Shadows of the Past: Rings of Power’s Complicated Penumbra
By Emma Louise Backe I, like so many “elder Millennials” raised on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and even the 1977 Hobbit animated movie, eagerly anticipated…
Tag: Study of geek culture
Multiverse of Madness and the Problem of Mother as Monster
By Emma Louise Backe Wanda by César Castillo Marquez Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is essentially a horror movie with the trappings of Marvel’s characteristic action…
Screen Memory, Social Distancing & Speculative Fiction: The Geek Anthropologist 2021 in Review
2021 wasn’t quite the year we anticipated, nor does the conclusion of the year feel like it does justice to the warped sense of time, distance, and stasis…
Burdened with Glorious Purpose: Loki and the Hidden, Occult Power of Bureaucracy
By Emma Louise Backe At the beginning of Marvel’s new Disney+ series Loki, the God of Mischief and Chaos is apprehended just as he’s escaped from the Avengers…
Whedon, Fandom, and Cancel Culture
By Alissa Whitmore “A guy who goes around saying ‘I’m a feminist’ usually has an agenda that is not feminist. A guy who behaves like one, who actually…
The Poetics of Internet Memes
By Kai Blevins I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference…
Navigating the Maze: Models of Cultural Revitalization in HBO’s Westworld
By Haley Bryant The Maze on Kissy’s scalp HBO’s 2016 reboot of the 1970’s sci-fi film Westworld is not only one of the most visually interesting television programs…
2019 in Review: Hopepunk
By Emma Louise Backe Avengers: Infinity War (2018)—the penultimate movie in the Avengers Marvel franchise—ended in defeat, the assorted heroes unable to stop Thanos from using the Infinity…
Grief and Getting Beyond the Endgame
The lasting impact of Avengers: Endgame on our understandings of heroism, masculinity, and mental health. By Emma Louise Backe An hour before I walked in to see Avengers: Endgame,…
Twisted and Evil: Ableism in Star Wars
By Cindee Calton “Seriously, Star Wars? Again?” was the exact phrase that ran through my mind the first time Dryden Vos appeared on screen during my first viewing…
Monstrous possibilities: Kaiju as beauty and terror
By Esther R. Anderson Kaiju are giant monsters that can be seen causing filmic chaos without apparent cause or motive. As genetically-engineered creatures, aliens, or remnants of a…
The Word: Rhetorics of Resistance in Westworld and The Handmaid’s Tale
By Emma Louise Backe Dolores Abernathy—titular host in HBO’s Westworld series—spends most of the second season with a gun on her hip and a constellation of blood spattering…
Nerdlesque and Body Positive Cosplay: Stripping Down Sexual Paradigms in Geek Culture
By Emma Louise Backe The lights on the stage dim, a lone spotlight hovering over a dark figure clad in loose robes. Just as Kylo Ren’s red lightsaber…
Toying with Our Teleologies: Reflections on What SF Can Do for Anthropology
By Priya Chandrasekaran, Taylor C. Nelms, Valerie Olson, Elizabeth Reddy, Heather Thomas, and Nicholas Welcome At the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in late 2017, a…
Colossal: The 2017 Monster Movie About Abuse You Might Have Missed
By Emma Louise Backe 2017 was a year for grappling with monstrosity, the deeds and discourses perpetrated by private citizens and public officials, as well as the explosion…
An Archaeology Carol… Or How Ghost Hunting Made Me A Better Archaeologist
By April Beisaw Another Christmas has passed without a personal visit from the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, or Yet to Come? Same here. In Dickens’ A Christmas…
Replicants and Reproduction: Blade Runner 2049 and Sci Fi’s Obsession with Motherhood
(Warning: Blade Runner 2049 spoilers.) From the outset of Blade Runner 2049, Agent K (Ryan Gosling) is promised the possibility of a miracle. No longer more human than…
Answered With A Question Mark: Researcher Reflexivity in Geek Spaces
BY STEVEN DASHIELL Graduate school has in many ways blessed me with what I call a researcher’s eye, or the ability to view the world in an ethnographic…
Ethnography as Street Magic, or What We Can Learn from David Blaine
By Haley Bryant I think we have a lot to learn about ethnographic practice from street magic….stay with me, here. What is Magic? David Blaine, Street Magic When…
Blood Bowl: The Other Fantasy Football, Part 3: Chainsaws and Steamrollers
Editorial Note: This is the final part of a series on Blood Bowl. Part 1 offers a general background on the game, and Part 2 discusses the sociality…
Blood bowl: The Other Fantasy Football, Part 2: The Block Dice of Sociality
Editorial Note: This is part two of a three part series. Click here to read part one, “Warming Up,” Round 2: Following our defeats across the board in…
Blood bowl: The Other Fantasy Football, Part 1: Warming Up
Editorial Note: This article will be released in three parts over the course of the next month. Stay tuned. Shouts ring out around one of the main halls…
When Science Fiction meets Religion: The Case of Jediism
By Maria Menegaki Based on the paper ‘When Science Fiction meets Religion: The Case of Jediism’ which I presented in Piran, Slovenia in 2015 in terms of the…
World Anthropology Day: Grokking as a Geek Anthropologist
In honor of World Anthropology Day 2017, we’re sharing the text from an AnthroTalk presentation on what it means to do geek anthropology, given at George Washington University…