It interrogates the integration and efficacy of social impact messages across cinematic productions and evaluates the nuanced receptions by what is termed the 'contemporary spectator.' These individuals are characterized not merely as passive consumers but as active social participants, whose interactions with media are deeply informed by their diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, personal experiences, and the surrounding social realities. A core aspect of this investigation is the profound influence of technological advancements on SIE, particularly how these innovations have reshaped both the production mechanisms and distribution strategies of content. The analysis delves into the ramifications of such shifts for audience engagement and content accessibility. By employing a multidisciplinary approach that combines content analysis, theoretical exploration, and empirical data, the study maps the thematic trajectories and social resonances embedded in the body of work of Maria Farinha Filmes. Notable productions such as The Beginning of Life (2016) and Aruanas (2019) are scrutinized for their thematic depth, narrative strategies, and impact effectiveness. The dissertation advances the discourse on SIE by articulating its capacity to act as a catalyzing agent for social awareness and change, both within national borders and on the global stage. It posits SIE not only as a reflection of societal issues but as a proactive participant in societal transformation. This is achieved through a structured examination of the interplay between filmmaker intent, narrative execution, and audience interpretation, supported by a comprehensive review of secondary literature and primary case studies. Ultimately, this study aims to elevate the academic understanding of SIE, proposing a nuanced framework for assessing its impact on contemporary social issues through the lens of Brazilian cinema, thereby positioning SIE as a critical tool in the arsenal of social innovation and public pedagogy.

The kiss has played a large role in filmic narrative in American Cinema since the medium’s beginning. Yet, mainstream cinematic representation of romance between African Americans has been limited. Just prior to cinema’s Classical age, Hollywood self-regulators (i.e. the Studio Relations Committee) determined that white actors were not likely to want to see black actors kissing. There was no prohibition on kissing, Black or otherwise. However, there was a restriction on displays of black-white “sex relations” (i.e. miscegenation), instituted by the president of the Motion Pictures Directors and Distributors of America, Will Hays, and within his 1926 list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls.” Notwithstanding, major Hollywood studios limited the “romantic” depictions of Black characters in Classical Hollywood to instances of infidelity, licentiousness, and even violence in films made between 1929 and 1941—and even these depictions were few and far in between. While Black sexuality was focused on far less often than white sexuality, Black sexuality was predominantly depicted as deviant behavior harmful to American society. Still, Black sexuality was used to help define, contrast, identify, and aid not only concerns about white sexuality’s function in the American society, but was systemically utilized to help solve societal concerns about class, gender, and race, all the while working to uphold depictions of whiteness as a standard to strive toward in terms of behavior and values.

The topic of migrants from Mexico to the United States has been in the foreground of culture and politics for the past twenty or so years, and public opinion regarding migration has affected policy decisions. This public opinion has largely been influenced by news media as well as popular films, series, and literature. However, not all migrants are represented equally or in equal situations. My dissertation analyzes the representation of Mexican migrant women’s trauma in Mexican and Chicanx cultural production in the 20th and 21st centuries. This dissertation looks at Mexican and Chicanx film, literature, and oral history to understand the ways in which the figure of the migrant woman is inserted into narratives of suffering and trauma Using such thinkers as Gloria Anzaldúa, Amanda Ellis, and Cathy Caruth, I link gender, trauma, and border identity to understand the differences between the migrant women characters represented in cultural production and the real-life women whose lives are affected by these portrayals.Most of the cultural production related to migrant women shows that this group is considered threatening by established institutions in both the U.S. and Mexico because of a pervasive xenophobia, many times codified into law, in both countries. This dissertation builds on theorization around the representation of trauma in cultural production. While Amanda Ellis has written about trauma in Chicanx literature, there has been no in-depth study about the representation of female migrant trauma across the U.S. Mexico border.

Due to the awareness of how visual technologies have historically functioned as hostile and violent forces that render Blackness as aberration, this dissertation pays special focus to the creative practices of Black women and queer image-makers who are invested in decolonizing the ways in which we see. Through a careful examination of films and photography that spans from South Africa, and across the African diaspora, this dissertation is able to explore the edgeless connections between slavery and colonialism as ongoing histories that continue to rupture contemporary Black visual cultures. By orientating towards Black feminisms and queer theories to examine film and photography, this project inaugurates an interdisciplinary avenue that is able to reveal how the field of vision has continued to make marginal assessments on the compounding intersections between race, gender and sexuality. To further decolonize the process of knowledge production, this project recognizes the creative work of image-making, as an aesthetic practice that theorizes in its doing. Thus, I further draw from my positionality as a media practitioner and the experiential knowledge I have garnered in order to offer a methodological intervention that centers Black feminist creative praxis.As a prevailing enquiry in each chapter of this project, I interrogate how Black women and queer image-makers subvert the use of the camera as an institutional apparatus and technology of capture. In an anti-Black visual culture that is often calibrated by abject representations of Black women and queer identities, I believe that there is something bold and subversive about positioning Black women’s visual productions as constituting counter-hegemonic historiographies and archival repositories. Thus, I consider that due to the institutional neglect and erasure of Black women in hegemonic visual history, a decolonial approach to scholarship ought to contend with questions of materiality to contemplate the role played by Black film and queer photography in producing narratives that are able to collapse colonial framings of histography and archive. Therefore, I postulate that the films and photography examined in this dissertation, serve as revolutionary and decolonial visual archives of an otherwise due to the ways in which the hegemonic visual histories are challenged and subsequently refused.

“Nostalgia film,” also referred to as “colonial nostalgia film” and “heritage film,” is a genre that offers audiences a romanticized representation of the French past, including (problematically) its legacy of colonialism. My dissertation, oriented around four case studies – of Régis Wargnier’s Indochine, Pierre Schoendoerffer’s Điện Biên Phủ, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s L’Amant, and Trần Anh Hùng’s L’Odeur de la papaye verte – interrogates the relationship between sound, music, and “nostalgia” in this specific body of early 1990s French films set in colonial-era Vietnam. It offers a sustained critique of the relationship between the mise-en-bande and the narrative and representational frameworks of these films. It also considers the impact of this relationship in subsequent films, such as Trần’s Cyclo (1995) and Việt Linh’s Mê Thảo, thời vang bóng (2002).

This dissertation is a production study of disability representation in televisual entertainment from 2015-2024 at Netflix. The current digital ecosystem provides a forum for niche topics due to enhanced competition between platforms, more sophisticated utilization of algorithms to precisely target selected audiences, and increased opportunities for creators that are given more authorial control over previously underrepresented storylines. While there is much at stake for those who consume these representations, this project focuses on the characters. This seemingly disparate group of collaborators – including “entities” like the disability advocacy groups, university research organizations, casting agents, disabled creatives, as well as corporate “institutions” like Netflix, Nielsen, and IMDB– play off each other in complex, consequential ways that can only be understood by acknowledging and delineating their mutually constitutive roles in producing the characters that make it to the screen. This project combines production studies and disability media studies frameworks to delineate how these entities and institutions understand themselves and their industrial and social functions. This project tracks emerging practices in disability representation in entertainment media including diversity pipeline programs, cultures of disclosure, authentic casting practices, and utilizing diversity as a branding strategy, while also tracing the axiomatic notions of normality, neutrality, and naturalness.

This dissertation investigates the prominence of incest tropes in Australian and U.S. Rural Gothic literature and film of the late nineteenth through early twenty-first century. Through a comparative study of texts from and about Tasmania and Appalachia, regions of low-economic status historically imagined to be on the fringe of their respective nations, I trace how stereotypes about inbreeding among the white rural poor reflect an anxiety over state biopower that originated during the founding of these settler colonies. I argue that the fear of “failed” yeoman farmers, whose non-normative sexuality, gender, racial identity, and refusal of labor are understood to degrade the settlement from within, led to the creation of an “inbred” hillbilly figure that can be found throughout the media of settler colonial states. I coin the term “inbred grotesque” to refer to the aesthetic pattern associated with this stock character, whose prominent physical differences, deformities, and disabilities are designed to reflect their internal opposition to settler values. I examine how the inbred grotesque transformed incest into a form of cultural shorthand for alternative and queer kinship patterns that challenge the foundational unit of settler states—the patriarchal nuclear family. Throughout the dissertation, I outline how the hillbilly and inbred grotesque shaped and were shaped by eugenic theory, industrialization, and nationalist movements. In the first and second chapters, I focus on the literary and historical origins of incest stereotypes in Appalachia and Tasmania, taking as my primary case studies John Fox Jr.’s Virginian “local color” novel The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908) and Marcus Clarke’s Van Diemonian convict narrative For the Term of His Natural Life (1874). In my third chapter, I perform a comparative reading of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Outer Dark (1968) and Louis Nowra’s play The Golden Age (1985), examining how these American and Australian writers harnessed the inbred grotesque to express their opposition to postmodernist challenges to reproductive futurism. In my fourth chapter, I move to the birth of the “killbilly” horror genre, the dominant form of the inbred grotesque from the 1970s to the present day, and consider how cult films featuring inbred cannibal families such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and House of 1000 Corpses (2003) have both sustained and challenged hillbilly tropes. Finally, in my epilogue, I discuss the fate of the hillbilly today, considering how this figure has played a key role in the rhetoric of the contemporary Australian and American far- and alt-right movements and how the Left might itself learn to embrace the inbred grotesque.