Sean Brayton
Biographic Data
| ID | 369046 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sean Brayton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sean |
| FAMILY NAME | Brayton |
| SIGNATURE | BRAYTON S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Lethbridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0932-3872 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 42 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Below Deck: Politics and paradoxes of class conflict on reality television
Reality television and the politics of mass surveillance in channel 4's Hunted
This paper is interested in representations of mass surveillance in Hunted, Channel 4's reality tv series in which 'ordinary British citizens' roleplay as 'fugitives' that must evade surveillance and capture by 'the state.' Here contentious powers of state surveillance are mitigated by (a) the programme's deployment of a myth of surveillance 'symmetry' and a 'fugitive fantasy' that obfuscate the racial politics of 'being watched' in a post-9/11 c…
Courtship and class conflict in Hallmark’s “Countdown to Christmas”
This paper presents a Marxist feminist textual analysis of Hallmark’s “Countdown to Christmas” made-for-television film series of 2018. While Hallmark films are widely and rightly criticized for their lack of racial, sexual and socioeconomic diversity, I examine how representations of women at work provide both critical and contradictory narratives of late capitalism, owing in part to class politics of the Christmas film genre and the (post)femin…
Exploring the Missing Link Between the Concussion “Crisis” and Labor Politics in Professional Sports
This study focuses on connections between labor struggles in professional sports and the epidemic of concussions among athletes, specifically in the National Football League (NFL) and National Hockey League (NHL). Using a critical discourse analysis (CDA), we explain how popular media presents concussions in ways that are informative but often avoid a more politicized discussion of the athlete as a manual worker whose body succumbs to use and abu…
Mental illness, late capitalism, and the socioeconomic “psychopath” in CBS’s Elementary
This article focuses on representations of mental illness on U.S. network television, particularly the “police procedural” Elementary. As a modern interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes character, Elementary is unique in emphasizing the detective’s struggles with drug addiction and mental illness, as well as a long road of recovery where intellectual labor is instrumental and “therapeutic” (rather than stressful and alienating). Despite its critic…
The “madness” of market logic: Mental illness and late capitalism in The Double and Nightcrawler
This paper examines representations of mental illness in popular film, particularly Richard Ayoade’s The Double and Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler. As I argue, both films trouble typical Hollywood narratives of mental illness by situating schizophrenia and psychopathy, for instance, within a socioeconomic context, specifically relations of production under late capitalism and the unfettered self-interest of neoliberalism. If mental illness is a produc…
Working Stiff(s) on Reality Television during the Great Recession
This essay traces some of the narratives and cultural politics of work on reality television after the economic crash of 2008. Specifically, it discusses the emergence of paid labor shows like Ax Men, Black Gold and Coal and a resurgent interest in working bodies at a time when the working class in the US seems all but consigned to the dustbin of history. As an implicit response to the crisis of masculinity during the Great Recession these progra…
Learning to labor with Handy Manny: Immigration politics and the world of work in a children's cartoon
This article provides a textual analysis of Handy Manny, a popular Disney cartoon featuring a Latino handyman. Specifically, it explores how the debut of the television series does important ideological work that moderates a more provocative image of Latina/os that appeared less than five months earlier during “A Day without an Immigrant,” a nationwide protest against conservative immigration reform in the US that sought to amplify the importance…
Ageing Masculinities and 'Muscle work' in Hollywood Action Film: An Analysis of The Expendables
In August 2010, the sixty-four-year-old Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone premiered his latest project The Expendables, an action-adventure film starring a pantheon of 'tough guys' from both past and present: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, and Bruce Willis. To understand the resurrection of this vintage Hollywood cast, we take up the title theme of 'expendability' within the climate of the economic recession of 2008 an…
Razing Arizona: Migrant labour and the 'Mexican avenger' of Machete
This article focuses on representations of Latinas/os and labour in US cinema. It is particularly interested in Robert Rodriguez's Machete, a 'Mexican avenger' film that debuted less than three months after the passing of a controversial immigration bill in Arizona (Senate Bill 1070). Although many reviews snubbed the film's 'trivial' delivery of immigration politics, I argue that Machete's strength as a social commentary lies in its ability to b…
Renovating ethnic identity onRestaurant Makeover
Food can be a novel way of understanding and explaining some of the pointed paradoxes of multiculturalism and the ‘management’ of ethnicity. Many studies of culinary culture are attentive to the exoticization of ethnicity in and through food media, which now includes a vertiginous array of cookbooks, travel literature, magazines and, most important for our purposes here, television series. Among various programs is Restaurant Makeover, a popular …
Mexican' labor in the Hollywood imaginary
This paper explores the manifold ways in which `Mexican' labor functions as a representational resource in three contemporary Hollywood texts: the films Friends with Money (2006) and Transamerica (2005), as well as the television sitcom Arrested Development (2003—2006). While the narratives partake in the racialization of labor in the US, they also visualize types of work and workers that often pass unacknowledged in white bourgeois culture. They…
The Post-White Imaginary in Alex Proyas’s I, Robot
Alex Proyas’s 2004 film I, Robot depicts a crisis of white identity in the figure of the marginalized NS-5 robot, Sonny. The anxiety prompted by this crisis is resolved via a parable of racial reconciliation between the “unique” white robot and the black detective Del Spooner (played by Will Smith). The film’s evocation of a post-white mythology is laden with ironies and contradictions, however. Like whiteness itself, the robot is able to slip in…
Dunky the Frog and the Politics of Irony
Although scholars have used poststructural and postmodern frameworks to understand the power relations of sport, critical research has rarely considered a politics of irony in the sporting realm. Using the controversial frog logo of Québec City’s professional basketball team, we explore irony as a reading strategy and method of critique that is already ambivalent. As a self-directed stereotype, Dunky the Frog is unique in its emergence through ir…
A Response to Rail
MTV'sJackass: Transgression, Abjection and the Economy of White Masculinity
In the post-civil rights era, it is argued that some white men have adopted a marginalized positionality. This ‘white male backlash’ is often described as a distorted attempt to wrest social privilege from civil rights, feminist, and gay/lesbian movements. Through ‘reflexive sadomasochism’ the white male subject is able to simultaneously express an aggressive and receptive identity. While this overt narrative of white male victimhood is a recurri…
An American werewolf in Kabul: John Walker Lindh, the construction of race, and the return to whiteness
On 1 December 2001, North America was officially introduced to John Walker Lindh The American Taliban. Lindh was captured in Afghanistan fighting against the Northern Alliance. The event created a groundswell of news reports concerning the political development of Lindh. In this paper, I interrogate the ways in which race is reproduced through a popular online magazine and its account of the John Walker Lindh case. There is a series of narratives…
Black-Lash”: Revisiting the “White Negro” through Skateboarding
Alternative sports have been situated within backlash politics whereby subcultural or marginal representations illustrate a victimized white male. While this may be true of some sports, skateboard media fosters a sustained critique of “whiteness.” To understand the representation of white resistance in skateboarding, we must locate the sport within the larger historical context of white male rebellion found in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) an…
Black-Lash”: Revisiting the “White Negro” through Skateboarding
Alternative sports have been situated within backlash politics whereby subcultural or marginal representations illustrate a victimized white male. While this may be true of some sports, skateboard media fosters a sustained critique of “whiteness.” To understand the representation of white resistance in skateboarding, we must locate the sport within the larger historical context of white male rebellion found in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) an…
MTV'sJackass: Transgression, Abjection and the Economy of White Masculinity
In the post-civil rights era, it is argued that some white men have adopted a marginalized positionality. This ‘white male backlash’ is often described as a distorted attempt to wrest social privilege from civil rights, feminist, and gay/lesbian movements. Through ‘reflexive sadomasochism’ the white male subject is able to simultaneously express an aggressive and receptive identity. While this overt narrative of white male victimhood is a recurri…
Ageing Masculinities and 'Muscle work' in Hollywood Action Film: An Analysis of The Expendables
In August 2010, the sixty-four-year-old Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone premiered his latest project The Expendables, an action-adventure film starring a pantheon of 'tough guys' from both past and present: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, and Bruce Willis. To understand the resurrection of this vintage Hollywood cast, we take up the title theme of 'expendability' within the climate of the economic recession of 2008 an…
Exploring the Missing Link Between the Concussion “Crisis” and Labor Politics in Professional Sports
This study focuses on connections between labor struggles in professional sports and the epidemic of concussions among athletes, specifically in the National Football League (NFL) and National Hockey League (NHL). Using a critical discourse analysis (CDA), we explain how popular media presents concussions in ways that are informative but often avoid a more politicized discussion of the athlete as a manual worker whose body succumbs to use and abu…
Renovating ethnic identity onRestaurant Makeover
Food can be a novel way of understanding and explaining some of the pointed paradoxes of multiculturalism and the ‘management’ of ethnicity. Many studies of culinary culture are attentive to the exoticization of ethnicity in and through food media, which now includes a vertiginous array of cookbooks, travel literature, magazines and, most important for our purposes here, television series. Among various programs is Restaurant Makeover, a popular …
An American werewolf in Kabul: John Walker Lindh, the construction of race, and the return to whiteness
On 1 December 2001, North America was officially introduced to John Walker Lindh The American Taliban. Lindh was captured in Afghanistan fighting against the Northern Alliance. The event created a groundswell of news reports concerning the political development of Lindh. In this paper, I interrogate the ways in which race is reproduced through a popular online magazine and its account of the John Walker Lindh case. There is a series of narratives…
Mental illness, late capitalism, and the socioeconomic “psychopath” in CBS’s Elementary
This article focuses on representations of mental illness on U.S. network television, particularly the “police procedural” Elementary. As a modern interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes character, Elementary is unique in emphasizing the detective’s struggles with drug addiction and mental illness, as well as a long road of recovery where intellectual labor is instrumental and “therapeutic” (rather than stressful and alienating). Despite its critic…
The “madness” of market logic: Mental illness and late capitalism in The Double and Nightcrawler
This paper examines representations of mental illness in popular film, particularly Richard Ayoade’s The Double and Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler. As I argue, both films trouble typical Hollywood narratives of mental illness by situating schizophrenia and psychopathy, for instance, within a socioeconomic context, specifically relations of production under late capitalism and the unfettered self-interest of neoliberalism. If mental illness is a produc…
Working Stiff(s) on Reality Television during the Great Recession
This essay traces some of the narratives and cultural politics of work on reality television after the economic crash of 2008. Specifically, it discusses the emergence of paid labor shows like Ax Men, Black Gold and Coal and a resurgent interest in working bodies at a time when the working class in the US seems all but consigned to the dustbin of history. As an implicit response to the crisis of masculinity during the Great Recession these progra…
Razing Arizona: Migrant labour and the 'Mexican avenger' of Machete
This article focuses on representations of Latinas/os and labour in US cinema. It is particularly interested in Robert Rodriguez's Machete, a 'Mexican avenger' film that debuted less than three months after the passing of a controversial immigration bill in Arizona (Senate Bill 1070). Although many reviews snubbed the film's 'trivial' delivery of immigration politics, I argue that Machete's strength as a social commentary lies in its ability to b…
Mexican' labor in the Hollywood imaginary
This paper explores the manifold ways in which `Mexican' labor functions as a representational resource in three contemporary Hollywood texts: the films Friends with Money (2006) and Transamerica (2005), as well as the television sitcom Arrested Development (2003—2006). While the narratives partake in the racialization of labor in the US, they also visualize types of work and workers that often pass unacknowledged in white bourgeois culture. They…
Black-Lash”: Revisiting the “White Negro” through Skateboarding
Alternative sports have been situated within backlash politics whereby subcultural or marginal representations illustrate a victimized white male. While this may be true of some sports, skateboard media fosters a sustained critique of “whiteness.” To understand the representation of white resistance in skateboarding, we must locate the sport within the larger historical context of white male rebellion found in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) an…
An American werewolf in Kabul: John Walker Lindh, the construction of race, and the return to whiteness
On 1 December 2001, North America was officially introduced to John Walker Lindh The American Taliban. Lindh was captured in Afghanistan fighting against the Northern Alliance. The event created a groundswell of news reports concerning the political development of Lindh. In this paper, I interrogate the ways in which race is reproduced through a popular online magazine and its account of the John Walker Lindh case. There is a series of narratives…
Dunky the Frog and the Politics of Irony
Although scholars have used poststructural and postmodern frameworks to understand the power relations of sport, critical research has rarely considered a politics of irony in the sporting realm. Using the controversial frog logo of Québec City’s professional basketball team, we explore irony as a reading strategy and method of critique that is already ambivalent. As a self-directed stereotype, Dunky the Frog is unique in its emergence through ir…
A Response to Rail
MTV'sJackass: Transgression, Abjection and the Economy of White Masculinity
In the post-civil rights era, it is argued that some white men have adopted a marginalized positionality. This ‘white male backlash’ is often described as a distorted attempt to wrest social privilege from civil rights, feminist, and gay/lesbian movements. Through ‘reflexive sadomasochism’ the white male subject is able to simultaneously express an aggressive and receptive identity. While this overt narrative of white male victimhood is a recurri…
Mexican' labor in the Hollywood imaginary
This paper explores the manifold ways in which `Mexican' labor functions as a representational resource in three contemporary Hollywood texts: the films Friends with Money (2006) and Transamerica (2005), as well as the television sitcom Arrested Development (2003—2006). While the narratives partake in the racialization of labor in the US, they also visualize types of work and workers that often pass unacknowledged in white bourgeois culture. They…
The Post-White Imaginary in Alex Proyas’s I, Robot
Alex Proyas’s 2004 film I, Robot depicts a crisis of white identity in the figure of the marginalized NS-5 robot, Sonny. The anxiety prompted by this crisis is resolved via a parable of racial reconciliation between the “unique” white robot and the black detective Del Spooner (played by Will Smith). The film’s evocation of a post-white mythology is laden with ironies and contradictions, however. Like whiteness itself, the robot is able to slip in…
Razing Arizona: Migrant labour and the 'Mexican avenger' of Machete
This article focuses on representations of Latinas/os and labour in US cinema. It is particularly interested in Robert Rodriguez's Machete, a 'Mexican avenger' film that debuted less than three months after the passing of a controversial immigration bill in Arizona (Senate Bill 1070). Although many reviews snubbed the film's 'trivial' delivery of immigration politics, I argue that Machete's strength as a social commentary lies in its ability to b…
Renovating ethnic identity onRestaurant Makeover
Food can be a novel way of understanding and explaining some of the pointed paradoxes of multiculturalism and the ‘management’ of ethnicity. Many studies of culinary culture are attentive to the exoticization of ethnicity in and through food media, which now includes a vertiginous array of cookbooks, travel literature, magazines and, most important for our purposes here, television series. Among various programs is Restaurant Makeover, a popular …
Working Stiff(s) on Reality Television during the Great Recession
This essay traces some of the narratives and cultural politics of work on reality television after the economic crash of 2008. Specifically, it discusses the emergence of paid labor shows like Ax Men, Black Gold and Coal and a resurgent interest in working bodies at a time when the working class in the US seems all but consigned to the dustbin of history. As an implicit response to the crisis of masculinity during the Great Recession these progra…
Learning to labor with Handy Manny: Immigration politics and the world of work in a children's cartoon
This article provides a textual analysis of Handy Manny, a popular Disney cartoon featuring a Latino handyman. Specifically, it explores how the debut of the television series does important ideological work that moderates a more provocative image of Latina/os that appeared less than five months earlier during “A Day without an Immigrant,” a nationwide protest against conservative immigration reform in the US that sought to amplify the importance…
Ageing Masculinities and 'Muscle work' in Hollywood Action Film: An Analysis of The Expendables
In August 2010, the sixty-four-year-old Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone premiered his latest project The Expendables, an action-adventure film starring a pantheon of 'tough guys' from both past and present: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, and Bruce Willis. To understand the resurrection of this vintage Hollywood cast, we take up the title theme of 'expendability' within the climate of the economic recession of 2008 an…
The “madness” of market logic: Mental illness and late capitalism in The Double and Nightcrawler
This paper examines representations of mental illness in popular film, particularly Richard Ayoade’s The Double and Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler. As I argue, both films trouble typical Hollywood narratives of mental illness by situating schizophrenia and psychopathy, for instance, within a socioeconomic context, specifically relations of production under late capitalism and the unfettered self-interest of neoliberalism. If mental illness is a produc…
Exploring the Missing Link Between the Concussion “Crisis” and Labor Politics in Professional Sports
This study focuses on connections between labor struggles in professional sports and the epidemic of concussions among athletes, specifically in the National Football League (NFL) and National Hockey League (NHL). Using a critical discourse analysis (CDA), we explain how popular media presents concussions in ways that are informative but often avoid a more politicized discussion of the athlete as a manual worker whose body succumbs to use and abu…
Mental illness, late capitalism, and the socioeconomic “psychopath” in CBS’s Elementary
This article focuses on representations of mental illness on U.S. network television, particularly the “police procedural” Elementary. As a modern interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes character, Elementary is unique in emphasizing the detective’s struggles with drug addiction and mental illness, as well as a long road of recovery where intellectual labor is instrumental and “therapeutic” (rather than stressful and alienating). Despite its critic…
Courtship and class conflict in Hallmark’s “Countdown to Christmas”
This paper presents a Marxist feminist textual analysis of Hallmark’s “Countdown to Christmas” made-for-television film series of 2018. While Hallmark films are widely and rightly criticized for their lack of racial, sexual and socioeconomic diversity, I examine how representations of women at work provide both critical and contradictory narratives of late capitalism, owing in part to class politics of the Christmas film genre and the (post)femin…
Reality television and the politics of mass surveillance in channel 4's Hunted
This paper is interested in representations of mass surveillance in Hunted, Channel 4's reality tv series in which 'ordinary British citizens' roleplay as 'fugitives' that must evade surveillance and capture by 'the state.' Here contentious powers of state surveillance are mitigated by (a) the programme's deployment of a myth of surveillance 'symmetry' and a 'fugitive fantasy' that obfuscate the racial politics of 'being watched' in a post-9/11 c…
Below Deck: Politics and paradoxes of class conflict on reality television
Sociology (15 works) · Political science (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Art (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Literature (9 works) · Narrative (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works)