NCJ Number
184003
Editor(s)
Sean E. Anderson,
Gregory J. Howard
Date Published
1998
Length
140 pages
Annotation
This volume presents nine articles selected from the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, an interdisciplinary journal that focuses on the interaction of criminal justice and popular culture.
Abstract
The first article argues that crime and deviance can only be understood in the context of broader cultural patterns and conflicts that are often located on the shifting margins of accepted behavior and respectable society. The second article examines the role of taxidermy in horror films; asserts that these films expose the violence of aesthetics, patriarchy, and consumer culture and mirrors the mediated violence in everyday life; and concludes that the films suggest that killers take the practices of everyday life to their logical extreme. Additional papers examine changes in public tolerance of intolerable behavior or intolerance of previously tolerable behavior and test the hypothesis that the violent frontier has continued to provide patterns of identification and legitimization for the 20th century. Further papers focus on television imagery and public attitudes; patriarchal rage as portrayed in films called the horror-of-personality form; the ways in which films depict the topic of insanity; comic books as a tool of subversion; and the usefulness of nontraditional texts as educational devices.