Cultural Studies - A Routledge Journal

We would like to congratulate Dr. Joe Edward Hatfield for receiving the 2024 Golden Anniversary Monograph Award from the National Communication Association (NCA) for his article "Moments of Shame in the Figural History of Trans Su***de," which was published in Volume 37, Issue 6 of Cultural Studies.

The Golden Anniversary Monograph Award is presented to the most outstanding scholarly monograph published during the previous year related to the communication arts and sciences. You can find information about the award and past winners here: https://www.natcom.org/awards/golden-anniversary-monograph-award

Here is the abstract for Hatfield's award-winning article, "Moments of Shame in the Figural History of Trans Su***de":
"This is an article about trans su***de – a longstanding consequence of a necropolitical order that perpetuates the disposability of trans life as a strategy of social subjugation and institutional maintenance. Although having become a more widely publicized crisis in recent years, trans su***de is not a new problem. Evidence of trans su***de dates to the early twentieth century, verifying its status as a malady that victimizes both youth and adults, stretches beyond American borders, and populates a range of discourses since well before the popularization of more contemporary identity categories, such as ‘transsexual’ or ‘transgender.’ In this article, I trace the historical circulation of trans su***de, with a primary focus on its movement across U.S. public culture. I show how trans people have long shaped meanings of trans su***de using a variety of communication channels. I argue that recurrent public renderings of trans su***de accrue force as potent articulations of trans shame, which arise directly from embodied experiences of gender dysphoria and other often hidden intersecting systems of oppression that make trans lives less livable. Thus, the figural history of trans su***de is a multi-generational structure of feeling constituted by an ongoing series of moments of shame that have shifted in tandem with evolutions in media culture and changing norms of trans visibility. These moments of shame open possibilities for challenging transnormative logics of representation and dismantling the necropolitical foundations of anti-trans death worlds."

This award-winning article is currently available to all to read with "full access" status; you can find the full text here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502386.2022.2055096

Likewise, if you would like to learn more about Dr. Hatfield's reception of the Golden Anniversary Monograph Award—including the words that were shared by the panel of scholars that selected Hatfield's article—you can find additional information here: https://news.uark.edu/articles/71423/assistant-professor-joe-edward-hatfield-wins-major-research-awards

We would like to thank Dr. Hatfield for thinking of Cultural Studies for this important scholarship, and we are deeply honored to have this contribution be featured in our last issue of 2023. Thank you for sharing your work with us.

The eighth and final article in Volume 38, Issue 5 of Cultural Studies—a special issue co-edited by Marian Burchardt and Nur Yasemin Ural about "The Future of Religious Pasts: Religion and Cultural Heritage-Making in a Secular Age"—is Paulina Kolata's "Cloned Buddhas: Mapping Out the DNA of Buddhist Heritage Preservation."

Here is the abstract for Kolata's article:
"This article considers how technological innovation transforms the value of religious materiality in Buddhist heritage reproduction projects in Japan. To illustrate the religiously and politically charged landscape of heritage care, I focus on the reproduction technologies developed by the Tokyo University of Arts researchers to create highly precise replicas of Buddhist heritage. One such ‘super clone’ replica of Japan’s National Treasure homed at Hōryūji temple in Nara – a 1400-year-old ‘Shaka Triad’ sculpture of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha – was put on display at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum in Japan in April 2021. The ‘cloned’ statue is a highly precise copy that goes beyond the practices of exact duplication. With the use of 3D measurement, digital modelling technologies, and advanced casting techniques, this cloned religious heritage object transports the viewer back in time to the aesthetic moment of creation and allows them to experience anew the object’s affective presence as crafted centuries ago. In drawing on this example and its potential to intervene in other religious heritage reproduction projects globally, I argue that technology transforms religious heritage to generate alternative socio-economic afterlives of Buddhist objects. By analysing the scientific narratives and processes of heritage care, I show how the religious heritage reproduction is where the aesthetic, political, and economic dimensions of Buddhist material futures are imagined and realized. It is also a space of contestation between devotion, science, and memory-oriented practices of care in transnational heritage preservation."

This article is open access, so we would like to invite you to read Kolata's work online regardless of your current subscription status: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502386.2024.2363187

Subscribers with print editions of Issue 5 can find this article on pages 865-890.

This post concludes our series highlighting the eight articles from our special issue on "The Future of Religious Pasts: Religion and Cultural Heritage-Making in a Secular Age." Thank you for sharing this space with us.

We hope you will continue following along to learn more about each of the five book reviews included in Issue 5 and the artist behind the cover art, , in the following weeks.