The American Comedy Roast as American Ritual: Performing Race and Gender (Dissertation, 2023) [read]

This dissertation examines comedy roasts as an American form of cultural ritual. It focuses on selected televised comedy roasts from the mid-twentieth century to the present. A roast is an event when a panel honors a well-known public figure, usually an entertainer and sometimes a politician. Notably, the process of “honoring” the person involves ridicule, lampooning, and carefully crafted insults known as “roasting.” A roast’s overt content is significant, but it is also necessary to recognize that the structure and context of roasts provide insight into the positioning of power and the changing social hierarchies in America since 1900. The roast format may appear to perpetuate racist and bigoted comedic actions, but rather than dismiss the cultural ritual on that account, the dissertation’s research intervention explores how roast rituals reflect the tensions and contradictions in their evolving social contexts.

The project’s focus on performance rituals and culturally specific developments, rather than ahistorical aesthetic, philosophical, or psychological studies of comedy or humor in the abstract, places it within the interdisciplinary field of American Culture Studies. Applying a multidisciplinary approach to four case studies, The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast: Sammy Davis Jr  (1975, ABC), The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast: Joan Collins (1985, ABC), The Comedy Central Roast of Pamela Anderson (2005, Comedy Central), and The Comedy Central Roast of Flavor Flav (2007, Comedy Central), the dissertation shows how the changing dynamics in comedy roasts are closely intertwined with developments in American values, identity, and inequalities. The analysis of the participants and their performances reveals that roasts can be a useful site of analysis of shifting cultural developments.

This project traces the American form of ritual from its development from Vaudeville performance of the early twentieth century to the Friars Club in the 1940s, and to the televised performance roasts of today. Framing the roast as a performance ritual allows for analyzing the ritual as a unique, heightened experience for participants. The case studies selected represent specific snapshots that bring focus to various tensions and contradictions of representing race and gender through television. Although the roast is defined by formal properties deviations and ritual rifts further the focus on contradictions among representation. The roast ritual will continue to serve as a unique and productive site to further understand race and gender through a televisual medium.

Archives Unleashed (Grant, 2022)

Proposal for the 2022-2023 Archives Unleashed Cohort, with Dr. Emily Lynell Edwards

In the era of post-blogging, or as some call it, microblogging, we plan to explore early aughts Mormon mommy blogging culture, mediations of marriage, mothering, and feminine domesticity to historicize this period in relation to contemporary manifestations and trends of mommy influencing on social media platforms.

This project will assess how Mormon women’s blogs, often labeled vernacularly as “Mommy blogs,” provide insight into contemporary manifestations of conservative, Christian mommy influencing in a platformed digital economy. While scholars have previously examined the digital blogging practices of female Mormon content creators (Whitney 2011), research has often focused on qualitative analyses of these digital communities looking particularly at particular subsections of this community such as Mormon feminist bloggers (Feller 2016; Finnegan and Ross 2013), or discussing the larger landscape of Mormon digital culture (Mason 2012). Comparatively, we are interested in historicizing aughts Mormon Mommy blogging to examine this period of Internet culture in relation to contemporary manifestations of racialized, gendered, Christian mommy influencing.

Our key research questions include, what are key themes, phrases, and topics that emerge from a selected archive from the aughts (2000-2010) Mormon blogs? How do these themes form ideas about the role of the wife, mother, and creator through a longform narrative form not often seen today on social media platforms? How can we identify connectivities between this period of blogging related to current trends of anti-feminism, “trad-wife” culture (Di Sabato and Hughes 2020), anti-vaccination movements (Baker and Walsh 2022), and white supremacist politics as articulated and championed by white female influencers?  Whereas on platforms that champion micro-blogging or the short video form such as Twitter and Tik Tok respectively, narratives and messages are spread rapidly through a platformed media ecosystem, we seek to explore how the medium of blog posts, as a personal, longer form, text-based narrative may assist us in contextualizing influencing trends we witness today. While we don’t intend to conclude that the early narrative websites directly predict current events, we are interested in how longform narratives create context for today’s shorter forms of digital expressions.

In examining a series of collections including the Mormon Websites Collection, the Mormon Blogs Collection, and the Mormon Journals Collection, we seek to examine user-created early aughts lifestyle and domestic content produced by Mormon women. As part of this project, we seek to examine both the thematic textual content contained within long-form blog posts focused on topics of domesticity, mothering and wifehood as well as to identify the way in which Mormon mommy bloggers constitute connect to other websites and pages thereby constituting a mediated ecosystem. As such, we propose to engage in both thematic textual analysis and network analysis, visualizing these linked connections using the data visualization software Gephi.

Feminist scholars have emphasized that practices of mommy blogging and social media influencing are forms of affective digital labor (Mäkinen 2020), we also emphasize that these mediated practices of Mormon mommy blogging in the early aughts not only are forms of socially reproductive labor but are ideologically productive as well (Jarrett 2015). This research project looks to identify connections and transitions to new media ecologies and new iterations of racialized, gendered domestic ideologies that share historic genealogies to digital media practices and structures pioneered by Mormon mommy bloggers.

Gavin Feller (2016) A Moderate Manifesto: Mormon Feminism, Agency, and Internet Blogging, Journal of Media and Religion, 15:3, 156-166, DOI: 10.1080/15348423.2016.1209393

King, Whitney L., “Mormon Mommy Blogs: “There’s gotta be some women out there who feel the same way.”” (2011). All Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 1453.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/1453

Mason, Patrick Q. “Mormon Blogs, Mormon Studies, and the Mormon Mind.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 45, no. 3 (2012): 12–25. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/dialjmormthou.45.3.0012.

Nancy Ross, Jessica Finnigan; Mormon Feminist Perspectives on the Mormon Digital Awakening: A Study of Identity and Personal Narratives. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1 January 2014; 47 (4): 47–75. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/dialjmormthou.47.4.0047

Popular Memoirs of Women Held Captive (Thesis, 2018) [read]

In this thesis, I apply an interdisciplinary approach to the study of four popular captivity memoirs. Popular captivity memoirs are recent memoirs published by women who have been held captive whose stories were previously well known in the media. The four texts I work with are A Stolen Life: A Memoir by Jaycee Dugard, who was taken at age eleven and held captive for seventeen years at a home in Antioch, CA; My Story by Elizabeth Smart, who was taken from her bedroom at age fourteen by Brian David Mitchell and held at a camp for nine months in the Utah hills; Finding Me, A Decade of Darkness A Life Reclaimed by Michelle Knight, who was kidnapped at age twenty-one by Ariel Castro and held captive in his home in Cleveland for ten years with two other women; and Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland by Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, who were held captive by Ariel Castro along with Knight. These texts are significant because they provide insight into how these women choose to frame their trauma in the written form intended for mass consumption. My analysis seeks to answer the questions: What are the significant themes, ideology, and messages that are contained within these narratives? How does the medium of a popular memoir deliver the narrative of trauma to fit the ideals and expectations of readers? How do the structures and framework resemble past structural narratives, and what do these similarities say about popular narratives? To address such questions, I (1) use genre theory to identify the components of the popular captivity memoir genre, (2) apply a structural analysis adapted from folklorist Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale to identify common functions of narrative, (3) identify and analyze common themes and narrative structures within the texts, and (4) explore recent texts in film and television that appear to be influenced by themes from popular captivity memoirs. By closely examining formulas, themes, and structures of the popular captivity memoirs, this thesis provides insight on how these memoirs both reflect and influence familiar narratives about reckoning with trauma.

Collecting Sweet Valley High (Journal of American Culture, 2020)

This work explores the motivations of collectors of Sweet Valley High paperbacks. For women who were adolescents in the mid-1980s, the Sweet Valley High young adult series was an all-important part of their world. The fictional adventures of identical twins Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield and their wealthy, attractive friends who lived in the idyllic upper-class beach town of Sweet Valley, California personified the quintessential high school experience that female tween and teen readers yearned for.  The world presented in these books promoted wealth, beauty, popularity and dating as markers of success; the series also provided a blueprint for high school that could be considered harmful to girls’ self-esteem. This paper examines how the adult appeal of collecting and re-reading SVH books arises from acknowledging the chasm between the aspirational reading by our younger selves and our adult knowledge that the books contained false promises of high school life. For adult women, collecting the SVH books serves a dual purpose. First is the desire to recapture the nostalgic enjoyment of becoming reacquainted with Sweet Valley’s perfect California teens. The second motivation to collect is to reengage with the books in order to recognize the ways in which they influenced the readers’ childhood, and to reassign new meanings to the text. In 2007, I created The Dairi Burger, a blog in which I wrote humorous recaps of the books. At its peak, the blog had 10,000 visitors a week, which was substantial. The blog’s success was due to the comments section of the posts where readers could comment and interact with each other, sharing memories and opinions of the books. In 2013, I turned these blog posts into a self-published book, If You Lived Here, You’d Be Perfect by Now: The Unofficial Guide to Sweet Valley High, written under the pseudonym of Robin Hardwick. Applying camp meaning to the books allows a collector to view the series within a new cultural context; instead of disavowing the books for their narrow and stereotypical views of teenage life, collectors can simultaneously allow for criticism and celebration of the naiveté of their younger selves. Using my experience in creating communal digital space, concepts of feminist camp, and postfeminist theory, I will explore the motivations behind collecting Sweet Valley High paperbacks.