Joy Elizabeth Hayes

This article investigates the role that community media play in the translocal negotiation of local culture in Latin America. Translocal is a concept that captures the way that local cultural producers engage with national and transnational forces in shaping everyday cultural practices. This study focuses on community radio station Ecos de Manantlán in Zapotitlán de Vadillo, Mexico (Radio Zapotitlán), during the years 2006–2012. Radio Zapotitlán is officially categorized as a campesino or agricultural laborer/peasant station and presents its campesino identity through radio and Internet content. Analyses of that content, along with interviews with station associates and listeners, reveal the complex cultural mediations between local media producers, national regulators, and transnational donors. This study investigates the local production of a transnationally funded radionovela, or radio soap opera, as a window onto the station’s role as a cultural mediator. This article argues that station participants used the radionovela to express local values and meanings and to marginalize the educational goals of the transnational agency funding the project. Radio Zapotitlán offers a concrete case of cultural negotiation in which local interests engage with – and transform – donor-funded content aimed at the local community.

Focusing on the period 1999–2003, this study examines the cultural content of the Howard Stern Show in order to develop a theory of shock radio. We argue that while Stern’s sexist and anti-feminist agenda framed his treatment of women’s bodies, his broader obsession with bodily excess reflected the particular cultural moment of the late 20th century and the long-term problem of embodiment via the radio medium. We draw on Linda William’s concept of body genres, M. M. Bakhtin’s grotesque body, and recent radio scholarship in order to conceptualize the relationship among the voice, the body, and the medium in shock radio.

This is an introduction to a symposium of four articles on shock radio and its legacies for US media culture in the 21st century. It provides historical and global context for the rise of shock radio, and introduces four articles. These articles argue that while the shock radio format seems to have declined since its peak in the 1990s, it continues to flourish in a new ‘‘political shock’’ format and in the broader sexualization or ‘‘Sternification’’ of mainstream culture. Articles by Joy Elizabeth Hayes, Dana Gravesen, and Sharon Zechowski focus on shock jock Howard Stern, while articles by Zack Stiegler and Michael R. Kramer examine the cases of Michael Savage and Don Imus respectively.