Brenda Weber
breweber@indiana.edu

Director of Undergraduate Studies
Assistant Professor of Gender Studies
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies,
American Studies, and English

Undergraduate
G 101 - Gender, Culture, and Society
G 225 - Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture
H 299 - Gender, Representation, and Reality TV
G 485 - Imagined Spaces:  The Discourses of Gender, Geography, and the Body
G 304 - The Construction of Masculinities: A Survey of Manhood in the American Imagination from the 1950s Forward
H 300 - Honors Colloquium on the Body
G 310 - Representation and the Body
G 402 - A Fascination with Fame:  Gender and the Culture of Celebrity
G 485 - Gender and Discourse:  Writing about Gender for a Public Audience

 

Graduate

CS 601/AMST620/GS 701 – Cultural Studies, the Body, and Theories of Embodiment
G 602/CS 701 - The Gendered Politics of Cultural Production and Criticism:  Discredited Genres, Unruly Peoples, and Wayward Acts
G 701/CS 701 - Gender, Media, and the Politics of Celebrity
G 708 - Contested Masculinities

I analyze the gendered politics of representation across a wide archive of mostly discredited cultural texts, including non-canonical nineteenth-century transatlantic women's literature and contemporary media, specifically literature, film, and television. As it relates to these texts I have particular interest in how the materiality of the body is discursively constructed through written and mediated means, as well as how gender, sex, sexuality, race, and class work together to inform notions of the "normative" self. Interestingly, "celebrity" and masculinity have become important themes offering a framework for coherency across the many modalities in which I work.

 

I have two ongoing book projects, both of which engage with issues of gender within a cultural studies framework; these are: Figuring Fame: Women, Gender, and the Body in the Transatlantic Production of Literary Celebrity (under review, Ashgate Publishing) and Subject to Change: Becoming a Self on Makeover TV (Duke University Press, 2009). I'm also working on a new book called: Mediating Masculinities: Conceptualizing "American" Masculinity in a Post-Millenial Mediascape.

 

Check her out in http://www.research.iu.edu/magazine/Pdfs/rca_fall09_weber.pdf

 

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Books

 

Makeover TV:  Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity.  October 2009, Duke University Press. 344pp.  Series:  Console-ing Passions.

 

Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century:  The Transatlantic Production of Fame and Gender. Under contract, Ashgate.  Series:  Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Studies.  Forthcoming 2011.

 

 

Books in Development

Mediating Masculinity:  Conceptualizing “American” Masculinity in a Post- Millennial Mediascape

Madeover Morphologies:  Transforming Bodies and the Cultural Politics of Reality TV

 

 

 

Edited Collection in Development

Gendervision:  Gender and Reality TV in a Transnational Context 

 

 

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Articles Published and Forthcoming

“Channeling Charlotte: Woman’s Secret and the Cult of Celebrity in Elizabeth Robins’ White Violets.” Women’s Writing. Forthcoming 2010.

 

“Teaching Popular Culture Through Gender Studies:  Feminist Pedagogy in a Postfeminist and Neoliberal Academy.”  Feminist Teacher.  Forthcoming Vol. 20, Issue 2, 2010.

 

“Discursive Bodies: The Popular Press, Sex Archives, and Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.”  Australian Feminist Studies.  Forthcoming 2010.

 

“Genre Transvestites:  Testosterone Tales and Feminine Textual Bodies on Fox’s 24 and The Swan.”  With Karolyn Steffens.  The Journal of Popular Culture.  Forthcoming 2010.

 

“Imperialist Projections:  Manners, Makeovers, and Models of Nationality” in Screening Women.  Stacy Gillis and Melanie Waters, ed. Palgrave MacMillan.  Forthcoming 2010.

 

“In Desperate Need (of a Makeover):  The Neoliberal Project, the Design Expert, and the Social Body in Distress” in Mediating Disaster:  Old and New Media After Katrina, Diane Negra, ed. Palgrave Macmillan.  Forthcoming 2010. 

“Extreme Makeovers.”  Invited contribution to 100,000 Years of Beauty, Vol IV: Beauty as Personal Challenge.  Les Editions Babylone, Paris. 2009:  66-67.

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“For the Love of Jane:  Austen, Adaptation, and Celebrity” in Adaptations in Print and Visual Culture: Textual Infidelities. Rachel Carroll, ed. Continuum Press.  2009.

 

Review Article:  “Situating the Exceptional Woman.”  Antonia Losano, The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature (Ohio State UP, 2008); Linda L. Clark Women and Achievement in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge 2008).  Nineteenth Century Gender Studies 5.1 (Spring 2009).   http://ncgsjournal.com/issue51/weber.htm

 

Review Article:  Meredith Jones, Skintight: An Anatomy of Cosmetic Surgery (Berg, 2008); Cressida Heyes, Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (Oxford UP 2007); Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Surgery Junkies:  Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture, (Rutgers UP, 2007). Women’s Studies Quarterly 37: 1 & 2 (Spring and Summer 2009):  289-299.

 

“‘Are you Finally Comfortable in Your Own Skin?’: The Raced and Classed Imperatives for Somatic/Spiritual Salvation on The Swan.”  With Karen Tice.  Genders 49 (2009). www.genders.org.

“The Text as Child:  Gender/Sex, Representation, and Fin-de-Siècle Metaphors of Maternity in Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage, Rhoda Broughton’s A Beginner, and Elizabeth Robins’ George Mandeville’s Husband.”  In Ellen Rosenman and Claudia Klaver, eds. Other Mothers:  Beyond the Victorian Maternal Ideal.  Ohio University Press, 2008: 71-90.

 

“Makeover as Takeover:  Scenes of Affective Domination on Makeover TV.”  Configurations:  A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology.  15.1 (Winter 2007):  77-100.

 

“‘Were Not These Words Conceived in Her Mind?’:  Gender/Sex and Metaphors of Maternity at the Fin de Siècle” Feminist Studies 32:3 (Fall 2006):  547 - 572.

 

“What Makes the Man?  Television Makeovers, Made-Over Masculinity, and Male  Body Image.”   International Journal of Men’s Health.  5:3 (Fall 2006): 293 – 312.

 

“Beauty, Desire, and Anxiety:  The Economy of Sameness in ABC’s Extreme Makeover.”  Genders.  (Spring 2005).  www.genders.org.  30 pp.