European Journal of American Culture - Volume 39, Issue 2, 2020

In the US presidential election of 2016, Donald Trump’s connection with his voters marked the history of American politics by electing a political outsider to the White House. Under a feminist scope, this article examines Donald Trump’s Twitter account. The central purpose of this article is threefold: first, to scrutinize Trump’s tweeting activity and his dissemination of hegemonic toxic masculinity through this platform; second, to assess the unfavourable representation of Hillary Clinton’s decentred femininity and third, to examine how Trump’s performative toxic masculinity immediately connected with his voters’ cultural capital via Twitter. Finally, through an analysis of the impact of Trump’s tweets on his followers, the findings from this study will highlight that Clinton’s decentred gender performativity and Trump’s shared capital with his voters may well have been a fundamental tenet of Donald Trump’s victory.

This article analyses whether and to what extent the popular TV show The Big Bang Theory conveys anti-intellectual ideas. The starting point of my enquiry is the verbal behaviour of the ‘main nerd’ of this series, Sheldon Cooper, who is noteworthy for his lack of empathy and propriety. I aim to shed light on the kind of inappropriate verbal behaviour Sheldon displays by analysing a speech pattern this character is particularly bad at – ‘white lies’, that is lies made out of consideration for other people’s feelings. By drawing on Immanuel Kant’s thoughts on civility in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), I will detail the social implications of white lies and how Sheldon fails in employing them. Doing so will be helpful in establishing why Sheldon’s comments and behaviour appear as outlandish as they do. This in turn provides important insights into the way the televisual text of The Big Bang Theory relates with its audience and the social implications of this connection. I will conclude with the observation that the portrayal of Sheldon Cooper relies heavily on two kinds of stereotypes: anti-intellectual ones and those associated with the ‘nerd’ identity.

Throughout the last decade, neo-liberalism has increasingly been the subject of academic inquiries, probed for its infiltrating influences in media and cultural products. Approaching the animation industry, this article takes a critical take at Inside Out (2015), a feature Disney–Pixar production, to reveal the way it is embedded in the discursive network of neo-liberalism, exhibiting neo-liberal niceties and legitimating its notional structures. Inside Out renders a subjectivity of self-responsibility and self-enterprise when surveyed vis-à-vis its hypothetical grounds in positive psychology and neuroscience. The result is a subject who has to be happy but her happiness is ontologized as a matter of emotional dynamics inside her mind. It is concluded that, through its representation of mind that comes at the cost of reason and free will, Inside Out marks the neo-liberal, affective turn in the conglomerate.

Review of: Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture, Melanie Kennedy (2019)

London: I. B. Tauris, 256 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78076-842-7, h/bk, £67.50, p/bk, £26.09

Review of: The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture, Zara Dinnen (2018)

New York: Columbia University Press, 223 pp.,

ISBN 023-1-18428-X, h/bk, £50.00

Review of: Black and Blur, Fred Moten (2017)

Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 360 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-82237-016-1, p/bk, $28.95

Stolen Life, Fred Moten (2018)

Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 336 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-82237-058-1, p/bk, $27.95

The Universal Machine, Fred Moten (2019)

Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 312 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-82237-055-0, p/bk, $27.95