Pansy Duncan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3674264 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pansy Duncan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Pansy |
| FAMILY NAME | Duncan |
| SIGNATURE | DUNCAN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massey University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5493-2984 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Making America hot again: Aesthetic politics, from Walter Benjamin to Sydney Sweeney
In 2025, as part of a broader campaign built around the punning slogan “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,” US denim brand American Eagle released an advertisement that paired the tagline with a subtle reference to Sweeney’s blue eyes and a less subtle meditation on genetic inheritance. The ad quickly became a flashpoint in the online culture wars. Left-leaning commentators condemned it as a fascist dog whistle, while right-leaning pundits dismissed…
The glowy: The aesthetics of transparency in postfeminist “wellness” culture
Anybody may look smart!”: The smart aesthetic and women film stars in 1930s Hollywood
As Maria DiBattista has shown (2003, 332), the ascendance of figures like Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn during Hollywood’s depression decade (1930–1939) marked the rise of a new breed of woman film star: the “smart girl.” These stars were smart in two senses. Yes, they were quick-witted and quick-tongued—proto-feminist fodder for the newly egalitarian vision of (re-)marriage peddled in 1930s screwball comedy. Yet they were also smart in …
Towards a natural history of film form: Silver salts and the aesthetics of early studio-era Hollywood cinema
In 1948, outspoken e migre director Erich von Stroheim offered a now-famous account of the troubled post-production history of his notorious 1924 exercise in naturalism, Greed. According to von Stroheim, a cadre of MGM studio executives, led by Irving Thalberg, had pressured him to cut his gritty, sprawling masterpiece -an attempt to 'reproduce life as it actually was' -from its eight-hour, 42-reel initial assembly down to a more studio-friendly …
The dainty: The aesthetics of female film stardom in the transitional period
This article discusses ‘the dainty’, an aesthetic category that rose to prominence in the trade and fan press during American cinema’s transitional era as a means of characterizing female stars like Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Marguerite Clarke, Billie Rhodes and Lois Wilson. The readiest reading of the dainty is that, like the stars the term often described, it was a throwback to an older, diminutive ideal of femininity that bore little relatio…
Introduction: Cultural Studies, Marxism and the Exile of Aesthetics
To reflect on the relationship between "cultural studies" and "aesthetics" is to master the art of holding two opposing insights in mind at once. In theory, at least as set out by some of cultural studies' leading lights, the aesthetic is bound up with forms of privilege, mysticism and elitism that are anathema to the key critical currents in the field. In practice, however, aesthetic engagement and aesthetic evaluation remain popular tools of th…
Exploded views: Early cinema and the spectacular logic of the explosion
In this essay I advance a simple but striking argument about the eruptive, explosive blasts that formed the primary attraction of the early cinematic ‘explosion film’ – a little-discussed species of trick film that was briefly in vogue between 1900 and 1903. I contend that, while regularly cast as a destructive object of vision that serves primarily as a spark to spectatorial kinesis, the explosion is also a productive technology of vision that s…
I drink liberal tears”: Genre, desire and the leaky liberal body
Whither the boundless visual appeal of the “leaky” liberal body? While the days immediately following the 2016 US Presidential election saw a flurry of user-generated video uploads across the eupho
Once More, with Fredric Jameson
Joke work: Comic Labor and the Aesthetics of the Awkward
Comedy has long been cast as the linchpin of a space of ludic, non-purposive play. Yet the subgenre ‘cringe comedy’ stakes out a space ruled not by the lighthearted aesthetic of the ‘funny’ but by the stressful, labor-intensive aesthetic of the ‘awkward’. Why, then, has comedy has become so much work? Tracking this now well-established comic formation across a range of media platforms, this essay shows that the ‘awkward’ comic figure on which cri…
Bored and Boringer: Avant-garde and trash in Harmony Korine'sGummo
While bearing all the formal stamps of the realist avant-garde, Harmony Korine's Gummo (1997) is animated not by the powerful, oppositional emotions of ‘shock’ or ‘anger’, but by a morally and politically devalued ‘boredom' – a vacuous, trivial affect long associated with the consumer culture that the avant-garde traditionally pits itself against. It should come as no surprise, then, that Gummo was widely greeted as an avant-garde failure. Conten…
Cute Studies
A review of Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard University Press, 2012
Corey Haim and the 'homeless celebrity: Rock bottom on Rodeo Drive
This article explores the seemingly oxymoronic figure of the homeless celebrity through a case study of ex-child star Corey Haim. It argues that the homeless celebrity demands a reconsideration of the traditional coupling of ‘fame’ and ‘fortune’ in light of what Graeme Turner has dubbed celebrity's ‘demotic turn’
Tears, melodrama and 'heterosensibility' in Letter from an Unknown Woman
As a number of scholars have observed, the expansion of queer theory into the mainstream of critical and cultural studies has been accompanied by a certain theoretical routinization. Recent work by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus on what they identify as a trend toward ‘surface reading’ in the text-based disciplines, however, would suggest that queer theory's stagnation is an effect less of a decline into the obvious than of an insistence on the n…
Joke work: Comic Labor and the Aesthetics of the Awkward
Comedy has long been cast as the linchpin of a space of ludic, non-purposive play. Yet the subgenre ‘cringe comedy’ stakes out a space ruled not by the lighthearted aesthetic of the ‘funny’ but by the stressful, labor-intensive aesthetic of the ‘awkward’. Why, then, has comedy has become so much work? Tracking this now well-established comic formation across a range of media platforms, this essay shows that the ‘awkward’ comic figure on which cri…
Corey Haim and the 'homeless celebrity: Rock bottom on Rodeo Drive
This article explores the seemingly oxymoronic figure of the homeless celebrity through a case study of ex-child star Corey Haim. It argues that the homeless celebrity demands a reconsideration of the traditional coupling of ‘fame’ and ‘fortune’ in light of what Graeme Turner has dubbed celebrity's ‘demotic turn’
Tears, melodrama and 'heterosensibility' in Letter from an Unknown Woman
As a number of scholars have observed, the expansion of queer theory into the mainstream of critical and cultural studies has been accompanied by a certain theoretical routinization. Recent work by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus on what they identify as a trend toward ‘surface reading’ in the text-based disciplines, however, would suggest that queer theory's stagnation is an effect less of a decline into the obvious than of an insistence on the n…
Tears, melodrama and 'heterosensibility' in Letter from an Unknown Woman
As a number of scholars have observed, the expansion of queer theory into the mainstream of critical and cultural studies has been accompanied by a certain theoretical routinization. Recent work by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus on what they identify as a trend toward ‘surface reading’ in the text-based disciplines, however, would suggest that queer theory's stagnation is an effect less of a decline into the obvious than of an insistence on the n…
Corey Haim and the 'homeless celebrity: Rock bottom on Rodeo Drive
This article explores the seemingly oxymoronic figure of the homeless celebrity through a case study of ex-child star Corey Haim. It argues that the homeless celebrity demands a reconsideration of the traditional coupling of ‘fame’ and ‘fortune’ in light of what Graeme Turner has dubbed celebrity's ‘demotic turn’
Cute Studies
A review of Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard University Press, 2012
Bored and Boringer: Avant-garde and trash in Harmony Korine'sGummo
While bearing all the formal stamps of the realist avant-garde, Harmony Korine's Gummo (1997) is animated not by the powerful, oppositional emotions of ‘shock’ or ‘anger’, but by a morally and politically devalued ‘boredom' – a vacuous, trivial affect long associated with the consumer culture that the avant-garde traditionally pits itself against. It should come as no surprise, then, that Gummo was widely greeted as an avant-garde failure. Conten…
I drink liberal tears”: Genre, desire and the leaky liberal body
Whither the boundless visual appeal of the “leaky” liberal body? While the days immediately following the 2016 US Presidential election saw a flurry of user-generated video uploads across the eupho
Once More, with Fredric Jameson
Joke work: Comic Labor and the Aesthetics of the Awkward
Comedy has long been cast as the linchpin of a space of ludic, non-purposive play. Yet the subgenre ‘cringe comedy’ stakes out a space ruled not by the lighthearted aesthetic of the ‘funny’ but by the stressful, labor-intensive aesthetic of the ‘awkward’. Why, then, has comedy has become so much work? Tracking this now well-established comic formation across a range of media platforms, this essay shows that the ‘awkward’ comic figure on which cri…
Introduction: Cultural Studies, Marxism and the Exile of Aesthetics
To reflect on the relationship between "cultural studies" and "aesthetics" is to master the art of holding two opposing insights in mind at once. In theory, at least as set out by some of cultural studies' leading lights, the aesthetic is bound up with forms of privilege, mysticism and elitism that are anathema to the key critical currents in the field. In practice, however, aesthetic engagement and aesthetic evaluation remain popular tools of th…
Exploded views: Early cinema and the spectacular logic of the explosion
In this essay I advance a simple but striking argument about the eruptive, explosive blasts that formed the primary attraction of the early cinematic ‘explosion film’ – a little-discussed species of trick film that was briefly in vogue between 1900 and 1903. I contend that, while regularly cast as a destructive object of vision that serves primarily as a spark to spectatorial kinesis, the explosion is also a productive technology of vision that s…
The dainty: The aesthetics of female film stardom in the transitional period
This article discusses ‘the dainty’, an aesthetic category that rose to prominence in the trade and fan press during American cinema’s transitional era as a means of characterizing female stars like Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Marguerite Clarke, Billie Rhodes and Lois Wilson. The readiest reading of the dainty is that, like the stars the term often described, it was a throwback to an older, diminutive ideal of femininity that bore little relatio…
Towards a natural history of film form: Silver salts and the aesthetics of early studio-era Hollywood cinema
In 1948, outspoken e migre director Erich von Stroheim offered a now-famous account of the troubled post-production history of his notorious 1924 exercise in naturalism, Greed. According to von Stroheim, a cadre of MGM studio executives, led by Irving Thalberg, had pressured him to cut his gritty, sprawling masterpiece -an attempt to 'reproduce life as it actually was' -from its eight-hour, 42-reel initial assembly down to a more studio-friendly …
Anybody may look smart!”: The smart aesthetic and women film stars in 1930s Hollywood
As Maria DiBattista has shown (2003, 332), the ascendance of figures like Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn during Hollywood’s depression decade (1930–1939) marked the rise of a new breed of woman film star: the “smart girl.” These stars were smart in two senses. Yes, they were quick-witted and quick-tongued—proto-feminist fodder for the newly egalitarian vision of (re-)marriage peddled in 1930s screwball comedy. Yet they were also smart in …
The glowy: The aesthetics of transparency in postfeminist “wellness” culture
Making America hot again: Aesthetic politics, from Walter Benjamin to Sydney Sweeney
In 2025, as part of a broader campaign built around the punning slogan “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,” US denim brand American Eagle released an advertisement that paired the tagline with a subtle reference to Sweeney’s blue eyes and a less subtle meditation on genetic inheritance. The ad quickly became a flashpoint in the online culture wars. Left-leaning commentators condemned it as a fascist dog whistle, while right-leaning pundits dismissed…
Art (13 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Art history (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Law (4 works) · Literature (4 works) · Movie theater (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works)