This thesis looks at how women journalists are now also digital influencers on Instagram. It analyzes the gendered expectations of women journalists that are also included on their professional Instagram accounts.

The intention of this thesis is to analyze the representations of masculinity in the anime series Dragon Ball Z as it aired on Cartoon Network's programming block Toonami, specifically the nature in which they were framed and how oppositional interpretations in the fandom became prevalent as a result. The series emphasizes the evolution of its central characters Goku, Vegeta, and Gohan into performing a sensitive masculinity, but there are a prevalence of images in the series that discredit this. Similarly, the way the series was advertised on Toonami placed emphasis on images of superficial violence and reinforced the masculinity that the series was attempting to move beyond. Understanding the ways fans have interpreted Dragon Ball Z on Toonami helps reveal that there is much more to a media text's influence than its themes and representations of gender.

The relationship between France and Hollywood is rooted in a deep history that dates to the late 1800s. French Cultural elites and policymakers have regulated Hollywood to prevent the American ideals that are depicted in Hollywood movies from infringing on French culture, restricting free trade distribution practices to limit audiences' accessibility of imported, non-French media. These import regulations have strengthened French exceptionalism, which is an ideal that recognizes France as being superior to any other culture, region, or market. Yet, the impacts of globalization and the rise of technology have shifted media consumption habits and forced France to regulate new modes of distribution, like digital streaming platforms, to continue to protect the French culture, film industry, and commerce. In 2014, when Silicon Valley-based streaming platform Netflix, entered France, the principles of French exceptionalism impacted the reception of the Hollywood-focused platform. Policymakers imposed a tax system which requires internationally based streamers to invest in the French media industry. Netflix invested their tax into local language, teen productions to target a demographic whose ideals were less rooted in French exceptionalism. Additionally, Netflix utilized the affordances of Instagram to visually appeal to teen users when marketing the local language productions Mortel (2019-2021) and …

The Godzilla media franchise is one of the longest running media franchises, which means the character himself has gone through many changes throughout the years. However, in American pop culture, the characters of Godzilla is perceived as a hero, a friend of humanity and defender of Earth. This reputation comes from the Showa Era, where Godzilla often fought on the side of humanity, rather than trying to destroy them as depicted in the original Gojira. In recent years, Toho, Godzilla's corporate owners, have been steering the King of the Monsters back into the villain role. Despite this tone shift by Godzilla's owners, American Godzilla paratexts still generally depict Godzilla as a hero. These depictions of Godzilla are used to maintain his status as a family friendly heritage brand and keep a door open for parents to introduce their children to the brand. Such a strategy allows Godzilla to survive into the modern day as an international powerhouse franchise.

This thesis provides an overview of the various ways in which select marginalized identities are represented within the twenty-first century American musical film. The first intention of this thesis is to identify, define, and organize the different subgenres that appear within the twenty-first century iterations of the musical film. The second, and principal, intention of this thesis is to explore contemporary representations of African-Americans, women, and queerness throughout the defined subgenres. Within this thesis, key films are analyzed from within each subgenre to understand these textual representations.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) is a massive ongoing franchise that began as a 1984 self-published comic book created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. Its history is intertwined with the creators' rights movement and the Creator's Bill of Rights (CBR), which rejected work-for-hire contracts, wherein creative laborers—creative authors—cede authorial control of their labor. Because the production of comic books and their franchises is highly collaborative, intellectual property (IP) rights are often consolidated in a single rights holder—a corporate author—via work-for-hire contracts. Eastman and Laird, as both creative and corporate authors, initially maintained strict control of TMNT licensees, but allowed their employees to retain IP rights over creative contributions to TMNT. However, in 1992, Eastman and Laird sent retroactive work-for-hire contracts to all current and former employees. This TMNT case study illustrates how the CBR represented the conflicting interests of publishers and creative laborers and ultimately reinforced the individualistic view of authorship that undergirds work-for-hire doctrine. Additionally, because IP legal infrastructure uses individualistic discourse to consolidate control of media franchises in one entity that allows authorized individuals access to a shared database of creative expressions that workers can borrow from or add to, media franchises resemble folklore and are made …

The intention of this thesis is to identify and analyze the precise shift from an exploitative archetype to an empowered representation of women warriors, to identify the arena in which male and female characters are given equal agency in the context of war, and finally explore the key characteristics that make up an empowered female hero. This thesis also addresses the sociocultural nature of the warrior woman archetype as it pertains to the current role of women in the military. The films analyzed in this thesis are all post 9/11 films; a fact that links them culturally to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent years, numerous milestones have been reached for women in the armed services, especially for those women in combat positions. For the first time in American history women are being recognized for their active role as soldiers in combat. Therefore, it is valid to consider the correlation between seeing women as military professionals, fighting alongside male soldiers in these films, and the cultural impact of female combat soldiers. This aspect of the thesis also imbues the female just-warrior archetype with a legitimate history, mythology, and current cultural reference; which is essential to the visibility of …

The trope of the queer cannibal recurs throughout fiction as well as film and television. While literature scholars such as David Bergman and Caleb Crain have written about this figure in American literature, the queer cannibal remains unstudied in the realm of media studies. This thesis analyzes six media texts that feature queer cannibals: Hannibal (2013-2015), Ravenous (1999), The Terror (2018), Yellowjackets (2021-), Raw (2016), and Bones and All (2022). Through these analyses, this thesis establishes a genre termed "queer cannibal texts." These texts function on two different levels: they include a cannibal character who is or can be read as queer, and they in some way cannibalize and queer an existing story or societal script. The presence of a queer cannibal character often signals that the work itself is a queer cannibal text. These texts are built on an awareness of existing power structures and narratives. By cannibalizing these narratives—whether they be a fictional narrative that is being adapted, or societal narratives of white supremacy, heteronormativity, and so on—and interrogating them from a queer perspective, queer cannibal texts create reparative narratives that speak from the margins. Queer cannibal characters act as a textual manifestation of this framework, providing a …