Forms and functions of genre in transnational popular culture

Abstract

This thesis explores the forms and functions of genre in late capitalist transnational popular culture through a close examination of the processes of genrification articulated to three generic categories located at the margins of genre as a critical construct. The factors that contribute to their ambiguous relationship to the category also make them ideally suited to the analysis of how genre operates in a highly commodified and globalized popular culture impacted by the rise of new media. Since the approach to genre herein stresses its processual characteristics, critical or academic constructions of genre are not privileged over those produced by more commercial or popular sites.

The first chapter deals with the genrification and canonization of Pinky Violence by cult discourses. This category emerged retrospectively in the cult reception of a group of sensationalistic films produced by Japan’s studio system in the early 1970s and has since been taken up by transnational cult discourses and the distributors responsible for the remediation and dissemination of these films to contemporary audiences outside of Japan. The popular forms of connoisseurship responsible for the genrification of Pinky Violence will be analyzed in relation to the subcultural ideologies that underpin cult discourses, the limitations of which will be considered in relation to more feminist manifestations of subversive spectatorship.

The second chapter looks at the relationship between genre and place by turning a lens onto the category of Nordic Noir and the practices of its travelling fans. The mediatization of mass tourism has resulted in the articulation of processes of genrification to the touristic consumption of place. This is encoded in the very name of the genre, which directly indexes the transnational Nordic region that functions as both setting and context of production for the narratives in different media to which the category refers. The chapter’s analysis of the processes of placing and displacing tied to the genre will be explored by interpreting several site-specific resources and their corresponding forms of authenticity as they relate to the third season of the transnational Nordic Noir television series, Bron/Broen.

The final chapter explores various functions of genre in industrial production and corporate processes of proprietization and branding through an analysis of the Bond-type films produced by Shaw Brothers Studio starting in the mid-1960s. The construction of the authorized tradition of James Bond films as corporate property will be examined in relation to its identity as both series and genre. Because genre usually falls outside of proprietary control, processes of genrification embodied in the production of Bond-type films arguably undermine constructions of Bond as property. However, the Shaw Brothers Studio also deployed genre in the projection of a studio identity in which Bond as brand and image simultaneously concealed practices involved in the films’ production.

In order to more fully exploit the critical potential of genre in the analysis of late capitalist transnational culture, the genres selected herein are ones that are themselves located at sites where boundaries between different media, institutions, cultures, and forms of knowledge are being negotiated.