Patricia Mellencamp

Analysts today routinely look toward the media and popular culture as a way of understanding global security. Although only a decade ago, such a focus would have seemed out of place, the proliferation of digital technologies in the twenty-first century has transformed our knowledge of near and distant events so that it has become impossible to separate the politics of war, suffering, terrorism, and security from the practices and processes of the media.This book brings together ten path-breaking essays that explore the ways our notions of fear, insecurity, and danger are fostered by intermediary sources such as television, radio, film, satellite imaging, and the Internet. The contributors, from a wide range of disciplines, show how both fictional and fact-based threats to global security have helped to create and sustain a culture that is deeply distrustful. Topics range from the Patriot Act, to the censorship of media personalities, to the role that television programming plays as an interpretative frame for current events.Designed to promote strategic thinking about the relationships between media, popular culture, and global security, this book is essential reading for scholars of international relations, technology, and media studies.

A challenging look at twenty years of feminist film theory

A challenging look at twenty years of feminist film theory

" . . . acute look at the state of contemporary culture . . . A humorous . . . book, it yields rewarding advice for our perception of reality and fiction." —Back Stage / Shoot "Mellencamp's ease of movement between the conceptual and the commonplace is the great strength of this work. . . . High Anxiety is an invaluable contribution to the cultural studies debate . . . " —Art + Text Written with wit and flair, High Anxiety is a critique of the temporality of U.S. television, a narrative journey between Freud's texts on obsession and the cult of anxiety pervading contemporary culture. Operation Desert Storm, I Love Lucy, Anita Hill, Twin Peaks, and Oprah are a few of the subjects which form this "anxious" mosaic of popular culture.

Indiscretions follows the path of U.S. avant-garde film and video from the underground of the 1960s to the academy of the 1980s. Patricia Mellencamp traces and charts the intersections of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the desiring male subject, Roland Barthes and texts of pleasure, Michel Foucault and the disciplinary society, the grotesque body and Mikhail Bakhtin, the rhizomatic alogic of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the female subject of feminist film theory. She creates a dialogue among theory and popular culture and politics through inventive readings of the films of Owen Land, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Bruce Conner, Robert Nelson, Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, and Sally Potter, and videotapes by Ant Farm, TVTV, Michael Smith, William Wegman, and Cecelia Condit.