"Ain't nobody's business": The public text of Michael Jackson.
Item
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Title
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"Ain't nobody's business": The public text of Michael Jackson.
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Identifier
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AAI9224835
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identifier
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9224835
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Creator
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Markowitz, Robin.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Stanley Aronowitz
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Date
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1992
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, Individual and Family Studies | Mass Communications | Music | Anthropology, Cultural
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Abstract
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The public text of Michael Jackson, as it's presented in this study, is an understandable narrative reconstructed from mass-mediated fragments of everyday life experience which, quite literally, "ain't nobody's business.".;This is not a study of the electronic and print media, but is instead a study of the ways in which the power relations of everyday life are maintained or resisted. The modes of power relations this study engages are primarily patriarchal, racist, and capitalist.;Those relations are struggled over, in part, on the terrain of discourse. People in subordinated positions of power have less opportunity to talk about and gain an understanding of their everyday lives from within the contexts of everyday life. It is not safe for them to do so. For such people (most people, actually), making meaning entails moving outside those contexts and producing texts of their experience. A text is understood here as a bounded space outside the domain of everyday power relations. A public text is a space which is accessible to almost anyone, including those who ordinarily lack power in their private, everyday contexts. Following Bakhtin, it is a space where divergent voices can speak without drowning out one another.;One space where such text-making can take place is that of the electronic and print media. The public text of Michael Jackson consists of electronically and mechanically reproduced voices of both resistance to power and voices of domination. The narrative constructed in this study takes shape at the points where those voices diverge.;The study includes, but is not limited to, published first-person accounts, commentaries from the electronic and print media, artifacts of Jackson's public presentation such as songs, music videos, performances, published interviews, and descriptions of televised appearances and photographs.;These and other documents are transformed in this study into a multi-voiced narrative which interprets the fragments so that they form an understandable social and historical story.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
