Abstract: When television programs are translated for global audiences, languages are changed, but so too are constructions of diverse identities. Characters who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC) undergo transformations in order to be intelligible outside of their original national contexts; such transformations might reinforce these characters’ difference or eliminate it, effectively whitewashing BIPOC voices. This article unpacks this phenomenon by investigating the translation of diverse characters through the lens of the many industrial norms and constraints that shape the dubbing industry. Using the international Fox hit Glee (2009-2015) as an entry point for exploring the role of dubbing in Latin America, this study complicates conventional notions about global media’s imperialist and hybridizing implications by tracing political economy and industrial practices onto the dubbing of Black, Latinx, and Asian television characters.
Topic: television
Magic Swords: The Queer Erotics of Muscled Warriors in 1980s Kids Programming
Abstract: The 1980s featured a niche slate of syndicated shows prizing nostalgia, sex, consumerism, and camp–and often in children’s programming! First-run syndication in this era was rife with the queer erotics of characters, featuring rippling muscled toons like He-Man and Masters of the Universe, The Transformers, and ThunderCats alongside the spandex-clad American Gladiators and the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. These shows and characters, with their glittery, provocative, and sexualized aesthetics blended, subverted, or were openly hostile to long-entrenched genre conventions of most of television and certainly children’s TV. They are remembered fondly today as contributing to and derived from the zeitgeist of a pop culture and televisual era enamored of excess. Using historical analysis from a media policy perspective, this presentation traces the collision of syndication with cultural, regulatory, political, and industrial circumstances that created a culture of queer kids programming in the 1980s.
Whitewashing diverse voices: (De)constructing race and ethnicity in Spanish-language television dubbing
Abstract: When television programs are translated for global audiences, languages are changed, but so too are constructions of diverse identities. Characters who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC) undergo transformations in order to be intelligible outside of their original national contexts; such transformations might reinforce these characters’ difference or eliminate it, effectively whitewashing BIPOC voices. This article unpacks this phenomenon by investigating the translation of diverse characters through the lens of the many industrial norms and constraints that shape the dubbing industry. Using the international Fox hit Glee (2009-2015) as an entry point for exploring the role of dubbing in Latin America, this study complicates conventional notions about global media’s imperialist and hybridizing implications by tracing political economy and industrial practices onto the dubbing of Black, Latinx, and Asian television characters.