Henry Jenkins's Blog, page 6

OSCAR WATCH 2024 — 'Killers of the Flower Moon' (2023)

This is the latest in a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards.

Before the nominations for the 96th Academy Awards were even announced, I made the overly confident prediction that Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese, US 2023) would win Best Picture. As I write this post, the ceremony is approximately a week away, so I have no idea what the actual outcome will be. But my conviction in my initial prediction has diminished substantially in the intervening months. Although I watch the ceremony nearly every year, I do not pay especially close attention to the speculation that precedes it. Nevertheless, my sense is that all of the momentum is currently behind a victory for Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan, US/UK 2023). As I look back in hindsight, then, I recognize that my initial assumptions about Killers of the Flower Moon’s path to awards success almost certainly say more about how the film tries to position itself within the sweep of American film history than it really does about its specific place in this year’s Best Picture race.

These things can be difficult to quantify, but – prior to the release of Killers of the Flower Moon – it often felt to me as though the film was being treated in press coverage like a referendum on the history of Indigenous representation in Hollywood cinema.

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I am wary of overly straightforward causal narratives, but it is difficult in this case not to read some of that early discourse about the film in light of the recent success of Reservation Dogs (FX, US 2021–2023) and Prey (dir. Dan Trachtenberg, US 2022). As the first American television show entirely written and directed by Indigenous North American filmmakers, Reservation Dogs was a landmark for self-representation. But its appeal was probably always destined to be somewhat niche, compounded in no small part by the show’s preference for intentionally low-key, small-town dramedy. Meanwhile, Prey demonstrated that settler filmmakers – with substantial assistance from Indigenous collaborators – could do representation well in the context of an ostensibly “low brow” genre like sci-fi/action. Prey was similarly popular with critics (and it might have even been a box-office hit if it had not been released directly to the Hulu streaming service), but it was never going to win any of the more prestigious Academy Awards. So along comes Killers of the Flower Moon, seemingly accompanied by the following question: Can a filmmaker with Martin Scorsese’s clout return to traditionally the most fraught genre vis-à-vis Indigenous representation (the western), tell a particularly devastating true story in the history of Indigenous-settler relations, and finally get it right? And, even if the film did “get it right,” (which is destined to be a contentious claim no matter the outcome) would the industry at large recognize and celebrate it? Again, I am hesitant about constructing a teleological narrative around the film. But, with relative ease, one can retroactively read Reservation Dogs and Prey as constituting a landing strip for Killers of the Flower Moon’s efforts not to merely feature “good representation” but to construct a long overdue counterbalance to decades upon decades of the opposite.

This task was – at least, in part – self-assigned when one accounts for the various public comments made by Scorsese and his collaborators about their ambitions for the film. And, given the stakes of that task, it is perhaps not all that surprising that the reaction to Killers of the Flower Moon from those invested in the issue of Indigenous representation has been decidedly mixed. Devery Jacobs (Mohawk), incidentally one of the stars of Reservation Dogs, lambasted the film, describing the Osage characters as “painfully underwritten.” On X (formerly Twitter), she wrote, “I believe that by showing more murdered Native women on screen, it normalizes the violence committed against us and further dehumanizes our people.” By comparison, Jacob Floyd (Muscogee), an assistant professor of cinema studies at NYU, offered a more positive interpretation in an article written for Film Comment. He contends that Killers of the Flower Moon’s significance lies not merely in its text but also in its production practices, which were undeniably collaborative with the Osage Nation. Considering the polarity of these responses, it feels almost fitting that Christopher Cote (Osage), one of the language consultants who worked on the film, expressed profound ambivalence about the final result. At the Los Angeles premiere, he praised the representation of Osage culture but concluded, “[T]his film isn’t made for an Osage audience, it was made for everybody, not Osage.”

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It is possible that the ambivalent response from Indigenous audiences stalled Killers of the Flower Moon’s award season momentum, although I rather doubt it. It seems just as likely that the film’s subject matter – however imperfectly it may have been handled – sufficiently discomforted a plurality of settler voters at major awards shows to the extent that they felt compelled to look elsewhere for a “best-of-the-year” favorite. And, of course, it is possible that my initial prediction will turn out to have been right all along; Killers of the Flower Moon will win Best Picture, and, in the process, the industry will get to pat itself on the back for how far it has ostensibly come. Either way, the impending ceremony feels like an auspicious occasion to revisit precisely the way in which Killers of the Flower Moon actually structures its own approach to representation. Because, quite frankly, that might be the most interesting aspect of the film.

Especially writing as a settler, it would be incredibly presumptuous of me to weigh in on whether or not the representation is “good” or “bad.” For one thing, the film does not allow for easy answers on that front. I appreciate Floyd’s argument that Lily Gladstone’s (Piegan Blackfeet, Nez Perce) performance as Mollie Burkhart derives much of its tremendous power from her lack of dialogue; “Gladstone silently conveys indignation, disappointment, and resolve, acting as the story’s moral conscience”.

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But I equally appreciate Jacobs’ assessment that the rest of the Osage characters are treated as little more than extras – props in the narrative machinations of the White protagonists. For another thing, “representation” can be a decidedly limiting framework when thinking about these issues. Good representation is important, to be sure. One need only look at the way that Hollywood has shaped the settler imaginary regarding Indigenous peoples to see that these things do have a tangible impact. But how they have an impact – how representation arises, is taken up, circulates, influences, is subverted/contested, etc. – is thorny. As Floyd’s article reminds us, what is on-screen is never truly separable from the accompanying circumstances of the production. The motivations of the studios, Scorsese, his co-writer Eric Roth, journalist David Grann (author of the source material), Gladstone, actors with executive producer credits like Leonardo DiCaprio, the Osage Nation consultants, and others are all relevant here and also not necessarily in perfect alignment. Likewise, how different audiences respond is not neatly calculable. The range of reactions from Devery to Floyd to Cote – amongst many others – is proof of that. What I find fascinating about Killers of the Flower Moon, though, is not merely that the question of representation is central to the film but that the film itself is oddly reflexive when it comes to that question.

This quality is most evident in the penultimate scene wherein Scorsese appears for a cameo to clarify why he felt compelled to tell the story of the 1918–1931 Osage murders. As he explains, the story has functionally been omitted from the historical record. However, Scorsese’s cameo is diegetically situated as part of an old-timey radio drama that recounts the real-life aftermath of the film’s events in a derisive and frequently racist fashion. One of the actors, for instance, adopts the exaggerated and stereotypical “Indian voice” made famous by Hollywood westerns when voicing the Indigenous characters. While undoubtedly an intriguing narrative choice in isolation, this penultimate scene really exists as a culmination of Killers of the Flower Moon’s persistent meditation on how knowledge about Indigenous peoples has historically been produced and circulated in settler society. For instance, the film’s protagonist, Ernest Burkhart, learns about Osage culture from an anthropological book clearly authored by White settlers. Likewise, the Osage characters are frequently asked to pose for photographs, recalling Edward S. Curtis’s notorious work of salvage ethnography, The North American Indian (1907–1930) photographic compendium. During the scene where the Osage delegation visits Washington D.C., Scorsese even voices the photographer who instructs the characters to look at the camera as they pose. In short, Killers of the Flower Moon is nothing if not aware of the long history of settler mediations of Indigeneity – from radio to books to cinema to photography – that have constructed the seemingly unshakeable stereotypes and conventions with which this film must now grapple.

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But, amidst all this reflexivity, does the film actually manage to escape the gravitational pull of that history? Even as he attempts to honestly address his own investment in this story as a settler filmmaker, Scorsese situates himself in the context of a radio show that propagates an unmistakable settler callousness to Indigenous lives and lifeways. (Nearly identical dynamics are at play in Scorsese’s decision to voice the photographer in Washington D.C., although this detail is far less overt than the radio show cameo.) In his article, Floyd notes, “Scorsese is perhaps acknowledging his own position as a non-Native outsider presenting this account.” Undoubtedly this is true, but it also necessitates the follow-up question: What comes next? Having acknowledged Scorsese’s positionality and, in turn, his limits when it comes to telling a story about Indigenous trauma, what – if anything – does Killers of the Flower Moon choose to do with that acknowledgement?

The film’s answer comes in the form of the final scene, which consists of a single overhead shot depicting the Osage I’n Lon-Schka ceremonial dance. The fairly obvious intent of this epilogue is to remind the spectator that Osage culture has not merely survived; even in the face of ongoing settler colonial violence, it thrives. (Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Cote argued the film was not made for an Osage audience; one imagines that they do not need Scorsese to remind them that their culture still exists.) But just as important to this scene is its formal construction. For over a minute, Scorsese’s camera gradually pulls back from a drum to eventually show the entire dance from a distanced god’s eye view. The shot recalls the very first cinematic representations of Indigenous peoples in film history. In 1894, William K. L. Dickson and William Heise made a series of short films in Thomas Edison’s Black Maria studio featuring a group of Indigenous actors who were all members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. The two most famous remnants from this endeavor – Buffalo Dance (dir. William K. L. Dickson, US 1894) and Sioux Ghost Dance (dir. William K. L. Dickson, US 1894) – film the actors at a distance as they perform ostensibly “traditional” ceremonial dances. (As Alison Griffiths (2001) notes, “[T]he Ghost Dance depicted in the Edison film was not the solemn circle dance associated with the spiritual movement of that name, but a different circle dance” (103), suggesting a degree of subversive agency on the part of the Indigenous performers.) However different the underlying intent from the filmmakers may have been, it is striking how closely Scorsese’s final shot resembles Dickson’s gaze – a gaze that quite literally initiated the entire intervening history of Indigenous on-screen representation in American film history.

To my mind, this throws into sharp relief the discourse that frames Killers of the Flower Moon as a referendum on the entire history of that mode of representation. Indeed, it suggests to me that whether or not Killers of the Flower Moon succeeds at the Academy Awards (which is to say, whether or not Hollywood chooses to implicitly congratulate itself for finally “getting it right”) may be beside the point. It would certainly be nice if Hollywood studios and filmmakers took the right lessons to heart here regarding the importance of working collaboratively with Indigenous communities, especially when the director is not Indigenous. Likewise, I think that Lily Gladstone losing a rightfully deserved Best Actress award would be a travesty. But, in terms of the larger politics of representation, what would be the actual impact of a symbolic victory for Killers of the Flower Moon if it wins Best Picture? Through its reflexive examination of the intertwined vectors of mediation and settler knowledge production, the film repeatedly grapples with the ethics of its own representation. Yet, when it is all said and done, it arrives at a film grammar established in 1894. What an awfully long way to come – 129 years of film history and three-and-a-half hours of runtime – to arrive right back at the beginning.

 

Note: I would like to thank Aandaxjoon Sabena Allen for providing valuable feedback. And I would like to thank J.D. Connor for initially drawing my attention to the parallels between Killers of the Flower Moon and the early Edison films.

Biography

Sebastian Wurzrainer is a settler scholar and a second year PhD student in cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California. He received his bachelor’s degree in film and media studies from Dartmouth College and his master’s degree in cinema and media studies from the University of Southern California. His research considers how Indigenous filmmakers, actors, and spectators enact sovereignty, survivance, and relationality in and around Hollywood films, particularly works of speculative fiction, thereby illustrating alterities to the settler colonial project. He has published reviews and articles in the Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and Spectator.

OSCAR WATCH 2024 — World on Fire: Reflections on 'Oppenheimer' (2023) and Contemporary Hollywood

This is the first of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards.

If ever there was a film of the moment, Oppenheimer must be it, right now. The film ends ominously with the image of the globe’s surface being consumed by (nuclear) fire (Figure 1), doing so at a time when the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set its Doomsday Clock, both in January 2023 and in January 2024, at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to the end of our world it has ever come since the clock’s inception in 1947. With two nuclear powers (Russia and Israel) currently involved in large-scale wars and all the others (the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea) involved in border disputes, limited military interventions and/or nuclear posturing, all of which could quite conceivably escalate at any moment, the ending of Oppenheimer is uniquely resonant. Many viewers, journalists and other commentators have reflected on these resonances, as have I.

figure 1: world on fire in oppenheimer (2023)

But there are other things to consider as well. A critics and audience favourite (judging by its ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic and its ranking in the IMDb users chart, as well as the numerous awards it has already won), Oppenheimer has been nominated for 13 Oscars; only three movies have ever received more. Members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences love biopics and, more generally, films more or less closely (or loosely) based on real events. Best Picture Oscar winners of this kind range historically all the way from Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Life of Emile Zola (1937) to Spotlight (2015), Moonlight (2016), Green Book (2018) and Nomadland (2020). The academy also loves Christopher Nolan and his movies which have received dozens of nominations since 2002, including for Best Director, Screenplay and Picture; but despite eleven Oscars awarded for Nolan’s movies, so far there has been none in these last three categories. As a Nolan-written-and-directed biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the atomic bomb”, which meticulously reconstructs the events leading up to the first nuclear explosions at the Alamogordo Bombing Range and in Hiroshima as well as important post-war developments, Oppenheimer would seem to be tailor-made for this year’s awards ceremony.

And there is yet more to say about the timeliness of this film. A surprise hit at the box office (at number three in the global chart for 2023 with revenues of almost $1 billion, the second highest figure ever for an R-rated movie), Oppenheimer breaks with the dominance of franchise movies as well as free-standing fantasy/Science Fiction/superhero/action and animation movies at the top of the annual global box office charts. Together with the underperformance of some of the usual suspects for global box office glory and the surprisingly successful transfer of the Barbie and Super Mario Bros. phenomena to the big screen (making up numbers one and two in the chart for 2023), some commentators have taken the financial success of Oppenheimer to indicate a possible sea change in cinemagoing habits and preferences – although it is not at all clear in which direction this may go: newmovie franchises and/or a return to biopics and historical epics (the latter arguably the most successful genre at the box office until the 1960s with a major revival in its box office fortunes in the 1990s).

Before one can speculate about whether Oppenheimer might initiate certain trends, one needs to get a better understanding of what kind of film it actually is, and to do so means, among other things, acknowledging that it explores one of the key themes of global blockbusters since 1977, namely large, even global, communities under threat, with high levels of spectacular death and destruction being put on display. From the Death Star’s destruction of Alderaan to Thanos’s erasure of half of all life in the universe (with the added threat to perhaps wipe out all life so as to enable a new beginning), Hollywood has entertained the world most successfully for over four and a half decades with stories about wide-ranging devastation.

And Oppenheimer arguably does this as well, even going as far as using the kind of mythological framework that also underpins other hit movies from Star Wars and Superman (1978) via the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies all the way to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After all Oppenheimer’s opening caption reads: “Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this, he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.” As already mentioned, the film’s final image is of the Earth on fire; fire stolen from the gods (in Greek myth or in 20th century science and engineering) goes together with infernal punishment – in Oppenheimer’s case not primarily for the bringers of fire but for all of humanity.

The film also makes interesting (and controversial) use of Oppenheimer’s famous quotation from the Baghavad Gita: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” In the final scene, Oppenheimer reminds Albert Einstein of the scientists’ fear that the explosion of the atomic bomb “might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world”, and then concludes: “I believe we did.” The following image of the burning planet suggests that Oppenheimer (and his team) will indeed one day have to be regarded as destroyer(s) of a world.

It should also be noted that, like so many other blockbusters, Oppenheimer makes extensive use of otherworldly special effects imagery, which here is mainly to do with what appear to be the subatomic and cosmological realms. This imagery could be – just like the final image of the globe on fire – related to Oppenheimer’s imagination, but it feels, to me, quite separate, not anchored in anyone’s subjectivity but more like yet another framing device: the story and the story world are not only placed in a mythological frame (Prometheus, Baghavad Gita) but also on a scale in between the unimaginably small and the unimaginably large, the world of human experience revealed as only a very thin slice of physical reality.

At the same time, the film – quite unusually for a Hollywood blockbuster and even more so for one of the biggest ever IMAX releases – is for long stretches basically made up of talking heads (not necessarily in close-up, though). There is lot of dialogue and also some silent contemplation, but not much action; or perhaps one could say that the dialogue is the action. Now one might expect that this being a biopic, the dialogue reveals a lot about Oppenheimer, and in a sense it does: one gets a strong sense of his arrogance and his tendency to offend and alienate certain people, but also his ability to convince people, to win them over, to mobilise and guide them. It is strongly suggested that much of the time he merely plays a part, in that he carefully calculates what he says and how he generally presents himself to others with a view of manipulating them.

There are very few scenes revealing his “true” self, as it were, his genuine beliefs and feelings (his breakdown after he receives the news of Jean Tatlock’s death being one such scene). Importantly, the closest we may come to understanding him perhaps are comments made by his wife and by his nemesis, Lewis Strauss – and they do not paint a flattering portrait: Oppenheimer is said to be a narcissist who revels in having led the atomic bomb project and who, instead of feeling genuine regret or guilt, just wants to shift the public’s perception of him, if necessary by playing the role of a martyr in the security hearings. This gives an extra charge to his final (flashback) dialogue with Albert Einstein. What exactly are we to make of his facial expression and tone of voice when he says “I believe we did” (start a chain reaction that will destroy the entire world)? Does he feel guilt and regret, or perhaps a perverse sense of pride?

I have to admit that I have only seen the film twice, and I may well see it very differently when I will finally go through it scene by scene, shot by shot, conceivably even frame by frame. But I think the film will continue to fascinate and deeply engage me and many other viewers for many years to come. Unless, of course, – and this is a genuinely frightening but, unfortunately, not really that far-fetched thought – the film’s final image of the burning Earth becomes our reality, and we (or rather: those of us who survive) will have more important things to do than analysing and appreciating movies.

Biography

Peter Krämer is a Senior Research Fellow in Cinema & TV in the Leicester Media School at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK). He also is a Senior Fellow in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK) and a regular guest lecturer at several other universities in the UK, Germany and the Czech Republic. He is the author or editor of twelve academic books, including American Graffiti: George Lucas, the New Hollywood and the Baby Boom Generation (Routledge, 2023), and has published over ninety essays in academic journals and edited collections.

Immersive Ways of Live Storytelling Through Challenging Transmedia Universes: Rodrigo Terra Interviewed by Renata Frade and Bruno Valente Pimentel

Rodrigo Terra is an old-school transmedia evangelist who still maintains the systemic logic of developing storytelling projects with advanced immersion technologies for interactive content. His career is a great model of a hybrid researcher, with parallel academic and professional trajectories over more than 15 years of work in Brazil and abroad, especially related to virtual reality. Co-founder and Chief Technology Evangelist of ARVORE Immersive Experiences, Rodrigo Terra has won several international awards, including the first Primetime Emmy®️ in Brazil. He was awarded a Graduate in Administration degree from Fundação Getúlio Vargas (Brazil), trained as a radio broadcaster, and serves as a professor of Post-Graduation at ESPM-SP (Brazil). His mission today is to bring extended realities (XR) to the world and to raise Brazilian creative talents in XR globally. Today he is also a member of the EraTransmidia Association, Executive Director of the XRBR Association, and an active member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (USA).

In my conversation with Terra and mobile apps developer and VFX editor Bruno Valente Pimentel, we discussed experiences developing transmedia and storytelling strategies as well as how those strategies can be applied to engaging audiences in entertainment, education, audiovisual media, and business.

Q - You have been working with virtual reality for almost 10 years in entertainment and education projects, in addition to being a transmedia researcher and founder of the Brazilian organization Era Transmídia, which has existed for around 15 years. Could you talk about why you became interested in this area of study and business? Throughout this period, what advances and areas for improvement do you see in terms of engagement and the evolution of media for transmedia?

A - My transmedia journey began in 2006 while studying at the New York Film Academy, where my focus was on flat screen content. I was always fascinated by how franchises like Star Wars, The Matrix, and The Lord of the Rings expanded their storyworlds across various media, showcasing different levels of integration and convergence. This curiosity intensified when I came across Henry Jenkins’ book Convergence Culture at a Barnes & Noble store. It was my first encounter with the term "Transmedia" and gave a name to my growing interest. At that time, there were no organizations or study groups on this topic in Brazil, leaving me to explore this field on my own. In 2011, I discovered the first study group on Transmedia at ESPM University in São Paulo. This discovery marked a turning point. EraTransmidia had just been established as an organization and, by 2014, evolved into an Association. I had the honor of serving as its President from 2016 to 2018. From the outset, I viewed transmedia as the future of content creation, extending beyond mere entertainment. Influential works by Professor Mark J.P. Wolf were pivotal in shaping my understanding of content as a journey through sub-creation. This approach sees storyworlds and galaxies of stories as systems akin to fractals, with both direct and indirect connections among the core pillars of narrative, playfulness, and interactivity. As of 2023, I observe that transmedia has finally become an integral part of the entertainment industry. The video game industry, in particular, now recognizes the value of transmedia, utilizing content creation strategies to enhance user engagement and expand intellectual properties (IPs) for that medium.

Several recent works demonstrate the effective use of transmedia:

- Sony Pictures and Sony PlayStation have adopted a new strategy for expanding their IP, highlighted by the creation of PlayStation Studios and Microsoft’s new IP conglomerate. A prime example is the Last of Us HBO series, which successfully extends the game's IP to reach a new audience while preserving the original game's fan base. This is part of a broader trend, with Sony Pictures also investing in adapting TV and movie series into innovative gaming and media formats, including XR. Conversely, Xbox is expanding beyond its long-standing Halo franchise, which has seen various unsuccessful attempts to engage new audiences over the past decade. The upcoming Fallout series on Amazon Prime, involving an open-world game, is another project to watch. It’s noteworthy that Todd Howard from Bethesda and Phil Spencer from Xbox are ensuring its canonical integration, a lesson learned from past transmedia efforts. Additionally, the growing popularity of board games and role-playing games that utilize these IPs adds another dimension to these storyworlds.

- The Line, a VR immersive narrative produced by ARVORE and directed by our partner Ricardo Laganaro in 2019/2020, is an Emmy Award-winning example of blending narrative with art forms to create something new. This project highlights how virtual reality can be used to weave compelling stories in an interactive and immersive environment and to evolve narratives by including the body as a meaningful medium.

- The creation of VR Chat worlds represents an emerging form of art and social interaction, originating from community-driven content. The works of creators like Fin Interactive showcase the potential of these platforms for community and user-generated content (UGC) to craft unique experiences. In these non-geographical spaces, users can engage with diverse avatars, including pop culture appropriations from Batman to anime characters, and participate in activities like watching new dramas through streaming services within VR Chat. This represents the cutting-edge of transmedia, where users can express themselves and interact in a virtual space that blends imagination with elements of popular culture.

Q - Your mission is to bring extended realities to the world and present creative Brazilian talents in XR internationally. How have you carried out this work and which are the most paradigmatic in terms of transmedia and storytelling actions?

A - I have always been an “evangelist” for ecosystems I’ve been connected to.

The transmedial approach, which I like to define as “the native and natural capability of an IP to expand throughout media and its degree of adaptability by trans-creation,” reaches one of its best values in the XR medium. When we add spatiality to the user’s perception of content, it unlocks another layer of the power of presence.

Q - You are a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (USA), President of ABRAGAMES, Executive Director of the XRBR Association, and winner of several awards, including the first Primetime Emmy®️ in Brazil. Could you talk about the journey you took to reach these achievements? What were the projects, training, mistakes and successes that made you achieve these things? How do you believe you are seen as a Brazilian, especially in the USA, in international projects and what are they currently?

A - I have always been committed to building and participating in communities I believe in. I am also an advocate for associative movements, believing in the power of people and companies coming together to seek a common betterment. I have always been an entrepreneur as well.

Q - You consider yourself a Legomaniac. How do you believe Lego can help in teaching and producing transmedia and civic imagination content and strategies? Do you have any experience in this regard?

A - LEGO is a therapy and an art form for me.

They have the incredible premise of “thinking with hands,” which helps connect our most profound learning capabilities with context understanding and complex conceptualization, everything using fun as a tool.

Through build-and-play, you need to imagine or follow initial instructions in order to start, which is essential to develop creation skills and materialize concepts. Concepts became tangible and you have a more personal and clear view of a difficult problem, for example.

LEGO Education Serious Play deserves mention because the company understood the power of fun and creation and developed a tool for stimulating problem-solving approaches by using Imagination to “get you out of the box.” This is a very native transmedia strategy.

Q - How do you see a VR/AR platform nowadays as a narrative experience tool? What are the best new platforms or technologies to develop a new immersive transmedia platform?

A - Today's immersive technology platforms empower creators and users to tell their own stories as personal journeys. This is the layer of “storyliving,” which goes beyond storytelling. A well-crafted immersive narrative experience puts you viscerally into fictional situations, as our brain understands that we are present in that space-time with more stimuli than just imagination. The memory created in that moment is more akin to a memory of a trip to a place where you were enchanted by a sunset on a rainy evening or a childhood moment playing with your favorite LEGO, rather than chronologically remembering a story you passively watched in a dark room or at home. There is no value judgment here, but immersive narratives are highly connected to the way we live moments, not just how we transmit our stories. Thus, I see that the best immersive transmedia platforms in the future will be those where you choose your degree of immersion, personalization, and socialization.

Q - How do you feel about Apple entering into the VR headset market with Vision Pro as an immersive tool? What kind of new experience you can imagine on it that you cannot have in hardware like the Meta Quest Pro?

A - Apple's proposal is indeed to have a spatial computer with enough processing power to elevate the paradigm of productivity and media consumption. We will still discover what we can do with this equipment, but an interesting thing, for example, is the potential metaphors we can create using the reality dial, where you control the degree of immersion you want to have at the moment. It's very playful and highly functional.

Q - You got a degree in radio and have a long history as a broadcaster developing projects in different platforms. Audiovisual is now becoming a convergence zone for games, AR/VR and XR projects. How do you perceive the power of storytelling and audiovisual foundations to involve the audience in those platforms?

A - I have always believed that stories should be expanded beyond screens. Great creators like Disney or Maurício de Souza have shown us this. Platforms that encompass media convergence as their semantic space need the foundations of the audiovisual to build new ways of living and telling stories. Just because we are in a new moment where interactivity opens paths for deeper connections with content, it doesn't mean the basics of story transmission no longer apply. Structures that the arts of theater, music, cinema, and television have taught us so far to inform, enchant, and provoke continue on. They are our common ground now.

Q - As a transmedia producer/researcher how do you perceive the evolution of immersive platforms, and which do you think is the best start for an immersive project nowadays ?

A - Today, to start a project, you begin with the motivation of what experience you want to offer someone. Beyond a story, the message you want to convey will be given viscerally in an immersive experience. Whether it will be a game or immersive narrative is a subsequent creation exercise, in my view. We always start with sensations, and from them, the product is born.

Q - What motivates the recent record in Brazilian game exports? Can you tell us about the Brazil Games initiative and how storytelling is applied in this campaign?

A - Brazil has improved its game production quality in all aspects – art, game design, sound design, and, mainly, universalism, over the last 10 years. The work of the Brazil Games export program (a partnership between ABRAGAMES and ApexBrasil) has been and continues to be to introduce these games, professionals, and companies to the world, so the international market can know, negotiate, buy, and distribute our content. Our narrative is very much focused on the journey of the studios, developers, and their games. We are still in a moment of discovering the capabilities of the Brazilian market in producing games that meet the desires of the modern consumer, but we are proving that the country is a creative powerhouse capable of being one of the largest game producers in the world in a few years.

Q - Metaverse is seen as an evolution of game world creation in which technology tools are used to live in other realities, other than just this physical one as we know it. There are many stories in Metaverse and different immersive experiences on it depending on the brand/technology you are using.  How do you perceive it, and do you think in the future a possible convergence to create one universe/metaverse where many brand’s projects interact would be possible?

A - I believe the Metaverse is the natural evolution of convergent media. Understanding that we will increasingly enter the era of spatial computing, the media and content we consume and the forms of interaction with them and social interactions will also converge. Adding an important element in this equation: the physical world interacting in real-time with simulations, seeking to bring a new type of context perception called “mixed reality.” What we have to be careful of at this moment is to ensure that we have a solid construction of platforms that will converge in the future to be the Metaverse: integrated, open, and focused on protecting the privacy and security/integrity of those who will have this medium as part of our lives, just as we have smartphones today.

Q - Pixel Ripped is a great success for game sagas developed in Brazil! Would you tell us how the idea of the first game happened and what we can expect for the next games?

A - Pixel Ripped was born from the brilliant mind of our partner Ana Ribeiro and her motivation to tell, in the form of a game, about her child and teenage memories and daydreams about her own journey with video games. Pixel Rippedis a great tribute to the history of games, and more than that, it is a tribute to the memories lived by gamers of all ages. We can expect more games from the franchise addressing important and historic decades of video games, always with the franchise's signature of bringing the craziness of our imagination in when we are playing!

I have always been engaged in building and participating in the communities I believe in. I am also an advocate for associations, believing in the power of people and companies coming together to seek a common betterment. I have always been an entrepreneur as well. ARVORE Immersive Experiences is my second company; before that, I had a small production company focused on entertainment and events/corporate videos.

In 2017, already familiar with many VR and AR trailblazers, when we founded ARVORE, I felt the need, along with other innovators, to create a space for us to exchange experiences broadly. We joined forces in São Paulo with a group working on VR in Rio de Janeiro and started what became the XRBR Association (Extended Reality Brazilian Hub). From then on, our efforts to engage entrepreneurs from all over Brazil culminated in us becoming the largest association in the sector in Latin America by 2023.

With our work and ARVORE's engagement in the gamedev community, I was invited to lead ABRAGAMES (National Association of Videogame Developers). As of 2023, I have been in management for three years and will continue for two more. As a broadcaster, my dream was to someday come close to an Emmy statuette and perhaps see my name in the credits of a winning production. I never imagined being the executive producer of a Primetime Emmy-winning piece, especially with a prize I am most proud of like Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Programming. This recognition is a huge milestone in my journey, making me a member of ATAS and allowing me to contribute to the US content innovation ecosystem.

Being perceived and recognized as a Brazilian is the greatest achievement I seek. The quality of Brazilian digital products is unquestionable. Our diversity and originality are our trademarks; we communicate with the contemporary global audience. Living in imperfect systems has made us more adept at handling moments of crisis or difficulty. I only see advantages in being Brazilian and being able to contribute this worldview to the US and other territories.

Biographies

Renata Frade is a tech feminism PhD candidate at the Universidade de Aveiro (DigiMedia/DeCa). Cátedra Oscar Sala/ Instituto de Estudos Avançados/Universidade de São Paulo Artificial Intelligence researcher. Journalist (B.A. in Social Communication from PUC-Rio University) and M.A. in Literature from UERJ. Henry Jenkins´ transmedia alumni and attendee at M.I.T., Rede Globo TV and Nave school events/courses. Speaker, activist, community manager, professor and content producer on women in tech, diversity, inclusion and transmedia since 2010 (such as Gartner international symposium, Girls in Tech Brazil, Mídia Ninja, Digitalks, MobileTime etc). Published in 13 academic and fiction books (poetry and short stories). Renata Frade is interested in Literature, Activism, Feminism, Civic Imagination, Technology, Digital Humanities, Ciberculture, HCI

Rodrigo Terra is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Evangelist of ARVORE Immersive Experiences. He has won several international awards, including the first Primetime Emmy in Brazil. He earned a Graduate degree in Administration from Fundação Getúlio Vargas (Brazil), trained as a radio broadcaster, and is a professor of Post-Graduation at ESPM-SP (Brazil).

Bruno Valente Pimentel earned a Bachelor's degree in Social Communication and graduated in Radio and TV (Multimedia) at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ/Brazil), with post-graduate work in Film & Television Business at Fundação Getúlio Vargas (Brazil). Bruno Valente Pimentel has been working with Audiovisual Products for more than 20 years. He was in the team who produced the first live streaming project in Brazil,Gilberto Gil/IBM ’s project “Pela Internet." He has also been a mobile app developer since the beginning of the App Store, creating apps in areas such as market, AR/VR/XR, events, services, brands, educational, training, streaming and entertainment. He also has experience in UI/UX and design and transmedia (M.I.T.).

Serial Killers and the Production of the Uncanny in Digital Participatory Culture

With the evolution of media from the late 19th century onwards the ‘spectacle’ of serial killing moved beyond the realm of one-to-many, lean back and read-only media to be incorporated across our many-to-many, lean forward read-and-write 21st century digital environment. The new media landscape – where we do not live with, but in media - is not merely a state of having more media. Rather, it reflects (as much as it invites) a radically altered experience of being in the world, one that is at once collective and collaborative, inevitably shared and participatory (whether through surrendering our personal information or via our co-creative behaviours online), as the Pop Junctions blog consistently documents.

The marriage of participatory culture and the digital environment extends to all mediated phenomena – from the hybrid warfare of the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, to the various ways people find, maintain and break up their love online, up to and including cocreating and reshaping the modern mythos of the serial killer. Further, the serial killer, we argue, is not just yet another exemplar of contemporary digital culture—it is reappropriated as a unique totem upon which people can project their anxieties about either a real or perceived dehumanisation process experienced in the digital environment. This experience is part of our recurring encounters in the digital environment suffused with reminders of humanity’s potential obsolescence. Examples of such uncanny occurrences include when we are confronted with algorithmic curation, automation and robotics, and the results of generative artificial intelligence (such as intimate chatbots and hallucinating image and video generators).

Our argument is based on a consideration of the specific ways in which users can be seen as active agents in the process of co-creative meaning-making about serial killers online, and how such engagement links to the uncanny as both an expression and production of people’s lives lived in digital media.

In our digital environment, the generation and co-creation of serial killer mythology takes places through overlapping practices. These include:

streaming and binge-bonding over content (such as serial killer documentaries or podcasts on the major platforms);

sharing content (trading serial killer media across multiple channels);

commenting about serial killers (which fuels massive threads on YouTube and is the raison d’etre of Reddit subs like r/serialkillers);

creating amateur content (which is particular to platforms like YouTube and TikTok); as well as

remediating or remixing content into memes and other forms of creative expression online, such as shared through the DeviantArt community.

These practices all function to encourage the appropriation and reappropriation of modern serial killer discourses into a new media language particular to digital culture.

While many theorists expounded on what serial killing says about the social in any given context and the ways in which serial killing and media entangle, we ask: what is the current new media landscape doing to the idea of the serial killer as it is related to media publics? And how is serial killer mythology developing in relation to participatory culture? What we suggest is that people’s lives in media open up ways in which media publics consume, cultivate and perform knowledge about serial killers, enabling them to exercise a reconfigured sense of control over the story of the serial killer as a myth and as a deviant Other, all serving to establish oneself as authentically human confronted with a pervasive and ubiquitous digital environment heavily populated by non-human actors.

 

Serial killers then and now

While the ‘serial killer’ was defined and coined in the 1970s, the phenomenon took hold after the Ripper murders of the 1880s in London’s Whitechapel district. The serial killer evolved through different media iterations—from a celebrity of the newspaper tabloid to the spectacle of the television, to a ‘public property’ of the new media apparatus. The high-profile case of Jack the Ripper was perhaps the first ‘celebrity’ serial killer, as he was celebritised via the medium of the newspaper. Another example of this relationship, this time in turn of the century Australia, is the case of Martha Rendell in Western Australia. Despite major protestations of her innocence and the dubious evidentiary support presented at court in 1909, Martha Rendell was the last woman to be hanged in Perth. The newspaper coverage at the same carefully constructed her, managing the threat of the ‘wicked stepmother’ serial killer.

Charles Manson, we might then say, was to television what Jack the Ripper and Martha Rendell were to newspapers—Manson exploded into public consciousness within the historical moment of the rise of colour television across America, and concomitantly, with the media obsession with celebrity. These figures are therefore not just a product of context, but also a product of media.

How we see them, how we project our fears and anxieties onto them and their horrific acts, how we make sense of the serial killers in our midst – this is very much a function of both mediation (how we learn about serial killers in media) and mediatization (how media come to play a profound role in the way institutions and society as a whole function over time).

Importantly, the newspaper, radio and later on television were the original mass media, symptoms as well as signposts of massive urbanization, the rise of the industrial age, and the emergence of the ‘mass’ society – where the uncannily anonymous nature of everyday life contrasted as well as aligned with the horrific acts and identity (as also one of us, just ostensibly less human) of the serial killer.

With the shift from the static imagery of the newspaper to the spectacularised moving image serial killers were reborn in living colour. As a result, during the post-War period, the function of the serial killer construct evolved and became, more than ever before, a function of media spectacle. The strategies of television formats developed in this era find eery parallels to the techniques of serial killer ritual, as Mark Seltzer writes, “Repetitive, compulsive, serial violence... does not exist without this radical entanglement between forms of eroticized violence and mass technologies of registration, identification, and reduplication, forms of copycatting and simulation” (1998: 265).

Since at least the late 1960s, with the ubiquity of colour television across the domestic sphere, media primed mainstream culture for the popularity, fascination, and endless imagery of the serial killer (Stratton 1994: 7). The site of the serial killer became a locus onto which media publics could project their own pathology, and emergent languages about perversion and trauma came to the fore. As such, the ‘serial killer’ reminded people of their corporeality as well as confronting them with its dismissal at the hands of these murderers. The visceral engagement between publics and celebrities that was fostered during this era intensified this relationship.

Television provided the necessary grounds for the production of violence as celebrity spectacle. A screen cultures evolved and professionalized, a pathological repetition of the subject of serial killing in the form of television news, true crime documentaries, and ‘serial crime drama’ ensued. As Brian Jarvis pinpoints in his work “Monsters Inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture,” a serial killer consumer culture emerged where ‘fans’ “avidly build collections which mirror the serial killer’s own modus operandiof collecting fetish objects” (2007: 27). We agree with Jarvis that it would be too simple to “dismiss this phenomenon as the sick hobby of a deviant minority” and rather understand it as “merely the hardcore version of a mainstream obsession with the serial killer” (327) engendered by and in media.

The serial killer of the 1960s onward, as represented (and promoted) in mass media culture, can also be seen as exemplary of this era’s relative affluent and peaceful nature and the rise of consumer culture, as the middle-class flocked to generic, lifeless suburbs and shopping malls of major metropolitan cities around the world.

The ‘serial killer’ construct continued to gain currency later in the 20th century as a manifestation, or even of ‘symptom,’ of postmodern media culture itself. In effect, labelling serial killing and serialising it on television and film also brought it, like murder back into the home—where it belongs (as Alfred Hitchcock was famously quoted in an interview with the National Observer of 15 August 1966).

The mythologising of the serial killer through postmodern media, in many ways, led to the conflation of the mythic with the abject, the grotesque with the sensational, and the tragic with the iconic. This is also what led to the glorification and even glamorising of serial killers that some commentators have condemned (“Netflix’s Next ‘Sexy Serial Killer’ Documentary,” 2019). Regardless of problematic ethical implications, late century broadcast models set the tone and conditions for the mediatisation of the serial killer on the new media platforms and practices of the 21st century.

 

Being human in the digital

Given the participatory nature of our digital environment, we recognise how users are active agents in the process of meaning-making about serial killers. The newly interactive style of public commentary exercises a kind of ‘public ownership’ over the ‘social problem’ of serial killing in ways that traditional media did not and could not. Commenting on serial killers fuels massive threads on nearly every social platform, the most notable of which are perhaps YouTube and Reddit, where one can witness raw and unfiltered exchanges. Partly, this phenomenon stems from the near-zero gatekeeping mechanisms on new media platforms. Users can also participate in these threads as anonymously (or as visibly) as they wish, a choice that provides another dimension of control over the practice.

Understanding why and how YouTube extends users’ agency in the process of meaning-making is complex and challenging. In part because of its originally open nature, and the ability to share and embed YouTube videos on every other platform or messaging service seamlessly and effortlessly, YouTube has become an incredibly powerful and impactful social phenomenon. In other words: YouTube is a ‘media public’ especially because it is a loosely knit co-creative practice.

Source: screenshot of YouTube

The top three results sorted by ‘view count’ for the search term ‘serial killer documentary’ on the YouTube platform (at the time of writing): “Inside the Mind of Jeffrey Dahmer: Serial Killer’s Chilling Jailhouse Interview” (Inside Edition, 2019) and “Ghosts of Highway 20”[1] (The Oregonian, 2019), boasting more than 37 million views each. The Dahmer interview video alone hosts more than 70,000 discrete user comments. When sorted by ‘popularity’ (ranked by ‘likes’), the top three comments on this video (on 27 March, 2023) are as follows:

The fact that he is so aware and still did it is absolutely terrifying. (51k likes)It’s terrifying how calm and normal serial killers seem, you just never know. (7.5k likes)This interview is literally insane. The way he’s able to recognize the bizarreness with such clarity but at the same time almost be completely detached from the carnal side of himself. Very strange man, it’s like he’s split in two mentally. (3.2k likes)

Each of these top comments separately and distinctly engender a notion of the uncanny: the unsettling feeling that the once well-known, familiar, and reliable fabric of reality—whether another person, specific social relations, or people’s sense of belonging to a community—becomes strange and unsettling. As both Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger have argued in different ways in their published works, the first focusing on the uncanny as a feeling, the second on its relation to ontology, the experience of uncanniness goes to the heart of the human condition.

In fact, much of people’s actions and behaviour in life revolve around reducing, downplaying or altogether ignoring the uncanny, yet it is always there. The uncanny is waiting to be discovered, acting as a source of estrangement that makes us instantly aware of the fact that who we (think we) are, how things (are supposed to) function, and what all of this means is simply just an act of sensemaking that is essentially arbitrary, and permanently unstable. It is here that we meet the figure of the serial killer, as the comments above demonstrate, this is the place where the human figure is both monstrous and “calm and normal,” the place where the human figure is “split in two” (the other half clearly comprising a non-human, unfeeling and therefore unknowable entity). Here, people are forcibly moved beyond the horrors of their actions to the rather unsettling notion that these human beings can do what they do as part of our human community, part of us.

Users are active agents in the process of meaning-making about serial killers in relation to the uncanny specifically when looking at the kinds of gatekeeping operations that are active in Reddit’s true crime communities (r/TrueCrime and r/SerialKillers). Take for example the ‘patrolling of borders’ about what can be said, could be said, and what can absolutely not be said (with the consequence of being permanently banned). Three of the nine rules for participating in the r/SerialKillers community are specifically directed to these language rules:

#3. No glorification of serial killers#5. No Self-promotion / Merchandise Links / Murderabilia#9. No Writing To Serial Killers. (https://www.reddit.com/r/serialkillers/)

 These rules are self-regulatory and independent of traditional ‘rulemaking’ structures (in the sense that there is no legal obligation), reflecting the way the community sees its position in shaping the language and knowledge around serial killers—namely what is right, what is wrong, and how users should or should not engage with the cultural site of the serial killer. That is, the ‘serial killer’ must remain actively conscripted to its place as deviant Other—the celebration of which is not tolerated.

These structures can also be read as a mechanism of protection against the psychic threat of violence upon the community. This is activated both through the attempt to collectively ‘figure out’ the serial killer as a problem to be solved. For example, users provoke conversations on this issue by posting questions such as:

What are some of the wildest conspiracy theories for why SKs killed people? (https://redd.it/1257iun)Why is it commonly believed that a serial killer doesn’t stop killing until they die or are imprisoned? (https://redd.it/xwne4h)Why serial killers don’t kill bad people instead? (https://redd.it/vjr903)

Of course, users could consider referencing or reading the medico-scientific literature on the bio-psycho-social makeup of these kinds of offenders to discern motivations, but there is a preference (and easier access point, especially considering most people do not have access to journals outside the field or the academy) to do this in an online community as it provides the power of collaborative knowledge-seeking and knowledge-making with the additional psycho-social safety of group dynamics and collectively policed boundaries. 

Further, these relatively organic and self-directed rules suggest a broader attempt to distance the Self from the deviant Other. In her research on Reddit, Judith Fathalla (2022) points out that the term “‘True Crime Community’ (TCC) is a self-description used by enthusiasts of true crime media on Tumblr, Reddit and social media sites. Fathalla suggests that the very fact that these media publics self-describe as ‘a community’ is telling because it denotes a need for “boundaries and norms of behaviour” (3). This is borne out in rules and community discussions about ways of speaking. For instance, the r/serialkillers community reminds its members that “phrases like ‘favourite’ killer can be construed as glorification and are better phrased as ‘most frequently discussed’” (https://redd.it/gctnjx). These collectively policed ordinances enable anyone to delve deeply into the phenomenon, while such mechanisms of digital culture simultaneourly keep the threat of the serial killer at bay.

The Internet produces just as many unregulated spaces that cultivate taboo as it does self-regulated ones that attempt to contain it. In these spaces we see the uncanny emerge in other ways, namely, via the production of user-generated, and remixed material. An endlessly creative range of work is posted on the site DeviantArt, a user-generated portal self-described as a place where “art and community thrive” and through which users can “explore over 350 million pieces of art while connecting to fellow artists and art enthusiasts” (https://www.deviantart.com/).

By its very name, this community positions itself as the deviant Other. Members are referred to as ‘deviants’ and pieces submitted to the site are called ‘deviations’. It is unsurprising then that users remix serial killer iconography in ways that focus on some of the most troubling aspects of their crimes. Two pertinent examples are Jeffrey Dahmer’s cannibalism and John Wayne Gacy’s clown costume. In the case of Dahmer-themed content or ‘deviations,’ the notions of cannibalism and ‘ordinariness’ collide in a morbid excursion into the uncanny: cartoons of Dahmer ‘cooking’ with a frypan while skulls emanate from the pan (Star90skid), artwork remixing Dahmer in a scene together with American 1920s era serial killer Hamilton Howard “Albert” Fish casually discussing dinner (AGwun 2015a), and disturbingly ‘cute’ depictions of a child-like Dahmer with a knife and fork exclaiming “yummy” (AGwun 2015b). The range of John Wayne Gacy amateur work hosted on DeviantArt illustrates a preoccupation with assemblage and transformation that uses the evil clown as a leitmotif. There are literally dozens of remediations all conflating Gacy’s role in the community as ‘Pogo the Clown’ and the horror of his crimes.

https://www.deviantart.com/kazekage-of-the-sand/art/The-Bay-Harbour-Butcher-269494098

The incongruity provoked by the ‘ordinary cannibal’ trope cuts to the heart of the experience of uncanniness: all of them are just like us, and yet they are not – and one of the few ways we have to handle this, is to participate in remixing and deconstructing them. What these remixes on the tip of the digital serial killer iceberg remind us of is that rather than the ordinary being the opposite of our horror, the ordinary is in fact its twin, that is, the banal and mundane operate in dialogue with the deviant drive as a fortification against these taboos. DeviantArt functions as a site (both a cultural site and a web site) that holds space for the uncanny in this way. The ‘realities’ about us that we take as ‘given’ are disturbed and un-realised, made real again. In participating with this digital media, we are both normal (products of our environment) and not-normal (enjoying our taboo par excellence).

The serial killer belongs to all of us

Of salience in our collective reworking of trauma, through the historically conjunctive development of mass media and social order, is the spectre of the serial killer—ostensibly human and non-human. In every era, the serial killer gets reinvented, in each step engaging more of us in its co-creation. Statistically, most people will never interact with a serial killer ‘face-to-face’. Our entire relationship with this character is therefore mediated through all the communication practices which bring this archetype into our knowledge, which is the very basis of discursivity. The serial killer, time and time again, proves to be an enigmatic figure, particularly produced by the mass media of its time, available us to act out and cope with our anxieties about what it is to be human, yet also reproducing us as inhuman cogs of the machine of mass society, industry, and culture.

In doing so, our media act on two levels, at once offering us human agency and effectively reducing it to (almost) zero. First, mass media operate as a way for the collective to regain some psychic protection from the threat of horror posed by the ‘serial killer’ as a social phantasm, not in the least because it is the ‘average person’ that is the typical victim of the serial killer. However, if we are all potential victims of serial killer attack, then through social practice we are all also potential guardians against it, as much as we are participants (in and through media) of making the serial killer.

In our analysis, we combine notions of serial killing through mediation and through understanding media as practice to explore the entanglement between the media public, the media apparatus, and the serial killer archetype, in a current interaction becoming re-articulated through digital modes of exchange that provide grounds to share, remix, watch, like and comment simultaneously, in the most voyeuristic and compulsive of ways. These new practices tend to reconfigure the role of the serial killer as a site of shared, complex and profound interactions with our bodies, the notion of bodies-in-pieces, and indeed our humanity and non-humanity all at once.

The mediation and mediatisation of the serial killer provides a historically embedded trajectory through which we can appreciate, as much as appropriate, our engagement with this abominable figure and the horrific acts they engage in. In short, we suggest that the serial killer today has become the totem with which we work through the fear of losing our humanity—and vitally doing so in a digital environment where the serial killer has come to belong to all of us.

Works Cited

AGwun (2015a) Quarrel. https://www.deviantart.com/agwun/art/...

AGwun (2015b) Serial killers doodle 3. https://www.deviantart.com/agwun/art/...

Fathallah, J. (2022). ‘Being a fangirl of a serial killer is not ok’: Gatekeeping Reddit’s True Crime Community. New Media & Society, OnlineFirst: 1-20.

Freud S (2003 [1919]) The Uncanny. Translated by D Mclintock. London: Penguin.

Glitsos L and Taylor J (2022) The Claremont serial killer and the production of class-based suburbia in serial killer mythology. Continuum 36(4): 508–527.

Goodall M (2012) The ‘book of Manson’: Raymond Pettibon and the killing of America. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics3(2): 159–170.

Haebich A (1998) Murdering stepmothers: the trial and execution of Martha Rendell. Journal of Australian Studies 22(59): 66–81.

Jarvis B (2007) Monsters inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture. Crime, Media, Culture 3(3): 326–344.

Seltzer M (2013) Serial killers: Death and life in America’s wound culture. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.

Star90skid (2018) In the kitchen. https://www.deviantart.com/star90skid....

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2019) Netflix's Next ‘Sexy Serial Killer’ Documentary. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eMw4... (accessed 4 June 2023).

 

[1] Comments for the “Ghosts” documentary have been disabled—this can be enacted by the creator, which often happens when users become too involved, over-invested, or inappropriate or can be enacted by YouTube administration if the content/comments are of a sensitive nature and directed toward minors.

Biography

Mark Deuze is a professor of Journalism and Media Culture at the University of Amsterdam (before that at Indiana University). He is author of 11 books, including McQuail's Media and Mass Communicatin Theory (Sage, 2020), Leven in Media(Amsterdam University Press, 2017), Media Life (Polity Press, 2012) and Media Work (Polity Press, 2007).

Feeding the Civic Imagination (Part Four): Passing Down and Following Up: Jewish Cuisine’s Umbrella Potential

Forward

COVID-19 lockdowns inspired the Civic Paths research group to explore how food is involved in civic imagination, the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions. Although physically isolated, we found ourselves connecting over food—making it, eating it, missing it, and dreaming about it. These everyday experiences allowed us to share, learn, and think of what could be: they fed our civic imagination. By organizing the Forum “Feeding the Civic Imagination” on Lateral, the journal of the Cultural Studies Association, we invited others to participate in our exploration of food and civic imagination. Scheduled to be released in early 2024, the Forum brings together both topically and structurally diverse contributions to spark imaginations around various food-related practices, from traditional research articles on collectives around ingredients, cooking, eating, and human waste to practice-focused pieces on anti-racist pedagogy and Mexican and Palestinian recipe exchanges. To celebrate and extend the “Feeding the Civic Imagination” journey, three-part dialogues, “Intercultural Food” (by Elaine Almeida and Lisa Silvestri), “Digital Media and Food” (by Brienna Fleming and Ioana Mischie), and “The Great British Bake Off” (by Lauren Levitt and Elaine Venter), were organized for Pop Junctions. Jana Stöxen’s article, “Passing Down and Following Up: Jewish Cuisine’s Umbrella Potential” is the fourth and final installment of Pop Junctions’ series on Feeding the Civic Imagination. Jana’s case study is a thought-provoking companion to the collected essays in Lateral that complements its aims to inspire imaginative engagements with food.

Foreword by Do Own (Donna) Kim, Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on behalf of the Feeding the Civic Imagination co-editors Sangita Shresthova and Paulina Lanz and the editorial team members at the University of Southern California.

Passing Down and Following Up: Jewish Cuisine’s Umbrella Potential

Jewish cuisine.  Certainly a general yet elusive term for a plethora of tastes under one roof. None of the various ideas of this denomination can be identified as wrong if the actors primarily concerned with it – be they religious or rather selectively expressing their belonging – label their cooking and eating as Jewish. From this point of departure, asking for the most authentic dishes or the most Jewish sites, sets irredeemable preconditions.

Jewish cuisine can best be understood[1] as a set of practices and habits of eating and drinking, cooking, and serving, exercised by people considering themselves Jewish.[2] It is at the same time embedded in historical lines of traditions, deriving from religious beliefs and commandments – such as the Kashrut[3] – and influenced by local conditions. This combination makes it at the same time strict and highly reflexive: while the religious prescriptions and the Jewish calendar of festivities often offer a limited space for creativity, the local context and its influence provide for a huge diversity within Judaism worldwide. Merging these two contexts of religion and locality or local heritage – or: the sacral and the profane – constitutes the uniqueness of Jewish cuisine. Jewish communities may all have originated from the Twelve Tribes of Israel, but they have transformed over time and space, moved, merged as well as diverged.  So did their cuisine: Jewish cooking and eating is multifaceted and yet highly capable of dialogue.

Including religious as well as cultural traits, the most common division into three groups[4] of Jews worldwide is predominantly based on geographical belonging and the heritage linked to it. Ashkenazi, (originally) Middle- and Eastern-European Jewry, Sephardi, (originally) Jews from the Iberic Peninsula and Northern Africa, and Mizrahi, the third and smallest group, (originally) coming from Caucasus and the Middle East. They are traceable through their cuisines so that people and practices of cooking and eating as forged by Kashrut and its interpretations as well as by local traditions appearing in the regions of origin, in the diaspora, be it in Central Europe or the Americas, and in Israel, as country of religious reference. These Jewish lines of tradition form specific contexts and customs, literally a system of social semantics. With its triadic connection of food, cuisine, and identity, it provides a basis for orientation in, and beyond time and space[5], creating Jewish spheres of connection and identification. Locally diverse yet bound to certain patterns, e.g., dishes for religious holidays such as the Seder plate for Pesach, Jewish cuisine in the past and present is best understood as a pluralistic, inclusive concept. It largely contributes to identity formation and its performance in Jewish communities – be they real, easily identifiable ones like families, neighbourhoods or synagogal communities, or rather abstract imagined communities, dwelling on the idea of a religiously-constructed unity, imagined by individuals who perceive themselves as Jewish[6]  – and thus form a conceptual group. Anderson uses this concept to analyse nationalism from a political science perspective.  Not only the awareness of nation-building processes though, but also the knowledge about food cultures and the two fields’ analogies can contribute to the understanding of community formation: As exemplified here with Jewish cuisine in all its different facets, the recognition of multilateral embeddedness helps to question and to debunk persistent prejudices. For cultural anthropology, the cooking, eating, and drinking culture is an indicator of superordinate cultural processes and practices, which can be used to grasp social structures with their distinctive features and the ways they are negotiated and performed. Hence, eating is always a cultural act and a “social event”[7]. Therefore, I would like to stress a cultural anthropological point of view, expressed from my non-Jewish, thus outsider position. Yet, exploring the field of Jewish Cuisine (in Europe) in the project FoodGuide “Jewish Cuisine”[8] through participant observation, interviews and of course the tasting of a wide array under the umbrella term “Jewish”, made me an informed outsider with certain experiences in the contexts and customs of e.g., Shabbat meals and the discussions on who eventually invented falafel and hummus. Following this disciplinary positioning, I intend to emphasize the socio-cultural aspects of communities that provide support and exchange of ideas without actually imagining exclusive (national) societies.

Aldea Mulhern pictures this openness of the symbolic community aspect in the “eating Jewishly” foodway – an in-between attempt to harmonize the different spheres – as departing “from standard narratives about Jewish food practice as either eating kosher, or eating traditional Jewish foods [, opening] opens a space for a Jewish food practice that includes both of those modes alongside others, such as food ethics.”[9] This inclusive approach sparks potential for a vivid civic imagination[10] alongside the variety of Jewish cuisine: Making use of civic imagination as “the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions”[11] opens the discussion beyond the question of what a Jewish cuisine tastes like to the more revealing one on what the concept itself and its practice have to offer – besides flavourful dishes. Bridging gaps of ignorance and ideology through literally sitting at another table, tasting the neighbour’s dish can lead into civic arenas, where discussion is understood as cooperative exchange rather than competition.

A first step in this direction can be to sharpen and to loosen the technical terms at the same time: to emphasize Jewish cuisines’ diversity and to recognize the general fluidity of culture as subject to transformation. Settings of Jewish food culture – and Jewishly food and eating, in Mulhern’s terms – can be found throughout the world but with very different facets and frequencies. Mobility and the need to adapt to their surroundings form a common trait among them. For instance, the “multilingual and poly-cultural regions of Central [and Eastern] Europe”[12] have once been the cradle of Ashkenazi culture. These days they pose a tragic yet excellent example of how Ashkenazim have been subject to boundary shifts and other moments of often brutal hegemony: Smothered by nationalization efforts and close to being erased from the map by the Shoah, Jewish life in the region is nowadays an absolute minority project sometimes occupied by touristic expectations towards an entertaining commemoration.[13] Many Jewish survivors of the Shoah emigrated to the Americas or Israel[14] after 1945, taking their heritage and memories with them. Jewish life in Central Europe is thus largely dominated by a small number of long-established families and – since the 1990’s – a much larger amount of people with Jewish roots, originating from the former Soviet Union[15], who in turn brought their own every day and festive customs. Their search for identity is specifically demanding and was further challenged by a diversifying society: in the second half of the 20th century the appreciation of (seemingly) foreign livelihoods[16] – expressed through every-day culture – brought about by increasing mobility; globalization also became relevant in the field of interest in food culture. Mobility through trade and (forced) migration was historically provoked, but this factor of movement is also key to the popularisation of Jewish cuisine in more recent times.

It’s the Foreign, the Other that fascinates and scares people at the same time.[17] But especially in settings of migration, this otherness can constitute more than differences and separation, especially through the soft power of food[18]: Over time, it’s the “’old world’ foods of Greeks, Jews and Italians in New York”[19] that fundamentally changed eating habits in the ‘new world’; these dishes were transformed from often rather modest all-day or festive, rather scarcely consumed foods to signature dishes. Cream cheese bagels with lox, and pastrami sandwiches are just two examples: “The normalizing absorption of difference in mass culture thereby implies an ongoing appropriation and a becoming at home, i.e. a nostrification of the foreign that - as not only foreign, which […]  can lead to the complete de-exoticization of the formerly unknown.”[20] Many of those foods nowadays showcased as ‘typical’ dishes in New York and elsewhere derive from places and people of fairly different backgrounds, contributing to a bigger, post-migrant image of empirical and narrated belonging[21]. Although “the advent of a cosmopolitan and lively urban food culture is not an inevitable outcome of economic globalization”[22], the appreciation of the harmless Other contributed to a diversified society, focused on the singular and unique, as opposed to the standardized products of the 20th and 21st century.[23] In terms of food culture, this valorization of particularities creates a certain dilemma: On the one hand, national or religiously determined cuisines – such as the Jewish – are points of reference to determine similarities and differences. On the other hand, this methodological standardization, the subsummation as solely “Jewish” without negotiating its broad character, neglects the diversity behind these terms and the inherent transnational and -cultural intersections. Leaving questionable evaluation criteria such as the degree of authenticity behind, culinary systems can be regarded as an amalgamation of different prerequisites: Jewish cuisine as a non-national but religiously reasoned umbrella term contains everything from lived and subtle traditions to much younger developments and trends. Jewish cuisine largely varies. Focusing on the self-identification of individuals, leaves room for a set of Jewish dietary rules – the Kashrut –, their varying interpretations in relation to several ways of practicing religion and for locally diverse cuisines that have a Jewish side to them, such as the Jewish-Israeli (or Israeli-Jewish) cuisine of the Mediterranean Levante region or the hearty Polish-Jewish (or Jewish-Polish) cuisine, an ideal type of Ashkenazi food styles, and innumerable others. However, the tension between local and global is also evident here: In times of global food and health trends, borders cannot be sustained any longer as clear-cut concepts. Instead, the sometimes eclectic fusion cuisine[24], an interactive, mostly urban trend, crosses culinary systems, when two or more forces are joined to create new dishes and eating habits. They combine various cuisines to add some spice to the culinary currents “between community, memory and identity”[25]. Kosher Sushi or the Ashkenazi chicken soup Golden Joich, aromatized with lemongrass emerge from this dynamic trend “of combining foods from more than one culture in the same dish”[26]. The line between solely and exclusively “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” food thus becomes blurred, if it ever existed at all. Mobility and exchange prove to be as crucial for Jewish history and religious (self-)understanding as for its cuisine.

Established in 2017, the “Jewish Food Society”[27] approaches the branches of Jewish cuisine by following up on passed down family recipes and their origins. It also dwells on the emotions connected to them, testified by family members. The digital archive “works to preserve, celebrate and revitalize Jewish culinary heritage from around the world” through storytelling. Recipe books, cooking tools or certain dishes as well as non-tangible memories of cooking and eating can be understood as family heirlooms, “associated with Jewish cultural heritage that have been passed down through a family over several generations […] important for the formation of collective memories”[28]. Even though it is to question, if traditions, such as recipes, can in fact be passed on over more than three generations, or, which degree of consistency and stability in looks and taste must be present in the dishes that continuity is assumed, the emotions connected to this practice of creating heritage are the actual transmitter. Shared heritage is therefore vital for the creation of affectionate, intergenerational bonds. With people migrating, these bonds have become inter- and transnational. The platform can thus be a vehicle to imagine what can be created, when open-mindedly building up on the passed down: It fosters on the one hand side a community of shared memories, and, on the other hand side, contributes to a valorization, yet not a frantic clinging to these memories and recipes as heritage. Consequently, in an online archive, the aspect of contributing is the key to this process of sharing inspiration.

The homepage of the Jewish Food Society, a “a non-profit organization that works to preserve, celebrate, and revitalize Jewish culinary heritage from around the world in order to provide a deeper connection to Jewish life.” (https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org/about).[29]

The families presenting their recipes, mediated by the team of the open-access platform, are these days often located in the US, Israel, or Western European countries such as France or Great Britain. But their ancestry is much more diverse: Old-worldly Ashkenazi and Sephardi livelihoods are the background for the culinary family heritage. Migration stories from the 19th and 20th century up to today – often but not necessarily related to Shoah[30] – form the path of intergenerational, transnational, often also multiethnic and -religious relations through food practices. The recipes’ “roots and routes”[31] describe the ways of immigrant integration[32] – and, vice versa, the incorporation from the immigrants’ side –, a gradual process in which definitions of belonging, of out- and in-side are challenged over and over again. When the family of Becca Gallick-Mitchell[33] celebrates Thanksgiving, a genuine North American family feast, centring around a shared table, they already have a leftover recycling method in mind, “tempted to carve the turkey poorly, leaving more meat on the bones”[34]. The leftover meat is then used to stuff Kreplach, a traditional Ashkenazi dumpling, filled with meat, potatoes, or what is at hand. Their beloved five-generation old recipe, originating from Poland, preserved through the Lodz Ghetto and emigration to the US by their grandmother Mala, serves as a follow-up on the feast they accustomed to in their adult life, mixing local and Jewish customs to create family traditions. Cherishing memories and reliable practices, such as extensively tried and tested recipes, delivers a basis to intergenerational communication. Since the experiences of first- or second-generation immigrants differs significantly from those their children and grandchildren make in a substantially multifaceted environment with loosened bonds to their family’s region of origin, generational gaps do appear e.g., in the mode, quantity, and frequency in which dishes are prepared[35]. Their situation within “a variety of different and often competing generational, ideological and moral points of reference, including those of their parents, their grandparents and their own real and imagined perspectives about their multiple homelands”[36] further complicates the creation of a common identity.

(Post-)Thanksgiving Kreplach -  a mean for intergenerational communication and memory (https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org/stories/a-fifth-generation-thanksgiving-kreplach-tradition).

Nevertheless, “food as a bastion of […] religious, spiritual and cultural identity”[37], is a soft though powerful approach to resilient relations, when regarded with a certain openness for its combinability. The descendants of Marie Immerman[38], a first-generation American of Ukrainian origin, are still fond of her sixth generation Coleslaw recipe, likewise a Thanksgiving staple – “simple but trusty.”[39] At the same time, they are adding their personal twists to it: When Jo Betty Sorensen’s mother came to visit “it was interesting because she would grate onion,” while Jo herself would use onion powder.[40] Jo Betty summarizes this observation according to the changing environments the dish has been prepared in and the respective technologies and food trends: “With recipes, people make it their own.”[41]People in specific local, sociocultural contexts inherit their family recipes and adjust them to their needs. Cooking and revising the inherited recipes can thus be a field of intergenerational interaction, including multiple ties not to change but to subtly adapt a dish to make it a lasting, contemporary product. Same applies to Claude and Anna Polonsky’s family[42]: Their Ashkenazi apple strudel – itself a dish with Habsburgian heritage – evolved over time and became an “updated” Ashkenazi-French strudel aux pommes, prepared close to the famous French Tarte Tatin recipe.[43] By re-creating recipes, they are adding up  more and more layers to their shared family history, breaking culinary and national borders but are still staying within the frontiers of the well-known.

Combining religious, national and family holidays to create a personal “culinary canon” (https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org/collections/thanksgiving-recipes).

 As Cañás Bottos and Plasil point out for the Levantine and Mizrahi migration to Argentina, four mechanisms – packaging, grinding, mixing and blending[44] – are responsible for the inclusion of migrants and their cuisines in the settling country – and vice versa: People and food are packaged (or labelled) under graspable terms (here: Arab). Especially the following generations are grinded in by language acquisition and schooling. Local circumstances and resources are (partly) mixed with known ones and can even replace those; they blend. The creation of new combinations, such as the post-Thanksgiving-Kreplach, the use of onion powder instead of freshly grated onions, and the preparation of an apple strudel according to French culinary concepts are examples of a process, where cooks and eaters alike are creating a form of “translocal consumer product”[45] with a transgenerational side to it, characterized by various transfers.

This renders the notion of traditional or authentic cuisines highly questionable. Is not almost every dish – especially the nationalized ones – a migratory product, be it the Italian(-American) Pizza with its tomatoes, deriving from Columbian Exchange, or the (stereotypical) German lust for potatoes, stemming from the same place, South America? Yet disputable enough from this radical point of view, one must admit that cuisines are – like the communities they are created in – at least partly imagined, yet highly effective supporters of identity.[46] Collectivity is created through assumptions of standardized belonging, expressed in shared names, dishes and practices, neglecting specificities and other possible dissensions within that frame: same but different. Community cuisines have become more than just necessities – they are cultured, ritualized, traditionalized eating habits. That valuable heritage, passed down and followed up, is kept in their respective families and – see Jewish Food Society – distributed through digitally mediated, yet emotional storytelling, closely relating them to sharing foodstuffs and memories themselves. Preserving recipes for your grandmother’s or -father’s stew is one step in keeping history and its stories alive – but they need to be stirred well from time to time. The act of preserving the old and known might sound like a conservative claim to keep it that way. Still, it can certainly be used in a more productive, proactive way: it can pave the way to a general openness based on recipes as orientation tools and resilient transmitters of emotional bonds. Sharing, trying, and adapting them to today’s needs and beyond offers a glimpse into organic practices of how age-old, non-trivial approaches to e.g., food and nature, food and work, or food and family are intertwined with recent perspectives and challenges. Especially the interconnection of food and migration proves eating culture to be at the same time an artefact of and a glimpse into diversifying, often parallel running patterns of belonging – as here, under the same umbrella of the Jewish cuisine. Therefore, the understanding of these cooking traditions and its transmission is to be read from a resourceful, layered perspective: Jewish Cuisine goes beyond the standard-distinction between Ashkenazi : Sephardi : Mizrahi. It has its feast and its fasting, its seasons and styles, its taboos, and sweet treats – and is spelled out best as pluralistic Jewish Cuisine(s): religious in different intensities and secular, regional and global, fusional, traditional, and re-invented. Everything can be Jewish – and, if not, possibly Jew-ish[47]. In the kitchen, on the plate and beyond, no “either-or”, but a promising “as well as” is crucial for sparking inclusive imagination, for mixing and blending to create dishes not yet tasted. Imagining culinary possibilities is therefore imagining participation, connection, and cooperation.

 

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank the team of FoodGuide “Jüdische Küche”, particularly my colleague Antonia Reck, for their support and input in the development of this text - herzlichen Dank!

 

Author Bio

Jana Stöxen is a doctoral candidate in Comparative European Ethnology at the University of Regensburg (Germany) and holds a scholarship of the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation (FES). She is currently working ethnographically on transnational migration and diasporic practices between the Republic of Moldova and Germany. Prior to this, she has been a research associate in the project FoodGuide “Jüdische Küche” on Jewish food and cuisine in Europe. Her research interests lie at the intersection of transformation and migration, and within the spectrum of food and home-making, particularly in post-socialist and transnational contexts.

Contact:
jana.stoexen@gmx.de
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jana-Stoexen

 

Notes

[1] See: Paulette Kershenovich Schuster, “Habaneros and shwarma. Jewish Mexicans in Israel as a transnational community,” Religion and Food, Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 26 (2015): 281–302, 285. doi:10.30674/scripta.67458.

[2] Gunther Hirschfelder, Antonia Reck, and Jana Stöxen, „Jüdische Esskultur: Traditionen und Trends,“ Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland 44-45 (2021): 35-41, 35. [original in German; translation by the author]

[3] “Kashrut” is a set of Jewish religious laws, concerning rituals and dietary prescriptions. The term most commonly associated here is “kosher” – the (ritual) “suitability” of certain, e.g. alimentary “pure” products, as pointed out by the Kashrut.

[4] These “groups” share common traits but are within themselves highly heterogenous. Still counting them, based on the combination of religion and ethnicity or heritage, as “groups” is thus a rather pragmatic approach to conceptualize Jewish people and their traditions. However, “groupism” is to be criticized if it goes beyond the methodological sorting and negates intersectional identities and/or personal characteristics.

Also see: Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity without groups,” Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Minority Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 50–77, doi:10.1017/cbo9780511489235.004.

[5] See: Gunther Hirschfelder, „Pelmeni, Pizza, Pirogge. Determinanten kultureller Identität im Kontext europäischer Küchensysteme,“ in Russische Küche und kulturelle Identität, ed. Norbert Franz (Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2013), 31-50, 32 ff. [original in German; translation by the author]

[6] See: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 1991), 6 f.

[7] Johanna Mäkelä, “Defining a Meal,” in Palatable Worlds. Sociocultural Food Studies, ed.  Elisabeth Fürst, Ritva Prättäla, Marianne Ekström et al. (Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1991), 87–95, 92.

[8] Gunther Hirschfelder, Jana Stöxen, Markus Schreckhaas, and Antonia Reck. Foodguide Jüdische Küche: Geschichten I Menschen I Orte I Trends (Leipzig: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2022).

[9] Aldea Mulhern, “What does it mean to ‘eat Jewishly’? Authorizing discourse in the Jewish food movement in Toronto, Canada,” Religion and Food, Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 26 (2015): 326-348, 327, doi:10.30674/scripta.67460.

[10] Henry Jenkins, Gabriel Peter-Lazaro, and Sangita Shrestova, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change (New York: New York University Press, 2020).

[11] Ibid. 5.

[12] See: Tomasz Kamusella, “Central European Castles in the Air?,” Kakanien revisited, 17.01.2011, accessed May 19, 2021, http://www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/essay..., 14 ff.

[13] See: Ibid. 22.

[14] See: Ibid. 21.

[15] See: Alina Gromova, Generation „koscher light“. Urbane Räume und Praxen junger russisch-sprachiger Juden in Berlin (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013).

[16] See: Maren Möhring, “Staging and Consuming the Italian Lifestyle. The Gelateria and the Pizzeria-Ristorante in Post-War Germany,” Food & History 7, no. 2 (2009): 181-202, doi:10.1484/j.food.1.100655.

[17] See: Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[18] See: James Farrer, “Eating the West and Beating the Rest: Culinary Occidentalism and Urban Soft Power in Asia’s Global Food Cities,” in Globalization, Food and Social Identities in the Asia Pacific Region, ed. James Farrer (Tokyo: Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture, 2010), 128-149, 146.

[19] Krishnendu Ray, “A Taste for Ethnic Difference: American Gustatory Imagination in a Globalizing World,” in Globalization, Food and Social Identities in the Asia Pacific Region, ed. James Farrer (Tokyo: Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture, 2010), 97-113, 101.

[20] Maren Möhring, Fremdes Essen. Die Geschichte der ausländischen Gastronomie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (München: Oldenbourg, 2012), 461. [original in German; translation by the author]

[21] See: Naika Fouroutan, “Post-Migrant Society,” in: Unity in Diversity: Integration in a Post-Migrant Society, ed. Naika Foroutan (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2015), accessed January 17, 2022 https://www.bpb.de/gesellschaft/migra....

[22] Farrer, “Eating the West and Beating the Rest,” 146.

[23] See: Andreas Reckwitz, Society of Singularities (Hoboken: Polity, 2020).

[24] See: Kershenovich Schuster, “Habaneros and shwarma,” 287.

[25] Hirschfelder, Reck, and Stöxen, „Jüdische Esskultur,“ 39.

[26] Kershenovich Schuster, “Habaneros and shwarma,” 287.

[27] Jewish Food Society, 2017, accessed January 7, 2022, https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org/.

[28] Jakub Bronec, “Identity in Post-War Jewish Generations through War Souvenirs,” Heritage 2, no. 3 (2019): 1785-1798, 1786, doi:10.3390/heritage2030109.

[29] This screenshot has been taken before the relaunch of the website’s layout. It is now showcasing pictures of the people behind the recipes and particularly the  stories rather than these of the dishes chosen in this initial version

[30] “Shoah” and “Holocaust” are often used as synonyms for the genocide by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. While “Shoah” is the Hebrew word for “catastrophe” or “doom” and is especially used to name the murder of Jews in Europe, “Holocaust” is Greek for “sacrifice by fire” and refers to all people killed. 

[31] Peggy Levitt, “Roots and Routes: Understanding the Lives of the Second Generation Transnationally,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35, no. 7 (2009), 1225-1242, doi:10.1080/13691830903006309.

[32] See:  Laura Limonic, Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019).

[33] Becca Gallick-Mitchell provided the story of her family to the online-archive of “Jewish Food Society”. She is an American with Ashkenazi heritage, sharing her families dumpling recipe.

Jewish Food Society, “A Fifth Generation Thanksgiving Kreplach Tradition,” 10.10.2021, accessed January 8, 2022, https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org/pos....

[34] Ibid.

[35] See: Kershenovich Schuster, “Habaneros and shwarma,” 298.

[36] Levitt, “Roots and Routes,” 1238.

[37] Kershenovich Schuster, “Habaneros and shwarma,” 282.

[38] Marie Immerman was born to Ashkenazi parents from Ukraine in 1895 in New York. Her granddaughter Jo Betty Sorensen presents her recipe for coleslaw on the platform “Jewish Food Society”.

Jewish Food Society. “Six Generations of Coleslaw Makers,” 02.06.2017, accessed on January 8, 2022,

https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org/pos....

[39] Ibid.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Anna is the daughter of Claude Polonsky, whose parents and grandparents fled the pogroms in Ukraine in 1905 to France. They are sharing there family’s stories and recipes – among them fusions of Ashkenazi and French cuisine – on “Jewish Food Society”.

Jewish Food Society. “Keeping Ashkenazi Recipes Alive in Paris,” 15.01.2020, accessed on January 11, 2022, https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org/pos....

[43] Ibid.

[44] See: Lorenzo Cañás Bottos, and Tanja Plasil, “From Grandmother’s Kitchen to Festivals and Professional Chef: The Standardization and Ritualization of Arab Food in Argentina,” in: Objectification and Standardization: On the Limits and Effects of Ritually Fixing and Measuring Life, ed.s Tord Larsen, Michael Blim, Theodore M Porter, Kalpala Ram, and Nigel Rapport (Durham: Ritual Studies Monograph Series, 2021), 151-171, 152 ff.

[45] Möhring, Fremdes Essen, 422.

[46] See: Cañás Bottos and Plasil, “From Grandmother’s Kitchen,” 161 ff.

[47] James Cohen, Jew-ish: A Cookbook: Reinvented Recipes from a Modern Mensch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021).

Returning to Tradition: Emotional Morality in Fan Fiction of 'A Dream of Red Mansions'

As one of the four great literary masterpieces in ancient China, Cao Xueqin's masterpiece A Dream of Red Mansions is a model of ancient literature in its literary, artistic and ideological nature. This is a very unique novel, the culmination of Chinese classic family novels and the subversion of many of the conventions of the literary genre. A Dream of Red Mansions tells the story of a group of teenage girls and a young aristocrat named Jia Baoyu who live in a place called the Grand View Garden, a utopia for young people that is far from worldly troubles. It is a paradise for young people, a place full of love and peace where there are no conspiracies or authority and all of the young people treat each other as equals. In the Grand View Garden, the names of the houses are also full of poetry, and each woman has her own unique personality and destiny, leaving room for readers to imagine more—particularly as the novel is incomplete.

No novel has had a greater influence on Chinese society than A Dream of Red Mansions, which has been popular since the end of the 18th century in both copies and engravings, and has become an important subject for popular literature and drama. The novel depicts romantic love in an environment dominated by Confucianism. After the A Dream of Red Mansions came out, a large number of sequels and imitations also came out, which can be described as early "fan fictions." It is worth mentioning that due to the incomplete manuscript, there is endless space for imagination and opportunities for sequels in which countless fans express their views on love. Many fans have also written a large number of sequels to make up for the "defects" of the original work. In the Internet era, online literature websites began to serialize a lot of fan fiction based on A Dream of Red Mansions.

In the online Dream of Red Mansions fan fiction, girls’ love (GL) is striking. Jia Baoyu, the only man who originally lived in the Grand View Garden, is no longer important, and the two women around him - Baochai and Daiyu - have become a couple. In addition, the genre of "time travel" is extremely popular. People from modern society travel to the end of the Qing Dynasty. Since A Dream of Red Mansions is a well-known story in China, the character plot and story arc development are known to almost everyone, so the hero who travels to the end of the Qing Dynasty acts as a representative of countless fans of A Dream of Red Mansions. Through these time-traveling characters, readers can get the full experience of being a "person in the book" and play the "changing the direction of the story" game.

As Lu Hsun said, A Dream of Red Mansions is able to break away from Chinese classic family novel style and become the pinnacle of this genre, precisely because its emotional description breaks the Confucian emotional structure under feudal ethics and creates a modern type of emotional type. Its vitality and innovation also come from this. Jia Baoyu, a unique male character in the history of Chinese fiction, has no interest in career success but genuinely appreciates every woman in his life. "Love" is unique in this traditional Chinese novel. The main concern of A Dream of Red Mansions is "emotion," and it is a masterpiece of Chinese people's emotions. When Haiyan Lee does a literary analysis of Chinese modern emotions, she relies on A Dream of Red Mansions as an important explanation of Chinese people’s emotions. It also contains a lot of potential to break the traditional Chinese Confucian emotional structure.

On Jinjiang Literature City, a popular online novel platform in China, fan fiction about A Dream of Red Mansions often top the bestseller list. The classic novel still has a strong appeal to this day. Among these fan fiction stories, the most mainstream are "Mary Sue" and "childish" styles. The Mary Sue style features a protagonist with the perfect birth, appearance, and fate; the other characters of the novel exist completely as foils for the protagonist. The "childish" style is mainly funny and fantastic. It only borrows characters from A Dream of Red Mansions to write modern love stories that have almost nothing to do with the original work. 

This online fan fiction creation shows the characteristics of "splicing." Fans combine A Dream of Red Mansions with novel ideas of time travel, rebirth, detectives, etc., to present rich and diversified works. What is surprising, however, is these fan fiction stories, despite their variety in genre, are highly consistent in their spiritual core - satisfying love and flourishing families. Fans have re-endowed the original characters with a feminist consciousness, giving them superior talents and resources, and even giving them some magical abilities, such as traveling through time and space. However, these "reborn" characters often take the most worldly path: marrying a prince and building a career. Ironically, this is precisely the kind of Confucian ethics that the original book rejects, and for which the work has become both a pinnacle and anomaly of classical Chinese fiction. Baoyu, the hero who does not conform to the expectations of Confucian ethics in the original work, is abandoned by many fan writers. They separate the original work’s main couple Baoyu and Daiyu and change Daiyu's lover into the originally supporting character of Beijing King, believing that Beijing King has a prominent family and is not as emotional as Baoyu, which is more suitable for Daiyu. This kind of societal value, that women should marry someone more prominent than themselves, is actually not modern but the mainstream view of feudal times. Here we see an interesting phenomenon: today's fan fiction for this subversive classic work continues the traditional view.

Biography

Xiaoxi Zhou earned her PhD in communication at Fudan University. Her research interests include fan studies, celebrity culture, and Asian popular culture. She is deeply attracted by the emotional characteristics of fan culture.Her dissertation, Structures of Feeling of Chinese Idol Fans: A New Emotional Intimacy in the Making, shows a new type of intimacy among Chinese fandom

The Popularity of Cotton Dolls: The Desire to Return to Childhood

A cotton doll, as the name suggests, is a toy made of cotton and about 10-20 cm in size. The main body design originated in South Korea in 2017, mimicking K-pop idols, and became a hot commodity. In 2018, cotton dolls entered the Chinese market, and some cotton dolls gradually separated from the meaning of K-pop idols and became ordinary goods for the public rather than K-pop fans. People who love cotton dolls have formed "doll groups" on the Internet. According to the "2021 Cotton Doll Player Insight Report," 43% of the cotton doll's fans are born after 2000, with 8.73 cotton dolls per capita.

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The popularity of cotton dolls has made "cuty" popular in China. They have also become a favorite image of high school girls and young office ladies, a totem of "Peter Pan syndrome.” Guard this lovely, fragile, romantic image, as if you can keep the innocent feelings of your heart in the process.

The popularity of cotton dolls shows that the entertainment industry is not just a huge, glossy market for images and symbols, it also provides a critical material carrier for fans’ emotions. The intimate feelings of the fans are concentrated in the tangible object of the cotton doll. The relationship with the beloved idol can be experienced in concrete material, not just viewed in symbolic images. Fans use transparent bags to take the doll shopping, take photos, punch the card, highlighting the doll's display value but also announcing their fan identity to others. Fans are not content to stay in the visual field; they also want to touch with their hands to feel the intimacy. Baudrillard called non-functional goods "gadgets," meaning that they were divorced from practical value and had only symbolic meaning. The practical value of the cotton doll lies precisely in the implementation of the symbolic meaning on the concrete and perceptible material, which happens to form an interesting contrast with Baudrillard's "gadget."

In fact, buying a cotton doll is only the first step. "Dress up" is the key practice. The young people who buy the dolls call it "raising a doll." "Raising" is a special verb in the Chinese context, which means caring and supporting the family, from the material to the spiritual level. The basic tasks of "raising a doll" include making up the doll, changing the hair, buying clothes, and so on. In such a very special "raising" demand market, many new jobs were born: doll restorer, fashion designer, barber and other professions have begun to appear. Under the influence of consumer culture, fans have completed the shaping of personal aesthetics, styles, and values on various cotton dolls. From this perspective, the cotton doll is a representative of McRobie's "consumer girl culture."

Shrink the idol into a mini cotton doll, dress him up, buy clothes, take him to travel with friends, take photos with him; the process is similar to the experience of girls with Barbie dolls. The events that fans experience with the dolls construct one intimate narrative after another as time passes. Immersed in the world of the cotton doll, with the cotton doll as a bridge, addicted to the experience of intimate emotions, you can escape from the real world and enter a world of only private relations and intimate imagination. The cotton doll evokes the fond memories of the fans’ childhood, and the combination of this nostalgic tenderness and the love of the idol gives the fans an unparalleled pleasure experience. That doesn't mean fans can't distinguish between the real world and the imagined world. To quote Baudrillard's wonderful analysis of Santa Claus, after a little knowledge, children no longer believe in Santa Claus. Even so, they still look forward to their Christmas presents. Fans fully understand that the cotton doll in their arms has little to do with the idol, but the intimate companionship established with the cotton doll evokes rosy childhood memories, which are still precious and worth looking forward to. This fits in with the worldwide trend of "Peter Pan syndrome," which challenges the values of the adult world, does not define one's preferences by worldly standards of success, and encourages you to live forever on that beautiful island.

During the COVID-19 lockdown period when gatherings could not be held, the companionship of cotton dolls comforted many people. The touch of a soft fabric, changing clothes for a lovely figure, and even talking to him or her are all great ways to banish loneliness. The main force of consumers buying cotton dolls is school girls and young professional women. For young girls who go to school, the cotton doll is "another self.” School rules restrict how they dress themselves, but they can achieve their desired style on the cotton doll. For young office workers, the decompression and social attributes of cotton dolls have become the primary uses. Many young office workers bring cotton dolls to work and attend weekend "doll parties." By "raising dolls," young people from rural areas who come to work in big cities have greatly expanded their social circle and relieved the pressure brought by a week's work.

The popularity of cotton dolls has been accompanied by China's declining fertility rate for several years. Cotton doll fans call these toys "pups," a term of endearment that shows parental compassion for their children. Although some of the fans are underage teenagers themselves, they have enjoyed playing the role of mothers in the process of "raising a doll."

One of my teachers told me how she was shocked by the cotton doll culture. One of her teenage relatives was a cotton doll fan, and the girl carried the doll around and talked to her. My teacher could not understand this phenomenon at all. This lack of understanding was displayed in a more dramatic way on the Chinese Internet in October this year. Some fans took the dolls into a chain of hot pot restaurants, which are known for their considerate and warm service, and asked the staff to celebrate their dolls' birthdays. But the request was refused by the waiter, who thought it was weird to celebrate the doll's birthday and that it was just a toy. It was the same "culture shock" my teacher had. It is difficult for them to understand the emotion and communication that exists around the "non-person," to really treat an object like a human being - to talk to him, to celebrate his birthday. This story was big news on the Chinese Internet in October

Having a cotton doll fulfills the irreplaceable role of symbols - confirming intimacy. Token of love often come out of the entertainment industry’s large-scale standardized production of items, such as albums, posters, etc. It is precisely because the image data of the idol can be easily obtained that the limited release of the cotton doll is trying to jump out of the world of commodities and can obtain unique meaning through "dress up" and "accompany" in the hands of fans. The intimate feeling brought by the cotton doll is not only in the state of mind. The tactile feeling is like a deep hug, and the soft touch of the fabric can evoke a happy and comfortable feeling. Attached to things and carried with them, the cotton doll becomes an excellent carrier for experiencing intimacy. 

Under the popularity of cotton dolls, a new "feeling structure" seems to have emerged, which is different from the traditional understanding of emotion. It is a very strong "attachment" that accumulates between people and things. This attachment can express both a sense of intimacy and fellowship, as well as practical touch, care, and engagement, and it becomes an important social substitute during periods of great containment when parties cease. In addition, the doll is like a young person's own doppelganger, and the characteristics that they can't really practice in daily life can be realized in the doll. Finally, the cotton doll takes us back to the safe space of childhood, surrounded by soft fabrics as when we were fully loved and cared for by our mother. Cotton dolls reproduce the characteristics of fabric in texture and shape and let us experience the role of child and mother through role-play at the same time. No wonder cotton dolls are so popular in today's age.

Biography

Xiaoxi Zhou earned her PhD in communication at Fudan University. Her research interests include fan studies, celebrity culture, and Asian popular culture. She is deeply attracted by the emotional characteristics of fan culture.Her dissertation, Structures of Feeling of Chinese Idol Fans: A New Emotional Intimacy in the Making, shows a new type of intimacy among Chinese fandom

Contemplating Molly: Notes on Pop-Mart Toys (Part Three)

Read Part One here.

Read Part Two here.

All of this means that Molly was designed to be scrutinized and studied more than she was designed to be played with in any traditional sense. I do fiddle with her and touch her when I see her on my desk, opening and closing her visor or moving her arm up and down, pointing her ray gun at different objects. American toys are sold in terms of the number of different points of articulation, but these toys seem to be selling their limited mobility. These limits, though, mean that she can become more fully an object for introspection; she comes alive only in our imagination. In outlining the different frames we can put around Molly, I am of course mimicking the kinds of daydreaming and contemplation this doll was designed to provoke among young office workers in Shanghai. These toys suck everything towards them, even as they also function as portals into larger imaginary worlds. Molly, much like the Maltese Falcon, is, indeed, the stuff dreams are made of.

Much like the Snape notebook, Pop Mart products apply this distinctively Chinese style to their various imported IPs, as is suggested by these figurines of Ultraman or the Disney Princesses, some of which are unrecognizable to western eyes even though they originate in our media. These familiar characters have been reconceptualized, reconsidered, reimagined, remade, and restoried before they enter circulation in China. From the first, I was fascinated by this process of ongoing g/localization.

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Then, again, there are more high-end toy stores dedicated to toys which reproduce in precise details the range of robots, in particular those of mecha anime series or restaging specific moments from the Ultraman series, which are much more faithful to the original source material than the Pop Mart toys are, but these toy stores tend to attract more men than women. One of my more startling encounters was a window display showing a row of Ultramen being crucified, which I later learned referred to a plot point in one of the Ultraman films. Here, the window display rewards fan knowledge, even as it may startle those who are not in the know.  Fandom studies talks about affirmational vs. transformational fans: on that continuum, Pop Mart leans towards the pleasures of transformation.

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What makes a character seem promising for this market? Shanghai Disneyland studied the existing characters – Chip and Dale, Lotsa Bear, Winnie the Pooh, etc. – which do well in the Chinese market, discovering recurring trends of cuteness and mischievousness before launching a China-specific IP, the pink fox Linabell, as a friend of the Japanese bear Duffy. A corporate statement characterizes Linabell as “a fox with an inquisitive mind and the intelligence that supports it. She finds joy and excitement in solving problems and mysteries.” Her likeness in the form of t-shirts and stuffed animal head purses can be seen throughout Shanghai and far beyond, signaling how successful the company has been at g/localizing its output. It is hard to know what is the best way to explain how Linabell is decapitated and then worn as a fetish or talisman, as a decorative item, as an accessory to the larger performance of female identity not only inside the theme park but routinely on the streets and especially in the malls.

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Pop Mart layers these foreign influences over their own original IP, so here is a Molly doll dressed in Chinese Astronaut uniform, but we see the face of Spongebob Squarepants reflected in her eyes.

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Molly and the other original IP characters are often shown wearing mouse ears or cosplaying as characters from international sources, literally enacting the idea that, however foreign their trappings, their core identity remains Chinese. 

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A similar layering of cultural influences can be seen around the practice of Disneybounding. Disneybounding began as a way of working around the rules which are imposed on visitors to their theme parks: adult guests are not allowed to wear any costumes which might confuse other visitors into thinking they were park cast members. To work around these constraints, Disneybounders began to adopt the color palettes or design philosophies of specific Disney characters, seeing how close they could get without triggering a response from the gatekeepers. In that sense, Disneybounding represented a means of negotiating with the constraints that rights holders impose on readers.

Here, for example, these Chinese women adopt Disney characters popular in China into Japanese subcultural street fashion, while others adopt colors and patterns associated with Snow White into Hanfu, both examples of how western content gets translated into Asian fashion.

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Pop Mart is certainly not unique in constructing fan subjectivity as a layered identity. Consider this eye-catching example of an unauthorized Winnie the Pooh plush toy which has Pooh, in effect, cosplaying as Tiger (the most generous read of what’s going on when he wears his friend’s head as a trophy). A still more subversive interpretation might read this toy in relation to Chinese memes which equate Xi Jinping with Winnie the Pooh and Barack Obama with Tiger. I am just not sure how deep one should go in interpreting any political significance here, but the deeper you go as a westerner trying to understand Chinese culture, the more it is clear how little we yet understand what has always been a “yes and…” culture.

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I hope all of this attention on Molly does not come across as too obsessive. Ever since my first visit to a Pop Mart, I have been as much possessed by these toys as I am someone who wants to acquire and possess them. Rumor has it that there may be a Pop Mart coming to Los Angeles, though this may be dangerous to my pocketbook. My one regret is that I did not bring more of them back with me to gift to worthy homes in America.

Contemplating Molly: Notes on Pop-Mart Toys (Part Two)

Read Part One here.

While collectors in Japan have historically tended to be male, Pop Mart’s customers from the start have been overwhelmingly young women. These young women have often had to resist parental pressures to marry and settle down in their home towns across China, choosing instead to pursue educational and work opportunities, and thus independence, which has contributed to a wave of urbanization, especially for women, in contemporary China. 

Ingyu Oh, Hyun-Chin Lim and Woonho Jang have discussed the feminine appeals of K-Pop music in terms which might describe Chinese fandom as well: 

“Assumed to have diverse female identities, all of which are virtuous and ethical, often armed with an unchanging belief in social justice, female universalism in Hallyu is not just about achieving an equal political and hegemonic power in society with males, be that in government offices, business corporations, or the pop culture market, a tenet popularized by the French feminist movement of Parité. Instead, female universalism in Hallyu allows all women in Korean society to achieve their diverse types of personal and social dreams, ranging from personal success to grand social transformations. Therefore, the alternative messages both K-drama and K-pop are delivering to their female fans remain diverse, as long as they commonly espouse the concept of moral and ethical women who are armed with the spirit of social, therefore gender, justice.” 

This pop feminism, as Sarah Banet-Weiser notes, often links personal empowerment with consumer culture and the performance of self in everyday life, but given the repressive context in which these Chinese women operate, even these small steps can have transformative effects. Molly’s pink space suit connects her with Barbie in the west, reflecting the fantasy that girls (or in this case, adult women) can do or be anything they want. I recall some of the many cringey comments I have heard through the years from westerners of my parent’s generation, who unconsciously view Chinese women as having the fragile beauty of a “China doll.” Molly offers an image of an, ahem, altogether more plastic feminine identity.

In order to speak to this hip young female consumer, Pop Mart absorbs a wide array of subcultural street fashion, from goth to steampunk, allowing for subtle if not altogether covert signals of affiliation and identity to enter their cubicles.  

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The figures from American, British, and Japanese franchises on Pop Mart’s shelves are only the tip of the iceberg. There are whole malls in Shanghai dedicated to otaku culture, where giant monitors showcase the latest anime, where massive figurines of popular characters allow photo ops, where store after store offer imported cultural goods for consumption, and where these shops co-exist with cat cafes, maid cafes, bubble tea shops, and other elements of Japanese everyday life. Shanghai has more than 400 shopping malls, many of them sprawling and five or six stories tall, so each is seeking ways to distinguish itself from the competition. Leaning into global media fandom has been one core strategy for doing so.

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In the heart of Shanghai there is a full size and garishly colored statue of Evangelion Unit-01. Early on a summer Sunday morning, the statue attracted a mix of young women in Japanese school girl costumes, geeky guys, and a family centered around a young princess in heart shaped sunglasses and a fluffy pink dress. During my fieldwork, I visited cafes dedicated to the Japanese manga omnibus Shonen Jump, the Final Fantasy video game franchise, and the anime series Naruto, not to mention a dojo where Pokémon fans were slapping down cards like an earlier generation might have played with Mahjong tiles. Another mall adopted a more feminine focus, where stalls of K-pop fans sell collector cards and boys love paraphernalia, and shops offer elaborate examples of Lolita dresses and Decora.

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Keep in mind the complex geopolitical history of China’s relations with Japan, South Korea, the United States, and Great Britain, and you get a sense of the growing generational tensions around these pop cosmopolitan borrowings. The Chinese government worries that they may be losing this generation to outside cultural influences.  

State responses mix promoting their own cultural products and repressing fandom around imported cultural goods and practices. In the first instance, we could point to their endorsement of the hangfu movement, where contemporary Chinese people reject modern (and often westernized) garb in favor of traditional design elements from classical Han culture. The Chinese state now embraces this long neglected, sometimes actively discouraged style as a means of rebuilding “cultural confidence” and redirecting the fans’ search for an imaginary elsewhere, in effect, to moments of the nation’s past glory.  Establishments have been set up to rent such costumes and apply related makeup and hair styles so that enthusiasts might glide through historic sites, such as restored water villages or cultural museums, though some hangfu elements can be spotted as everyday streetwear.  Forward Industry Research Institute (a Chinese research institute) found that by 2020, the number of hangfu enthusiasts in China reached 5.163 million, creating a market size equivalent to US$980 million, a proportional increase of over 40% compared to the previous year.

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Many of the participants have been lured into hangfu culture through their fannish engagement with historical fiction television serials, such as Empress in the Palace, though there are intense debates between fans who seek accuracy and authenticity in their fashion and those who are inspired by the less accurate but more dramatic costumes from their favorite series. 

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Koitake is a rival of Pop Mart which distinguishes itself with character goods based around Chinese television series and movies – works frequently produced by the state. For example, The Age of Awakening is a dramatization of the early days of the Chinese revolution with young and handsome versions of such venerated political figures as Chang Kai-Shek and Mao Zedong.

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How might we compare the sexy young revolutionaries depicted in vinyl with the old-school plaster of paris busts of a grandfatherly Mao which had been an ubiquitous element in China’s official culture a few decades before? The old busts are today often bought for irony or camp, but the new figurines are embraced as part of a growing wave of nationalism and Han supremacy sweeping this same millennial and post-millennial generation while their classmates are bopping to BTS and Black Pink. Do such contradictions arise as a result of the “two economies, one county” policy?

We would scarcely describe her as an agent of propaganda, but my Molly does serve at least one important state priority – the promotion of the Chinese space program. From the moment I stepped off the plane, it was clear China was engaged in an aggressive space race, whether Americans knew it or not, a race with India and Japan, both of whom are putting considerable funds into deep space probes, lunar landers, and ultimately, we expect, manned Mars missions. I have not seen so much popular space related imagery since the NASA moon landing in the 1970s, with significant portions of their toy stores given over to detailed models of various space vehicles or to more playful evocations of the astronaut, such as Pop Mart’s various space-woman Mollys.

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Moreover, Pop Mart’s products may help us to understand how processes of g/localization may shape this struggle between national cultures and anxieties about cultural imperialism. Each of the major East Asia competitors have developed their own styles of cuteness –  Kawaii in Japan, Meng in China, and Aegyo in South Korea. While there is certainly overlap in terms of neonatal features and high pitched voices, these different kinds of cuteness rely on different underlying ideologies. Japan’s Kawaii is characterized by an appeal to maternal instincts, the desire to protect and nurture the young and innocent, while as Xaojuan Ma characterizes Meng: “Meng culture signifies young consumers’ emotional needs because, to millennials and Gen Zers in China, Meng culture evokes a restorative feeling through fantasy.” Generally, Kawaii involves simplification, whereas Meng involves ornamentation, as demonstrated by this Chinese produced image of the Harry Potter character, Snape.  This helps us to understand the differences in forms of cuteness in Pop Mart’s Meng aesthetic and the Kawaii aesthetic of the Funko Pops that have been such a craze in America for the past decade or so.

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Another pleasure of a Pop Mart toy rests on its intricate details, which invite us to scan it and make new discoveries each time we pick it up. This focus on elaboration reflects an encyclopedic tendency one finds in so many different forms of Chinese art going back to its classical paintings or even the earliest clay or brass pots, themselves sometimes decorated with figures of cats or horses that carry forward to some of the anthropomorphized figures found in the toy shop today. This feature, more than anything else, makes these Chinese toys, much as Barthes sought to demonstrate the cultural dimensions of French toys.

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Part Three Coming Soon.

Contemplating Molly: Notes on Pop-Mart Toys (Part One)

“French toys: one could not find a better illustration of the fact that the adult Frenchman sees the child as another self. All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size.”

— Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“Where does he get those wonderful toys?”

— The Joker, Tim Burton’s Batman

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Meet Molly. She was gifted to me during the seven weeks I spent this summer teaching, lecturing, and doing field work on fan culture in China. She is a product readily available at any of the Pop Mart stores in Shanghai. Across this post, I am going to explore some of the different ways we might make sense of Molly as an embodiment of Chinese fan culture.

Pop Mart, the Beijing-based toy store chain whose annual sales have gone from $22 million in 2017 to close to $100 million in 2022, offers a valuable starting point into understanding the role that media fandom plays in China’s emerging consumer economy amidst struggles over its national identity. As of 2023, Pop Mart has 200 brick and mortar outlets and over 1000 vending machines spread across 22 countries, mostly in Asia, all of which deal in character goods, particularly blind boxes.  Pop Mart has now opened its first U.S.-based store in New Jersey and plans for more, including rumors of one in Los Angeles. When I first visited Beijing more than 25 years ago, the culture was still in transition from the uniformity of the Maoist years towards greater individuation, expressed through the expanded access to consumer goods. Its production was shifting from providing subsistence goods towards the introduction of goods designed for no purpose other than pleasure and joy.

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Character goods represent a broad category of merchandise centering on fictional characters, whether in the form of plush (stuffed animals) or vinyl (figurines). Blind boxes represent a marketing strategy for franchise-based vinyl toys – one of a series of a dozen or so collectible figures are sold randomly, much like bubble gum cards, in boxes which tell you only which series is represented inside. If you want to collect them all, you need to buy more than a dozen blind boxes, and there are rare figures which require massive amounts of consumption to acquire. There is, however, a growing second hand market where you can buy precisely the figures you want to round out your collection – for a slightly higher price.

People have discussed blind boxes in terms of gambling, a sense of risk rather than security. Which Molly you get sometimes seems like a matter of fate and predestination:  The toy gods meant for me to receive this one. I think a better analogy may be with strip tease: We peel off the layers of packaging, the cardboard box, then the translucent foil bag inside, each masking the next from view, until we finally see what is hidden within. Much like Youtube’s unboxing videos, the opening up of a Pop Mart box becomes a social occasion which culminates in the reveal as we finally see Molly in all of her glory. Only her pronounced innocence prevents us from seeing the strip tease dramaturgy in this process.

One of the most artful aspects of Pop Mart’s design is its capacity to construct compelling and coherent sets – groups of 10 or 12 figures that are clearly differentiated and yet belong together, which are familiar yet different. Sets are constantly being launched and removed from the market, so that each time you visit the store you find something new, and the whole gives you the pleasure of constant differentiation. Some of the lines are truly surreal, as in Foodie Molly, where, for example, she is shown wearing a fried egg on her head. And the packaging shows us the entire series, reminding us what we still do not have, creating a compulsion to buy yet another Molly if only so we could get the one which has so far eluded our acquisition.

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To visit the company's Shanghai flagship store is to step into another world, one where pastel pink, lavender, or turquoise are the dominant colors, and where the toys are set against the backdrop of an imaginary spaceship.  Many fans and collectors come just to get their photographs taken in this out-of-this-world setting, but once they are inside the shop, they succumb to the lure of the ever-shifting range of character-centered products. Pop Mart, thus, is selling fantasies of out-of-this-world escape for their Chinese fans. A Chinese mall in the era of social media presents one photo opp after another and as you walk through them, you experience the pleasure of both taking pictures and posing for pictures. Seeing and being seen is bound up with the retail process.

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A high percentage of the merchandise represented unique toy lines, produced by more than 40 designers, each with their own unique aesthetics and appealing to distinctive types of consumers. Molly – designed by Hong Kong-based Kenny Wong – now represents their top-selling product line. The Pop Mart toys are displayed in museum-case configurations, designed to stress the work of their distinctive designers, their desirability, and their status as collector items. The focus on the personalities and styles of these designers gives purchasing the right Pop Mart toy a feel of connoisseurship which depends on our own expertise and mastery. We know what we want in multiple senses of the word.

Pop Mart is the dominant player in the expanding market in China for designer toys, representing roughly 10 percent of an annual market of $3 billion dollars. My observations during seven weeks of field work in Shanghai found that most malls have 3-4, sometimes more, stores focused on character goods and especially blind boxes, not to mention various Robot Shops (large vending machines representing several toy lines) and rows of Gashapon and claw machines, all of which offer fans a chance to gamble on getting the item they need to round out their collections. The ubiquitousness of Pop Mart branding in China is suggested by this detail from a painting displayed in a Shanghai Museum of contemporary art, suggesting the ways that the designer aesthetic of their toys wins admiration for its artfulness even among the custodians of high and official culture.

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Investors are quick to note the raw potential of these various lines of Intellectual Property to be turned into future media franchises, mostly of Chinese origin in a country which aspires, but has rarely succeeded, in developing the kind of pop culture “coolness” that seems to come easily to Japan, Korea, and India, all arch rivals for the global media marketplace. A rival company calls its vending machines IP Stations, openly acknowledging the degree to which the whole industry has come to center around fostering intellectual property. 

But beyond this, Pop Mart also has more than 100 license agreements with major media franchises, such as Disney (Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, Mickey and Friends, the Disney Princesses), Harry Potter, Tom and Jerry, and various Japanese cult media properties, such as Ultraman, Studio Ghibli, Pokemon, Naruto, and One Piece. While these products co-exist comfortably on Pop Mart’s shelves, they offer a window into a struggle over cultural sovereignty in which the Chinese government is increasingly playing a heavy role, an issue which will resurface throughout this section. Each license represents a souvenir from what Mary Louise Pratt calls a “contact zone” – a point of encounter with a foreign story entering the culture, not without some conflict. The state is responding in both repressive and regulatory ways, restricting access, but also in attractive ones, producing and incentivizing alternative forms of Chinese popular culture.

In his essay on French toys, Roland Barthes protests the shift away from toys made of wood and other traditional materials toward more synthetic objects:

“Current toys are made of a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature. Many are now molded from complicated mixtures; the plastic material of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch. A sign which fills one with consternation is the gradual disappearance of wood, in spite of its being an ideal material because of its firmness and its softness, and the natural warmth of its touch….Wood makes essential objects, objects for all time…. Henceforth, toys are chemical in substance and color; their very material introduces one to a coenaesthesis of use, not pleasure. These toys die in fact very quickly, and once dead, they have no posthumous life for the child.”

When I was growing up, toys made in China had a reputation for being cheaply and crudely made, meant to fall apart in your hands, and, later, being potentially toxic since they were made of materials that had been discarded as unsafe in the west.  But Pop Mart toys are beautifully made: their colors are vivid, their details rich, and the vinyl is sensuous to the touch. I wish I could find toys this beautifully made here. True to Barthes, they have an immediacy which seems to belong to the current moment, but unlike Barthes, I have no trouble imagining them being treasured for decades and passed down to future generations long after the topical reference points which inspired them have been forgotten. The variation of these figures makes it feel as if each one is unique. 

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Astronaut Molly dolls come in a range of sizes from Mega to Micro and a range of different colors. When I map my own meanings, memories, and associations onto them, they become mine, personal to me, in a way that few American toys, given the relatively limited options, ever achieve. Another feature which amplifies our sense of ownership is that each toy comes in two or three pieces which we have to click together, giving us a sense that we helped to construct the finished product. They are “real” in the way the Velveteen Rabbit was “real” but without the destruction, the signs of wear and tear which that book reads as love. These toys are nigh on indestructible, though I have discovered that the little plastic accessories can be easy to misplace despite how much care we lavish on these items.

Speaking of price points, the basic blind box goes for roughly 10-12 American dollars, making it an indulgence but one well within reach of its desired market. You can buy it when you are having a bad day as a way of making yourself feel better or you can gift it to a deserving friend as a token of your affection. It is a bit more than an impulse item but less than most luxury goods. And the sensuousness of design, color, and material give us the same kinds of pleasure as dark chocolate.

These ready-made commercial toys co-exist with a more DIY doll culture in Shanghai. My local guide took me to visit a convention where grassroots doll makers could display their accomplishments, and amateurs could buy eyes, hair, glasses, shoes, and the like as resources for producing their own dolls.  

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And at the doll makers gathering, there were many examples of ways that people were producing their own versions of figures from western media franchises, such as this figure of Wednesday Adams, which tapped the cult interest in Tim Burton’s Netflix series. And just as you can find knock-off fashion goods on Shanghai’s streets, you can also find knock-off Barbies here.

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Elsewhere, the vinyl dolls co-exist with the simple cloth dolls which have become central icons of Asian idol fandom.

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Unlike traditional toy stores, these products target not children but young adults, particularly millennials, who live in cities and are students or early career professionals. Their purchasers use them to decorate their workspaces; they bring with them fantasies of escape and rejuvenation. As China’s consumer economy expands, as the country has experienced a decade of unprecedented prosperity, such consumers have more discretionary income than previous generations.  Participation in various media fandoms has provided an essential release from the pressures of China’s intensive exam culture, one which often has to be pursued covertly because of parental and teacher pressures to reroute those interests back into their studies. One student described going to the library to do her homework and using that time outside parental oversight to write and post fanfiction on the public computers. Others described teachers who told them that being a fan was a waste of time. 

These young fans face a new round of pressure as they complete their college degrees and enter the job market, given the intense work hours and demands of the Chinese labor market. Many are forced to discard their fannish activities and associations, or reduce them to the occasional purchase of Pop Mart toys to decorate their cubicles. A small percentage become professional fans living on commissions from other fans as they deploy skills that their community values. As such, these character goods provide a momentary release of frustrations, a temporary escape from the workplace grind. Many are pop cosmopolitans, who are drawn towards an imaginary homeland that is built around pop culture from elsewhere. But Molly and the other Pop Mart toys allow them to hold onto some small token of their fannish identities – gathering dust on a book shelf – even as they embrace more corporate roles.

Part Two Coming Soon