Welcome to Issue Zero of The ECCCS. This pilot issue is an abbreviated version of what
is to come. Enjoy!

Contents:

Mark Bernard: Hostel-ity
Toward Whiteness: The Subtext of Eli Roth’s Hostel and Hostel: Part II

Mike Lewis: “Online Community and Tragedy”

Critical Essays:

Hostel-ity
Toward Whiteness: The Subtext of Eli Roth’s Hostel and Hostel: Part II by Mark
Bernard

Many debates have arisen around the subject of “torture porn,” a
derogatory term for recent horror films that graphically depict grisly scenes of
torture and violence. Predominately featured in many of these debates are Eli
Roth’s films Hostel and Hostel: Part II. While Roth’s films have been
defended, both by critics and the director himself, as critiques of the United
States’s policies in the War on Terror and the Iraqi War, I argue that these
debates are largely missing a larger point because they do not consider how
Roth’s films construct for their audiences a context of understanding in which
white Westerners are the primary victims of torture and violence on the geopolitical
stage. Adducing the work of Paula Rabinowitz, Diana Taylor, and Judith Butler, among
others, I examine how Roth’s Hostel films portray a hierarchy of grief, with
white Westerners at the top of lives the most in danger and the most worth worrying
about. Thus, these films, I argue, substantiate the United States’s current
military and security policies, rather than critiquing them.

Commentary:

Online Community and Tragedy by Mike Lewis

On November 20 Liz Gannes, the editor of New TeeVee
blog, reported that Abraham K. Biggs had committed suicide live on Justin.TV. Biggs was 19 year old and was an active member
of many online communities. Early reports stated that members of Justin.tv and a forum
called bodybuiling.com had egged Biggs on.
Gannes’s writes:

As we understand it from various forum posts, the 19-year-old Floridian was apparently
egged on by commenters on Justin.tv and fellow forum users on bodybuilding.com. Biggs
overdosed on pills while on camera and appeared to be breathing for hours until
watchers realized he might be serious, at which point they alerted the police. The
video kept running until police and EMTs broke Biggs’ door down and blocked the
camera’s view.

The shock of this story spread quickly across the internet. Gannes’s post got
2503
diggs 100s of comments and many copy and paste repeat stories across the
internet.

When I first read of this story, I have to admit, I was not really moved. Suicide,
however one feels about it, is a part of the human experience. The fact that it was a
live webcast brings some novelty to Biggs’s death, but only makes sense within the
context of the voyeuristic impulse of social media. If an individual lives ones life in
the world of social media, why wouldn’t they want to make their death public?

It was not until I listened to the the November 21 episode of Buzz Out Loud. The episode
begins with a passionate call from a member of bodybuiling.com . He felt that his community had been
unjustly attached for its role of Bigg’s suicide. News reports from blogs like and
NewTeeVee to CNet.com all
repeated the story of people watching Biggs’s live stream began to egg him on while he
lay on his bed dying. The caller felt like journalists had been too quick to finger
forum posters. The caller identified himself as “Chace from Maryland” and said that he
talked about killing himself on the forum in the past. The posts had been flagged by
users for trolling and no one on the forum thought much about it.

This is not an uncommon reaction. Often times young people threaten to commit
suicide as a way to get attention, as a cry for help. These sorts of repeated threats
are sometimes met with concern but other times are written off as teenage drama. What
stuck me in this case is the speed in which blame was placed on nearly every party
involved and how little thought was given to the Biggs himself, his family or even the
people who are being blamed for Biggs’s death. A post on the mashable.com asks whether
Justin.tv is culpable. Would we blame Disney for the death of NASCAR driver killed
during a race being broadcast ESPN?

Mashible reports that Biggs’s father has blamed Justin.tv for not doing anything and
has called for tougher regulation of the internet. Elizabeth Bennett, a blogger writing
on the Blogger News Network calls
Biggs’s death standard for the internet, calling him another victim of a cruel society.
Both argue that laws against online bullying would have saved Biggs from the attacks he
was facing online. However, neither these stories produce any evidence that Biggs had
been bullied online OR that he had been egged on by members of
bodybuiling.com or justin.tv. Online bullying is a problem as the Lori Drew case has
shown.

I have argued in the past that online communities act to flatten out the discourse
of power, giving individuals the space to stand and argue against establishment media.
After the September 2006 shootings at Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec, American and
Canadian media were quick to point blame at an online community Vampirefreaks.com. The shooter, Kimveer Gill, had
posted pictures of himself brandishing the guns he used in the shooting and posting
“anti-social” messages. Reporters, cable news anchors and columnists said that the
other members of the goth-centric social networking site were to blame for not stopping
or reporting Gill’s activities to the authorities.

After the shooting, members of vampirefreaks.com organized a response, raising money
for children [cut] a children’s hospital in Montreal and writing letters to news papers
that had attacked the website. The organization and response was swift. Michele Mandel,
a columnist for the Toronto Sun wrote an angry response to the letters. In the
editorial she claimed that her authority to criticize members of vampirefreaks.com came
from her position as a columnist for a major newspaper. As ridiculous as Mandel’s
argument is, it shows how much power the collective voice an online community can have.
There did not seem to be this sort of response to the death of Biggs. Perhaps it is
because of our culture’s taboo against suicide. Or maybe it is because there was no one
party who could be painted as abjectly [objectively?] evil.

As social media becomes a part of everyday life, we must change the way we think
about the changing [cut] definitions of public and private space, and even the idea of
space. These are complicated questions; it is going to take a long time to understand
the questions let along begin to formulate answers. I hope that The ECCCS will be a
place where incidents like Biggs’s suicide can be contextualized and understood.

Contents

Rachel Dean-Ruzicka: Eating the Entire Plate: Violence,
Transgression, and an Overindulgence in the Carnivalesque in .What Happens in Vegas,
Stays in Vegas. and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Dr. Alissa Burger: Afraid to Go in the Water: Contested
Masculinities in Steven Spielberg.s Jaws

Cynthia D. Stroud: Manipulating the Spectacle for Change
’08?

Critical Essays

Eating the
Entire Plate: Violence, Transgression, and an Overindulgence in the Carnivalesque in
.What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas. and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation by
Rachel Dean-Ruzicka

Afraid to Go
in the Water: Contested Masculinities in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws by Dr. Allisa
Burger

Steven Spielberg’s 1975 hit film Jaws not only changed the way the movie-going
public looked at the water, but also the way we look at men who come into contact with
those spaces and creatures. In this film, viewers are presented with a range of men
who tackle the problem of the water and its secrets in very different ways: Police
Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), scientist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and the
fisherman Quint (Robert Shaw). This article explores the construction and maintenance
of masculinity and identity as a whole, as each man struggles to enforce his authority
over the others, while simultaneously moving toward the camaraderie necessary for the
fight of man against beast. The anxiety raised by these differing performances of
masculinity are focused in three key sites throughout the film: the action and
interaction of the men as they clash against one another and eventually begin to work
together; a cycle of storytelling, taking the form of a cadenced one-upmanship,
punctuated by claims of .I got that beat.; and finally, the treatment of each
individual man.s body, both in the pain suffered through the hunt and the camera.s
approach to each physical form.

Commentary

Manipulating the Spectacle for Change ’08? by Cynthia D. Stroud

Author Cynthia Stroud analyzes media coverage of the 2008 election from a Situationist
perspective.

Special Issue: Best of Battlegrounds States 2009

Welcome to this special issue of The ECCCS. The papers in this issue were selected
as the “Best of Battlegrounds” and were presented at the Battleground
States Conference 2009: The Future, in Bowling Green, Ohio. These papers represent some
of the many outstanding presentations featured at this year’s conference. For the
last four years, The Culture Club: Cultural Studies Scholars’ Association, at Bowling
Green State University, has hosted this conference as a platform to discuss
cross-disciplinary approaches to cultural studies scholarship and has encouraged
graduate students, emerging and independent scholars, junior faculty, artists,
activists, filmmakers, and educators to participate..

Contents:

Gary Cirelli: Why Ninteen Eighty-Four Matters,Preliminary
Thoughts

Joe D Faykosh: Battleground 2012: Electoral Shifts for the 2012
Presidential Election

Seth Vannatta: Formalism, Scientism, and Historicism: Law as a
Synthesis of Social Time in Legal Pragmatism

Critical Essays:

Why Ninteen
Eighty-Four Matters,Preliminary Thoughts by Gary Cirelli

Since his death in 1950 George Orwell has become the rope in a massive game of
tug-a-war, with all points on the political spectrum attempting to claim him in their
camp. Close attention to his writings and life have caused many (such as Christopher
Hitchens) to declare him an essential voice in the history of dissent, while it has
moved others (such as Scott Lucas) to denounce him as an agent of the British Empire.
Still with all this intense scrutiny it seems an important concept may be slipping
through the cracks.

This paper shows that through their focus on minuscule detail (such as the
intricacies of “double-think” or Orwell’s lack of economic
knowledge), it’s fair to say that the academic community may have forgotten
Orwell’s greatest contribution to the world was not his political writings, but
his conception of the dystopic world presented in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Through his
portrayal of human apathy and the power that can be obtained by governments because of
it, Orwell strikes a cord inside readers’ brains reminding them that if
something so horrible can be conceived on paper, then it could one day be actualized
in the real world.

Looking into the future and given the current conduct of the United States
government, reflected in the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay, citizens must now ask
themselves how much they are willing to allow or give away in the name of national
security. When attempting to make these decisions, this paper reminds citizens that
Nineteen Eighty-Four can still serve as a powerful reminder of what can happen if the
they choose to idly accept their fate and not actively participate in the governmental
process.

Battleground
2012: Electoral Shifts for the 2012 Presidential Election By Joe D. Faykosh

This paper will focus on the fallout from the presidential election of 2008 and
apply it to the future of presidential politics, which will next occur in 2012. The
2010 census will produce a different allocation of representatives from states,
showing a shift in population. This reallocation will strengthen swing states and open
up new battlegrounds for political control. Adding to this is the fallout from the
successful Obama campaign which utilized new and different campaign strategies and a
completely different electoral scheme. This will have significant ramifications for
elections to come. In addition, the contentious Democratic primary of 2008 will force
party leaders to re-examine the way that their party allocates votes from primary
contests. The present system, called “the McGovern” or proportional
primary, led to the extended primary season, which drained both campaign
significantly. Had the Democrats used a “winner-take-all” primary (as
Republicans do), the nomination system would have been completely altered, with a
different winner. This will have repercussions in the next presidential election, as
voters decide which system really presents the true nominee. Both of these issues, the
primary season and new electoral map, will affect the way that campaigns are conducted
for years to come. This paper will help to analyze the future of American elections,
and just how we will choose our leaders in the years to come.

Formalism,
Scientism, and Historicism: Law as a Synthesis of Social Time in Legal Pragmatism by
Seth Vannatta

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote that “[the law] is forever adopting new
principles from life at one end, and it always retains old ones from history at the
other, which have not yet been absorbed or sloughed off.” That is, the law is
always taking its cues from the past as it applies general precedent to specific case;
however, in so doing it projects law into the future, amending general principles
toward the novel specificities of its case. In this accurate assessment, we find that
the law is at once a conservative tie with the past and an instrumental. projection of
future social utility. Additionally we find that the law resides in adjudication, and
the judicial decision is a concrete synthesis of social time. Recent cries (often from
the right side of the political spectrum) against “judicial activism” and
“legislating from the bench” suffer from an overemphasis on law’s
orientation toward the past. They fail to see or choose to ignore the radical
indeterminacy in adjudication and the incongruity between principle and case or
between statute and offense.