Dr Neil Washbourne

The book explores the complex interconnections between media, political organisation and society. This is particularly important in a period when politics seems to be in crisis.

Abstract: »W.G. Grace: Sportstar, kulturelle Berühmtheit und Held (als Oscar Wildes Schurke) vom großen öffentlichen Drama von 1895«. This article explores the sporting superstardom and cultural celebrity of the Victorian English cricketer Dr. W.G. Grace, who played first-class cricket from 1865-1908. The great attention capital and significant masculine social status associated with his fame were deployed by him and the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) to side line the then dominant professional cricket teams and ensure that the aristocratic amateur-led MCC controlled the game from the early 1870s. It focuses on the social and cultural organisation of fame and a close analysis of Grace’s recognition to explore how Grace’s three-decade (1865-1895) superstardom and celebrity allied to a resurgence in his cricket form made Grace the masculine robust hero of 1895 to Oscar Wilde’s scandalous villain. It explores how that comparison played out as a public drama involving other celebrities. Wilde was reported as systematically removed from masculine social status and Grace approvingly confirmed in its secure embodiment and possession. Keywords: Cultural celebrity; attention capital; masculine social status; mediated publicness; public drama.

More than fifty years after the publication of C. L. R. James's classic Beyond a Boundary, the contributors to Marxism, Colonialism, and Cricket investigate its production and reception and its implication for debates about sports, gender, ...

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Adam Sandler's film work has been critically vilified and paid little attention by academics. This article suggests that his work justifies sustained academic attention, yet I conclude that he offers questionable masculine role models dependent on masculinity being asserted via ambivalent dis-identification with gay men and women. I argue this case via critique of the most sustained analyses of his workand via close readings of aspects of Sandler's films. I dispute Chapman's contextualisation of Sandler's film comedies in relation to thinking about masculinity and gay men. These changes have arisen in response to feminism and the lesbian and gay movement. I argue that Chapman's contextualisation of, and the ambiguities of Sandler's engagement with, feminism and gay men needs more critical attention. Further, I argue that we should actively read Sandler's films using Seidman's idea of comedian comedy and that focusing attention on such comedies’ tensions with narrative film enable us to direct our critical attention on the ambivalences present in Sandler's movies. His films show resistance to relinquishing some privileges of dominant forms of masculinity (physical violence) and demonstrate disgust withthe sexuality, bodies and behaviour of gay men.

This edited collection explores the representations of identity in comedy and interrogates the ways in which “humorous” constructions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, class and disability raise serious issues about privilege, ...