With starry aspirations in my eyes to be a filmmaker, I completed a BA in film and video – a practical degree – way back in the ‘90s at what is now called ‘The University of the Arts’ in London. There I had the opportunity to make a couple of experimental vampire movies and in my final year majored in direction and minored in sound recording and editing. My undergraduate dissertation contributed to the canon of Madonna Studies when I explored the public and academic reception to her particular star image. Deciding that I didn’t want to direct movies anymore but just watch them & write about them, I pursued my interest in cinema at a more theoretical level by completing a popular culture MA with the Open University, majoring in popular American cinema. My dissertation explored the Hollywood musical (circa 60s & 70s) from a socio-cultural context, questioning the utopian escapism associated with musicals and the musical number.
The wider cultural studies aspect of the popular culture degree really whetted my academic appetite & drew me to an interest in discourses as negotiated through popular culture texts, mediums and their audiences. With the invaluable help and support of the Centre for Women's Studies at the University of York, I secured ESRC funding for a 1+3 (MA in social research & PhD), leading to the straddling of interdisciplinary approaches between cultural studies and sociology. Last year I completed the MA (my dissertation subject: presentation of self and collective performance on MySpace) and have just begun finding my feet in what is known as the first year of a PhD.
My doctoral research explores how women make sense of discourses on the un/healthy and aesthetic body as they are disseminated through popular culture. I am interrogating discourses on health, appearance, fatness and skinniness by examining the concept of an ‘obesity crisis’ and fat as unhealthy and unattractive, interconnecting these ideas with the attention on women deemed ‘too-skinny’ (think American size zero/double zero as a fashionable ideal and media debates about ‘skinny’ actresses); The research is an examination of portrayals of the ‘flawed’ body that can be improved through self-surveillance or the celebrity body that is highlighted as ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ and asking how this is made sense of by women in their day-to-day lives. The texts I am exploring are celebrity gossip magazines (such as heat, Now and Closer), comparing these with television body and appearance makeover shows (such as You Are What You Eat, The Diet Doctors, and How to Look Good Naked) and news (paper and TV) reports on health issues relating to fatness and skinniness. The investigation explores the audience reception of these discourses by interviewing women who watch the shows and read the magazines and in focus groups using the TV shows and magazines as materials for discussion. As I am interested in collaborative and creative methods, respondents may create scrapbook journals out of popular culture texts, exploring their relationships to these ideas through their projects.
I'm 34 and a half, dig many genre of music, movies, literature and life. I have been an actress and co-writer in a community theatre group, voice-over artist (extremely briefly) and spoken-word performer. I sing cabaret and MAY perform soon and have recently embarked on a sideline in music journalism. You can read my words on sounds at Close-Up Music
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if you wish to contact me, comment, contribute or whatever (just BE NICE!) then please do so at the site email: corinnacultureschlock@yahoo.com