Scodari, Christine

Tommy Hilfiger is a popular fashion designer who incorporates a unique mix of style, patriotism and cultural diversity into the advertising and marketing of his products. But does his approach communicate true equality or divide Americans through race, class, and/or consumerism? Does his conceptualization of cultural diversity support ideals of multiculturalism or promote principles of assimilation? Tommy Hilfiger's official website, www.tommy.com, is analyzed from a cultural studies perspective to examine these questions. Political economic, cultural economic and semiotic theories are applied at the levels of production, text and consumption to reveal whether hegemonic or counter-hegemonic themes prevail. As a result, it is determined that hegemonic themes of white, Anglo-Americanism and consumerism do prevail, while counter-hegemonic messages of multiculturalism are less dominant. Findings also indicate that there is still much progress to be made in terms of achieving cultural equality in the United States.

This thesis focuses on the fandom surrounding the FOX network's hit show, The X-Files, via a long term study of an America Online site specifically devoted to the show. The primary focus is on audience opinions in relation to gender issues. Specific topics of analysis include why The X-Files is so popular with fans, the different types of episodes exhibited in season six, the character of Dana Scully, Mulder and Scully's platonic yet sexually charged relationship, and the contribution the Internet has made to the development of the fan community. The analysis finds that, although the show is targeted toward men, female fans are able to find various aspects of the text pleasurable by resisting hegemonic norms and/or utilizing the show's feminine textual characteristics.

This study explores the ways in which female nurses in management negotiate their roles within the male dominated institutions of medicine and administration. Our culture provides to this highly gendered profession a dominant construction of unambiguous identities for both management and nursing. The principles of semiology and feminist media criticism are used to show that negotiation with dominant messages takes place in lived reality in ways that are very similar to the negotiation in which consumers of media texts engage. Nine interview transcripts of nurses in management positions were analyzed for evidence of negotiated decodings of dominant meanings. The analysis reveals the presence of preferred readings, oppositional readings and resistive readings of the dominant construction of identities with an emphasis on the oppositional reading.

The Celestine Prophecy is a popular new age novel which has attracted an audience numbering in the millions. Looking at this book from both the political and cultural economic perspectives allows us to analyze economic factors behind the book's production, the text itself, and the ways the audience uses the text. From these perspectives we can see what produced this cultural phenomenon, and examine alternative meanings that readers of the text may find in it. Issues of hegemony, diversity and domination are explored, as is the "structure of feeling" of the text. How the audience uses or resists the ideas incorporated in the novel is also studied.

A new trend of unscripted, reality television programming chronicling the real-life childbirth experiences of American women and families has gained considerable ground in recent years. These programs, especially Discovery Health's BirthDay and The Learning Channel's A Baby Story, record, edit and broadcast the prenatal, childbirth, and postnatal health care of "everyday" women volunteers, including their physical, social, and emotional concerns. This research study focuses attention on the authoritative, technological and therefore, medically hegemonic perspective of this type of programming, illuminating through content, textual, focus group, and survey analyses the abundance of medically hegemonic meanings in both the discursive and visual aspects of these texts as well as the negotiations of their target audience.

Tabloids, often defined by the half-broadsheet size of regular newspapers, feature titillating, sensationalized stories of crime and/or scandal offered in a piquant manner. The exploratory study asks how the tabloid style was manifested in the coverage of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal of 1998 and related news, thereby fostering a hegemony in which the citizenry was distracted from more important political issues and events. The study also assesses how a critique of such tabloidization developed among journalists and scholars during the scandal. The print media analyzed are the tabloids Star magazine, The National Enquirer, and Globe , and mainstream media The New York Times and Newsweek. This study demonstrates that even the mainstream, "objective" reporting reflected sensationalism, the use of piquant and highly cliched language, and a lust for scandal, rendering it nearly indistinguishable from stories in the reviled tabloids. The related critique, led by journalists and extending to scholars who provided greater insight, precision, and elaboration, focused on the influence of the Internet and an increasingly competitive 24-hour media environment in fueling tabloidesque coverage of the scandal. The escalation of tabloid-style reporting in mainstream publications proved to be a troubling symptom of an industry already struggling under public distrust.

Both incredibly personal and inherently social, cosmetic surgery procedures intended to reconfigure the body toward a more culturally acceptable physicality and the increase in television representations of the phenomenon provoke a complex debate regarding the social, psychological, medical and ethical implications of such practices. This thesis raises the question: Do television texts of cosmetic surgery and their potential consumers reproduce or challenge the hegemony of cosmetic surgery as a cultural practice? Using qualitative, social scientific methodology to analyze current examples of such television texts and study viewer negotiation of these texts, the study concludes that television texts are most likely to present cosmetic surgery in ways that perpetuate hegemonic notions of beauty, and that while viewers may negotiate readings that suit their preconceived notions of cosmetic surgery, they are unlikely to condemn such messages for fear of compromising an individual's power to choose cosmetic surgery for "acceptable reasons" such as improved self-esteem or social acceptance.

This thesis examines how the media depicted First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton when she stepped outside of the traditional feminine roles of wife and/or mother and into the traditionally masculine/public world with her bid to run for the office of United States Senator from New York. It critically examines the cover, cover story images, and textual representations in Newsweek, Time, and New York magazines by means of a feminist semiotic and rhetorical analysis to discern potential meanings. The research concludes that the media circumscribe limited roles for First Ladies. First Ladies continue to be shown as victim, object, and/or appendage of a more powerful male, even when they consider political office. Therefore, it is argued that the media have a profound role in defining political women through the perpetuation of hegemonic constructions of femininity.

Through content and textual analysis, the thesis compares coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the BBC World News and CNN Headline News online services in terms of source selection patterns and framing. The study concluded that both the publicly owned BBC and its commercial counterpart, CNN, perpetuated hegemony by limiting the range of opinions and ideas regarding the conflict. Although both news organizations showed signs of being independent from their respective governments' official perspectives regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, they indirectly assisted in maintaining the status quo, U.S. hegemony, by narrowing the news source list and focusing on the more sensationalistic aspects of the conflict. In so doing, they deflected attention away from important issues of historical and political significance that, if told, would offer a different and more illuminating interpretation of events.

Corporations such as Exxon Mobil and environmentalist groups such as Greenpeace realize the potential of the Internet from a public relations standpoint. They have taken their industrial and oppositional discourse about global warming online through campaigns meant to appear motivated by grassroots impulses but which, as in the case of Exxon Mobil, are often motivated by profit. This study combines rhetorical and media studies approaches in performing semiotic analysis of online texts related to global warming. It concludes that corporations and environmentalists are making innovative use of this new medium in communicating their respective ideologies, but that corporate texts reflect signs and strategies that obscure their sources' primary locus on profit and are, consequently, less transparent.