Today we’re bringing you a special re-release of an episode that’s dear to our hearts: Dirty Dancing x Nostalgia with Andrea Warner, originally released on May 14, 2024. Andrea had just published her book The Time of My Life, a deep dive into the 1987 hit movie Dirty Dancing, and she joined us on the pod to talk about what made the film and the soundtrack so special.
Andrea passed away on Sunday, September 27th, after living with cancer for three years. We will miss Andrea with our whole hearts and thought today we would honor her memory by revisiting this special episode which showcases her brilliant mind and joyful voice. You can spend more time with Andrea through her pop culture podcast Pop This!, which she co-hosted with Lisa Christiansen and Andrea Gin. You can also check out her other books: We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the '90s and Changed Canadian Music; Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography; Rise Up And Sing! Power, Protest, and Activism in Music; and Kihiani: A Memoir of Healing, which she co-authored with Inuk singer and songwriter Susan Aglukark.
Thank you for listening. May her memory be a blessing.
To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back next week with a Material Concerns episode!
Material Girls is a show that makes sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand.
*Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both.
Original Show Notes (from 2024)
In this episode, Marcelle and Hannah are joined by Andrea Warner (she/her), the author of The Time of My Life, an exploration of Dirty Dancing as a deeply feminist film. We begin with a conversation about sexy films that made our younger selves all hot and bothered before heading into the segment "Why This? Why Now?" Hannah guides us through the difficulty that writer and producer Eleanor Bergstein faced in getting this movie made and distributed. We talk Reagan, Roe v. Wade, and nostalgia for the 1960s. Hannah then introduces us to American literary critic Fredric Jameson, cultural historian Bill Osgerby, and Russian-American cultural critic Svetlana Boym. Together, Hannah, Marcelle and Andrea parse through their respective work about postmodernism, nostalgia, late capitalism and the construction of history to get a better understanding of why Dirty Dancing is such a compelling film. We end the episode with a discussion of the appropriation of Black music in the movie, the power dynamics within Baby and Johnny's romance and the unique representations of mutual aid.
Works Cited
Boym, Svetlana. “Nostalgia and its Discontents.” The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture (Summer 2007). https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-uses-of-the-past/articles/nostalgia-and-its-discontents
Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Osgerby, Bill. “‘(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’: Romantic Nostalgia and the Early 1960s.” In The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture, edited by Yannis
Tzioumakis and Siân Lincoln, 207-222. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013.
Warner, Andrea. The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing. Toronto: ECW Press, 2024.
Music Credits
“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020
Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.
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