Friends reconsidered: Cultural politics, intergenerationality, and afterlives

With the passing in 2014 of the twentieth anniversary of its debut episode, the iconic millennial sitcom Friends retains a rare cultural currency and remains a crucial reference point for understanding the concerns of Generation X. This special issue, therefore, interrogates the contemporary and historical significance of Friends as a popular sitcom that reflected and obfuscated American fin de siècle anxieties at the time, and considers the lasting resonance of its cultural afterlife. Its abiding impact as millennial cultural touchstone can be seen in its persistent ability to find new generations of viewers and its manifest influence on myriad extratextual phenomena

John Terry and the Predicament of Englishness:Ambivalence and Nostalgia in the Premier League Era

This article examines media discourse surrounding the Chelsea and England footballer John Terry and argues that his iconicity embodies multiple anxieties about Englishness and English football in the era of neoliberalism. In a nostalgic culture in search of ‘traditional’ English heroes, Terry is celebrated for his physicality and traditionally ‘English’ style of play; yet, his off-field behaviour is seen to be both emblematic and symptomatic of a celebrity culture considered to betray the values coded as English in football history. Taking Terry’s dilemma as a starting point, this article historicizes the rise of footballers as celebrities; examines widespread anxiety about the loss of the typically English, noble working class footballer; and interrogates the problems of thinking about sporting icons of Englishness without recourse to the dominant nostalgic mode

Team GB, or No Team GB, That Is The Question:Olympic Football and the Post-War Crisis of Britishness

This article explores the furore surrounding the proposed creation of a ‘Team GB’ football team for the London 2012 Olympics, contextualizing it historically within the post-war crisis of Britishness

The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal, by Orin Starn, Duke University Press, 2011.

A review of The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal, by Orin Starn, Duke University Press, 2011

“If I Don’t Input Those Numbers…It Doesn’t Make Much of a Difference”: Insulated Precarity and Gendered Labor in Friends

This article examines the middle-class work culture of Friends, reading it as a text imbued with both Restorative and Reflective Nostalgia. I argue that the “insulated precarity” of Friends’ protagonists, and their seeming nonchalance about work, marks out the show as a prime example of a Clinton-era “boom” text and as a one that struggles with rising anxiety inherent in neoliberalism. I focus on the role of Chandler Bing, who quits his nondescript office job to follow his dreams, before realizing he does not know what they are, and ends up in advertising. I argue that while Friends’ self-reflexive comic mode facilitates sympathetic treatment of Chandler as a “New Man,” his perpetual crisis of masculinity (his infertility, his periodic reliance on his wife’s income, and the constant questioning of his sexuality) is related to the lack of purpose in his career and, thus, the changing work culture that characterized the period. </jats:p

‘The 90s are officially over’: Generation X celebrity break-ups.

In this piece we consider the intersection of relationships, nostalgia, and generational identities as struc- turing elements in celebrity culture, through a small sample of high-profile Gen X examples