Abstract
Moral crusades against popular culture have long been recognised as revealing key faultlines in structures and relations of social power. The construction of deviance serves as a way of defending the status quo, which is seen as under threat from either some new forms of popular entertainment or those affiliated to it. Attempts to regulate popular culture play on people’s fears and anxieties, stoking them in order to heighten the calls for ‘something to be done’. In this book, Karen Sternheimer offers chapter-length treatments of moral panics over movies, video games, pin ball machines, comic books, popular music and social media. The context is exclusively North American. The case study material is interesting throughout, and Sternheimer analyses each crusade in a clear and insightful manner. The value of this book does not extend beyond this. It draws mainly on news stories compiled through LexisNexis database searches, but not on other forms of documentation and evidence; it uses existing theory but does not add to it; and it does not relate anxieties over social change to a broader literature dealing with modernity, nostalgia, transformation and loss. It can best be recommended as an introduction to moral entrepreneurs and moral panics over popular culture, particularly for American undergraduate students.