Elvis’ Gospel music: Between the secular and the spiritual?

Do fans sanctify their heroes? In the past, I have argued that Elvis fandom is not a neo-religious practice but that attention to a modified version of Durkheim’s theory of religion can, nevertheless, help to explain it as a form of social interaction. I take that argument further here, first by revealing the ethical and analytical advantages of neo-Durkheimian theory, then by pitting this theory against three aspects of Elvis’ sincere engagement with gospel music. Elvis Presley won three Grammy awards for his gospel albums and was the musician who did most to bring the gospel quartet tradition to the mainstream. His eclectic personal ties to spirituality and religion have become a focus of debate within his fan culture. They offer a set of discursive resources through which to explain the emotional impact and social influence of his music. If star musicians are positioned as centres of attention, what happens when they use their privileged position in the spotlight to offer a “spiritual” message

Gloria Patri, Gender, and the Gulf War: A Conversation with Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly\u27s gallery size installation, entitled Gloria Patri, was first shown at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University in 1992. Gloria Patri focuses on the issues of heroism, mastery, and war within the context of a pathologized masculinity; that is, on the identification by both men and women with masculine ideals of mastery, domination, and control, and their simultaneous physical and psychological collapse. This crisis of masculine mastery is set against the backdrop of the Persian Gulf War

Coping with a Crisis of Meaning: Televised Paranoia

Across all genres, television communicates a host of perceived dangers or risks to human survival as entertainment, responding and reproducing the victim and risk consciousness of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Terrorism has captured the imaginations of not only politicians but also producer/writers, and as a consequence of this, and the visual spectacle that war and terrorism provide, it has featured regularly and consistently in British and American television programming. This article presents the analysis of some British current affairs entertainment programming (film and documentary) broadcast by the BBC during the height of the misnamed ‘war on terror’. Through the analysis of these programmes, I will demonstrate a psycho-cultural approach to textual analysis informed by early object relations psychoanalysis. Being aware of the degree to which political elites have shaped what is known about the ‘war on terror’ allows us to apply knowledge of the political and historical context of these elites to understanding why the dominant ‘war on terror’ perspective is paranoid in character. I will offer an explanation of why a paranoid style predominates in terrorism related programming in my conclusion