USA

This dissertation examines the cultural and political significance of sentimiento, the emotionally charged delivery of song in ranchera genre musical performance. Briefly stated, sentimiento entails a singer’s fervent portray al of emotions, including heartache, yearning, and hope, a skillfully achieved depiction that incites extraordinary communication between artist and audience. Adopting a feminist perspective, my work is attentive to the elements of nationalism, gender and sexuality connected to the performance of sentimiento, especially considering the genre’s historic association with patriotism and hypermasculinity. I trace the logic that associates representations of feeling with nation - based pathology and feminine emotional excess and deposits this stigmatized surplus of affect onto the singing body, particularly that of the mexicana female singing body. In this context, sentimiento is represented in film, promotional material, and other mediating devices as a bodily inscription of personal and gendered tragedy, as the manifestation of exotic suffering, or as an ancestral and racial condition of melancholy.

Gran Bretaña

This thesis examines Néstor García Canclini ́s relationships with various non-academic institutions in Latin America (focusing on Mexico) during the 1990s and the 2000s. It emphasises the shortage of communication between scholars and non-academic policy-making institutions through its study of García Canclini ́s cultural policy activism. By investigating García Canclini’s activities with various Latin American non-academic institutions (and particularly those from Mexico), this thesis argues that he not only conceptualises and proposes cultural policy; he also conducts cultural policy. Through his discussion of cultural issues with bureaucrats, legislators, policy-makers, politicians, private managers and newspaper editors, this thesis evaluates his most important engagements to present how cultural policy can move from being an institutionally oriented instrument to an intellectually-oriented operation.

Gran Bretaña

This doctoral contribution borrows from the discursive practices of transnationalism and diaspora in order to articulate the concept of “transnational audiences” in the United States. The project identifies transnational audiences as formed by individuals and families whose lives straddle two national territories. It draws on the traditions of cultural studies and reception analysis as a strategy to explore the relation between media use and novel experiences of migration in a context of contemporary gl obalization. This conceptual background is the result of empirical research conducted in Los Angeles which investigated the television news reception of 67 informants of Mexican origin during three months in 2006. Relying on a range of qualitative research methods based in the domestic settings of the participants, the project found high levels of interests across a variety of news occurring in Los Angeles, the US, Mexico and further afield. During interviews, television news-viewing sessions and in daily written accounts, respondents constantly conveyed the idea of being directly impacted by a wide vari ety of events and developments in the news, regardless of geographic proximity.