European Journal of Cultural Studies

This article examines the narrative and discursive strategies that have been mobilised over the past five years in the British community soap EastEnders to construct high-profile child (sex) abuse narratives. It focuses primarily on the long-running retrospective paternal rape and incest storyline that is reconfigured as a maternal melodrama to manage tensions over power, sexuality and the family. The mother–daughter dynamic as a privileged site of trauma and potential resistance to patriarchal control is analysed in both the EastEnders source text and Ronnie and Danielle fan fiction produced by and for female adolescents.

This article analyses the representation and consumption of infant formula advertising on Chinese television, following the food scare of 2008 when milk supplies were contaminated with the poisonous chemical melamine. Drawing on the concepts of encoding/decoding and ‘circuit of culture’, the article investigates how the Chinese dairy industry encodes the messages of food safety and quality in their advertisements, and how parents decode these messages as part of their daily risk management strategies. Combining a critical analysis of advertising imagery with focus group and interview evidence regarding its consumption, the article suggests that the dairy industry juxtaposed images of science and nature to mediate messages about the quality and safety of infant formula. The study’s evidence confirms that Chinese consumers decode these messages based on their previous experience and knowledge, exhibiting considerable ambivalence about the advertising of infant formula and reflecting significant anxiety about the product’s quality and safety.

The article explores how the concept of authenticity is deployed in contemporary Switzerland to delimit not only the representational boundaries of the Muslim (foreign) ‘other’, but also of the dominant cultural self. The authors analyse the act of constituting the authentic other in relation to the stability, comfort and safeness of the dialogically constituted authentic self, as illustrated in a Swiss advertising campaign in summer 2009. To investigate how those power relations unfold in the Ali Kebab advertising campaign, the article draws on a framework of visual analysis that studies the field of significations carried by specific images in relation to the particular context in which they are deployed, then facilitates their recontextualisation within wider social discourses. This sheds light on how the categories of authenticity displayed by the Ali Kebab adverts draw on a deep and powerful colonial imaginary that goes well beyond the borders of Switzerland.

In recent years, numerous cult franchises – once the purview of small communities of devotees – have been revived and adapted in order to draw mass audiences. Fans of these texts are left to puzzle out the question of communal and personal fan identity as fandom rapidly expands. This article focuses on the fandom of the science fiction classic Doctor Who, relaunched in 2005 as a ‘mainstreamed’ version, and examines how the introduction of genre hybridity into the text becomes for fans a crucial point in a struggle over the meaning of fandom. Using grounded analysis, the article demonstrates how members of LiveJournal community doctorwho construct their identities by othering two imagined communities: the romance-hating ‘anoraks’ and the romance-obsessed ‘shippers’. Navigating a minefield of undesired positions, these fans are characterised by a discourse of genre and community uniqueness that poses a challenge to the view of fandom as the blueprint for participatory culture.

Media forms play a vital role in making cultural and political sense of the complex economic developments and profound ideological uncertainties which have accompanied the global recession. This article analyses how popular genre cinema tackles the inequalities – in particular, gender inequalities – that follow from the financial crisis, situating Hollywood’s representational strategies in the context of recessionary media culture. It posits and analyses two sub-genres which demonstrate different approaches to an altered socio-economic climate: the recessionary ‘chick flick’ and the corporate melodrama. Amid the financial crisis these sub-genres shift emphasis to respond to changing circumstances, notably in relation to the once-ubiquitous trope of choice central to post-feminist media culture; neoliberal choice rhetoric is now considerably harder to maintain. The two case studies contrast the different ways in which female-centred chick flicks and male-centred corporate melodramas address unemployment, downward mobility and the challenges of work–life balance.

The image of the trafficked woman from a former state socialist country has come to symbolize the global crisis in sex trafficking. The ‘Natasha’ image is also a referent for the failure of state socialism. This article provides an analysis of the film Lilya 4-Ever (dir. Lukas Moodyson, 2002) to show how both sex trafficking and postsocialism are framed in representations of sex trafficking. The film presents the problem of sex trafficking in two covertly problematic ways, narrowing the issue to prostitution and illegal migration. While the film avoids voyeurism of sexual violence, this is replaced by voyeurism of postsocialist abjection. Postsocialist abjection is aesthetically captured as an eternal state of collapse. Thus, the tragedy of sex trafficking is the result of and a symbol for the failure (post-)state socialism.