Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

Joanna Elfving-Hwang Geriatric Romcoms: Ageing and Romance in South Korean Romantic Comedy Films
Joanna Elfving-Hwang’s paper discusses the “geriatric turn” in recent South Korean romantic comedy films.
The rapidly ageing society is one of the most pressing social and economic issues in contemporary Korea,
and also one that is often treated with a mix of anxiety and benevolent concern in mainstream media. These
representations have actively posited the elderly and their ageing bodies as “unproductive Others” (de
Beauvoir 1970), undesired and cast outside mainstream society’s concerns and priorities. This paper
discusses the ways in which recent Korean romantic comedy films, a genre which has hitherto been seen as
incongruous to ageing, has recently emerged as a discursive space to contest hegemonic assumptions about
ageing as a process of inevitable process of decline and loneliness. The way in which discourses around
appearance are utilised in these cinematic representations point to the existence of age-specific and
aspirational notions of romantic love in ways that problematise prevailing negative stereotypes about lives
of older adults in South Korea.
2F
Cultures, subcultures, and social meaning (Chair, Alice O’Grady)
Tim Highfield
Smashed mouths: Internet cultures and the embrace and subversion of nostalgia
Nostalgia and popular culture are intrinsically linked, through representations of the past and adaptations of
older, familiar cultural texts for new contexts. Online, cultural nostalgia features in user-created digital
content, from memes to spoof trailers, mash-ups, and fan fiction. This paper examines how cultural nostalgia
informs and is inverted by internet cultures. Online content plays on popular tastes and familiarity with
texts, but may also critique or mock a common cultural canon. The research uses as a case study the mashup
albums Mouth Sounds and Mouth Silence by Neil Cicierega (both released in 2014). Both albums put
emphasis on songs and other popular culture once ubiquitous but since derided (e.g. the band Smash
Mouth). The albums represent an extension of practices of remixing, distorting, and playing with existing
work, but also a subversion of nostalgia and of cultural tastes, creating new content that challenges
interpretations of popular, cultural nostalgia.
Shams Quader Forms of capital in the Dhaka metal scene
This paper examines the metal scene in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and attempts to explain how the resources
crucial to its birth and continued existence can be understood through Bourdieu’s different forms of capital.
This local metal scene, which is part of a larger alternative music, is a youth-based male-dominated, noncommercial
and non-professional music scene based on international genres of metal, located in the unique
urban socio-historic milieu of this postcolonial developing country. For this research, a total of fourteen
participants involved with this scene were interviewed, supplemented by participant observation at local
gigs and analysis of related texts. This local metal community revolves around the activities of primarily
middle-class, part-time, male musicians who share particular economic, cultural and social resources that
afford their participation in it. Economic and cultural capital involves resources such as privileged upbringing,
ability to invest time and money in such semi-professional activities like playing and being involved with
metal music, covering costs of buying necessary gear like music instruments, amplifiers, multi-effect
processors, microphones, etc., and learning instruments like guitar, bass and drums from music schools or
professional music teachers. Being involved with the local metal milieu also entails participating in shared
spaces like jamming pads, recording studios and small venues, having access to English-language education,
which in turn enables the understanding of foreign music content as well as bringing together people with
similar socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, and having access to foreign cultures and music through
record stores, travels, cable TV channels and the Internet. Of equal significance alongside such economic and
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