We have just published another article as part of our Geographies of Media Convergence research project (funded by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand). This article is a critique of dominant approaches in the field of popular geopolitics which in our view have not paid sufficient attention to existing and well-established debates within media and cultural studies. It also aims to expand the feminist critique of critical geopolitics initiated within feminist geography a number of years ago. While there is no doubt that popular geopolitics has become a lot more interesting in recent years, there is still a tendency to ignore television to focus on other kinds of media and popular texts and to gloss over the negotiations, complexities and contradictions associated with contemporary televisual texts. The second half of the article discusses the ABC TV drama Commander in Chief, which follows the first female president of the USA, and is set in a post-9/11 world wherein the struggle for US geopolitical domination has become a much more complex endeavor. We end by wondering whether entertainment television might provide us with imaginative resources for queering US hegemony. The article is now published in the journal Gender, Place and Culture and can be found here:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2013.855711
Julie Cupples 