About

Diana Blaine is a Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at USC Dornsife, where she also serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies. Her research and publications focus on analyzing representations of death in American culture, including media portrayals of corpses in advertising, literature, news, films, and television. She examines themes related to death, gender, and the body, exploring topics such as abortion, yoga, celebrity culture, and memorials, always through the lens of mortality. Blaine's academic background includes a Ph.D. in English from UCLA obtained in 1995, and she has completed postdoctoral training at Columbia University. Her professional career includes tenure-track appointments at the University of North Texas and various faculty positions at USC, where she has been a professor since 2009. Her scholarly work encompasses analyzing media representations of death, feminist theory, and gender studies, with a particular interest in images of women in art and advertising. Blaine has contributed to numerous conferences and publications, including book chapters and journal articles, and her research critically explores the social functions of bodies and death in contemporary culture.

Research topics

• Political Science
• History
• Law
• Cell biology
• Psychology
• Art
• Biology

Selected publications

• American individualism lives on after death, as consumers choose new ways to put their remains to rest

  2023-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 12 Death on Display: The Ideological Function of the Mummies of the World Exhibit

  Berghahn Books · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Art
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Notes on contributors

  Berghahn Books · 2022

  • Psychology
  • History
  DOI

• "We Are Going to See the King": Christianity and Celebrity at Michael Jackson's Memorial

  2017-07-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter explores the challenges posed by Michael Jackson's celebrity persona not just in death but during his life as well, including those related to race and sexual orientation. It demonstrates how the memorial service strove to resolve them, ultimately erasing his queer identity, striving to exonerate him of charges of pedophilia, and portraying him as a symbol of both the success and the failure of the civil rights movement. The chapter examines how this ritual worked to solve the problem of death itself, increasingly a conundrum in modernity, by offering the ethically recuperated Jackson as immortal Christ figure, eternally alive via his status as legend in the entertainment industry as in a transcendent realm beyond. Modern celebrity requires that the star's persona be an embodiment of oppositions, and Jackson certainly fulfilled this mandate. He was from a working-class family yet lived a breathtakingly lavish existence. Jackson surely functions as such a shamanistic figure, both in life and in death.

  PublisherDOI

• The Topless Professor in the Digital Age

  Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks · 2016-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A professor recounts her personal experience when private photographs of her bare-chested body went public on the nightly news. The pictures garnered more than 1 million views, catapulting her into a public scandal. She explains how she weathered the storm, standing unwavering for her freedom despite raging pundits and scolding university administrators.

  PublisherDOI

• Seeing Red: The Female Body and Periodic Renewal

  Pynchon Notes · 2002-09-22

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Alice Cooper once said that "only women bleed," but according to Dana Medoro, so do many of the canonical texts of American literature. And much as women and men in general have been taught to shun mention of the monthly "curse," male and female critics alike have largely avoided any discussion of the importance of menstruation in these works, despite their authors' best intentions: "Stanley Koteks" is hardly a subtle moniker, after all. But little of the previous criticism on Pynchon, Faulkner and Morrison investigates the paradigm, or indeed identifies it as one, even though, Medoro convincingly argues in <em>The Bleeding of America, </em>an entire parallel universe in these authors' novels revolves around the female body, the moon and menses, and offers an alternative to the masculine culture of separation, aggression and murder that each of these socially conscious authors indicts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• That's "Post-Bibliocentric" to You

  Pynchon Notes · 1997-09-22

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  An important contribution to the scholarship linking literature and technology, Reading Matters offers a sweeping overview of the myriad ways machinery has affected the creation and interpretation of narrative. With topics ranging from how the advent of typewriting divorced the hand from the pen (and so the body from the text) to the appropriation of the conventions of high modernism in the bestselling techno-thriller, this compilation of twelve original essays and a newly translated one examines the authors and the theoretical concerns that have both helped to make prose fiction a marginalized genre and guaranteed its indispensability in our arguably post-chironic cyber age.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Abjection of Addie and Other Myths of the Maternal in 'As I Lay Dying.' (Special Issue: William Faulkner)

  ˜The œMississippi quarterly · 1994-06-22 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Marina Cap-Bun

  16 shared

• William Faulkner

  University of British Columbia

  16 shared

• J. M. Ramsey

  University of Southern California

  16 shared

• María-José Blanco

  16 shared

• Julia Banwell

  Southern California University for Professional Studies

  16 shared

• Thomas Pynchon

  University of British Columbia

  16 shared