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Sadomasochism, Popular Culture and Revolt: A Pornography of Violence explores powerful connections between violent pornography and current gender wars, generational conflicts, political struggles, and racial and ethnic unrest. Long before these conflicts dominated headlines worldwide, they become embedded and contextualized in popular culture. Tracing the history of today's popular porn genres, including torture porn, revenge porn, war porn, and fascist porn, Tom Pollard reveals a "sadomasochistic trope" of fictional and real sexual violence and sexual justice that had largely remained hidden and suppressed. Today it has exploded into public awareness by mass movements like #MeToo demanding justice for sexual assault victims. This movement joins other recent social movements, including Black Lives Matter and advocates of safety from gun violence, which, along with #MeToo, constitute a "revolt of submissives" no longer willing to endure unwanted violence. This thoughtful examination of the history and content of violent pornography reveals portentous patterns and developing trends. By examining pornography's violent content, Pollard forces us to confront wider social and cultural violence. Sadomasochism, Popular Culture and Revolt will be of great interest to scholars of gay and lesbian studies and queer studies, while being a vital text for undergraduate and graduate instructors of social movement studies in sociology, political science, American Studies, and history.

This article examines popular culture's depictions of Artificial Intelligence. It begins with Hollywood's sci-fi robot characters that were often depicted as dangerous and inimical to human existence. It identifies major Hollywood movies that depict artificial intelligence, starting with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), James Cameron's The Terminator (1984), Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (2002), Garth Jennings' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), Spike Jonze's Her (2014), Alex Garland's Ex Machina (2014), and Toby Hanes' Brexit (2019). These films illustrate artificial intelligence issues, including self-aware computers, facial recognition, crime prevention, and personal assistants. These technologies are depicted both positively and negatively in popular culture, and their depictions in these films reveals popular culture's pervasive stereotypes and occasional timely warnings about emerging technology.

The alt-right movement dates from 2008 when white supremacist Richard Spencer invented the term to identify contemporary right-wing and far-right socio/political movements. The movement relies on mass media, communicating graphically and symbolically through "trolls," "tropes," and "memes." The "Sadomasochist trope" valorizes aggressive actors like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, while demonizing "passive" individuals like Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama. Trolls communicate through memes, single-frame or short video phrases matched with photos and cartoons, to attract online audiences. When not attacking liberals and progressives, alt-right memes turn on traditional conservatives. The alt-right community maintains it is "under assault" in today's politically correct, overly secularized, culturally diverse society. However, Donald Trump elevated alt-right icon and former Breitbart ceo Stephen Bannon to chief advisor, providing the alt-right movement access to the highest government levels. Will alt-right organizations continue their recent expansion, or will the public lose interest in the movement?

The Obama administration plans a "pivot" to the Asian-Pacific area, both in terms of military deployment and trade agreements. At the same time, Americans often view Asians through negative stereotypes while they express fear and distrust of Asian-Pacific institutions, including governments. These prejudices become readily apparent when one examines recent Hollywood films depicting Asian countries, including Asian intelligence agencies, corporations, and military forces. Hollywood's depiction of Asians and Pacific Islanders often finds expression through stereotypes, xenophobia, and, on occasion, blatant racism. The following article analyzes recent Hollywood movies with Asia-Pacific settings in terms of themes, characters, and depictions of institutions.

"The newly expanded and revised edition of The Hollywood War Machine includes wide-ranging exploration of numerous popular military-themed films that have appeared in the close to a decade since the first edition was published. Within the Hollywood movie community, there has not been even the slightest decline in well-financed pictures focusing on warfare and closely-related motifs. The second edition includes a new chapter on recent popular films and another that analyzes the relationship between these movies and the bourgeoning gun culture in the United States, marked in recent years by a dramatic increase in episodes of mass killings."--Provided by publisher.