Miami News-Digest

Between Sewers and Surrogate Fathers Family, Masculinity, Authority, and Material Bodies in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) A Cinema and Cultural Analysis of Steve Barron’s 1990 Film Abstract Steve Barron’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) occupies an unusual position in American popular cinema. Adapted from Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s independent comic-book property after its transformation into an animated television and merchandising phenomenon, the film simultaneously functions as comic-book adaptation, martial-arts picture, youth film, urban vigilante narrative, family melodrama, and transmedia commodity. Rather than treating these apparently incompatible registers as evidence of incoherence, this essay argues that their collision constitutes the film’s central aesthetic and ideological strategy. Through ...

During the past two decades, tattoos, facial piercings, and especially septum rings have traveled from recognizable subcultural markers toward ordinary features of American female appearance. The change tells us something larger about individuality, friendship, commerce, technology, and the manner in which a culture teaches people what to find beautiful. Body modification has moved steadily from the cultural margins into ordinary American life, appearing today across professions, social classes, and everyday settings. Photo: Brooke Cagle / Wikimedia Commons , CC0 1.0. During the past two decades, tattoos, facial piercings, and other forms of body modification have become increasingly familiar among American women. What once belonged, at least in the public imagination, to relatively narrow social worlds has entered ordinary life. Tattoos appear on teachers, nurses, clerks, mothers, students, office workers, artists, and professi...