Klein brand

Klein brand by clearly associating it with eating disorders, and through

pointing out the ethical and health consequences of too many young woman being influenced by the powerful fashion industry and its unreal

istic standards of beauty.

Reverend Billy, too, plays with memes created and distributed by corpo rations such as Disney, Starbucks, and Victoria’s Secret.

For instance,

during his “shopping interventions” at Disney retail stores, Reverend Billy and members of his church often carry large wooden crosses with Mickey and Minnie Mouse stuffed animals “crucified” on them. Reverend Billy

explains:

The Disney Company is the high church of retail. And that’s why we put Mickey Mouse on the cross. We’re taking two great organized religions [Christianity

and

what he calls the Church of Consumerism] and grinding them together and trying to confuse people

so they can think in a new way.

… I want the symbols and

meanings to fly away. (Reverend Billy, as interviewed in Post 8c Palacios, 2006)

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CULTURE JAMMING AS CRITICAL PUBLIC PEDAGOGY 333

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FIGURE 3.

Reverend Billy thus causes these memes to take on new meanings

as they

are incorporated

into new, unexpected counterhegemonic cultural scripts.

Mickey Mouse morphs from the Disney-sanctioned symbol of everlasting childhood and nostalgia to the leader of the evil, child-labor-sweat-soaked

empire of Disney.

Engaging Corporeally

Ellsworth (2005) argues that effective pedagogy engages the whole learner.

That is, powerful pedagogy “involves us in experiences of the corporeality of the body’s time and space. Bodies have affective somatic responses

as

they inhabit a pedagogy’s time and space” (p. 4). We argue that part of

the potential power of culture jamming’s pedagogy, then, lies in how it

attempts to engage the whole person?including the body and emotions?in

a process of “becoming.” First, the act of culture jamming often literally

involves the body. For instance, one of Reverend Billy’s retail interventions

literally engages jammers’ and audience members’ physical bodies. This

intervention, targeted at Starbucks, is entitled “It’s a Party! Bump and

Grind the Buckheads” (Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, n.d.), and involves jammers filling a Starbucks store and proceeding to