DISSERTATION (IN PROGRESS)
"National Transgressions: Exercising/Exorcising Ideological Alterity in America Entertainment Media".
ABSTRACT: For over one hundred years, U.S. popular culture has reflected America’s ongoing ambivalence towards nomadism and ideological transgression by framing them as both intrinsic and antithetical to rendering an “exceptional” and definable “American” disposition. This study examines popular representations of three nomadic, ideologically transgressive, predominantly white, hypermasculine subcultures (hobos, carnies and Irish Travellers living in the U.S.) in order to compare and contrast how this ambivalence has been mediated during three historic and technological epochs in the nation’s history. Through comparative and critical analysis of the way these subcultures’ worldviews have been rendered and circulated by both cultural producers within these subcultures and those who allied themselves with dominant culture, I argue that a “crisis in representation” concerning mobility and ideological alterity played a significant role in “mass” or widely distributed analog content. I discuss how this “crisis” helped to produce and stabilize a unified American identity during periods of major social, cultural, political and economic upheaval; and map key and distinct advantages and drawbacks that analog and digital media present to cultural producers, in order to interrogate current conventional wisdom that digital production technologies and distribution strategies enable the expanded incorporation and circulation of transgressive content.