Popular Culture: an Introduction

Carla Freccero

(1999)

Chapter 1: POPULAR CULTURE

Culture is a “whole way of life (ideas, attitudes, languages, practices, institutions, structures of power) and a whole range of cultural practices: artistic forms, texts, canons, architecture, mass-produced commodities, and so on. […] Culture, in other words, means not only ‘high culture,’ what usually call art or literature, but also the everyday practices, representations, and cultural productions of people and of postindustrial societies.”

WHAT IS CULTURAL STUDIES?

“Cultural studies covers a range of theoretical and political positions that use a variety of methodologies, drawing on ethnography, anthropology, sociology, literature, feminism, Marxism, history, film criticism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics.”

Cultural studies “has grown out of efforts to understand what has shaped post World War II societies and cultures: industrialization, modernization, urbanization, mass communication, commodification, imperialism, a global economy.”

Cultural studies explores “the relationship between cultural artifacts (movies, videos, science fiction books, comic strips, pornography, popular novels, popular science, performance art) and our social order.”

WHY STUDY POPULAR CULTURE?

• because popular culture is an integral part of culture in the United States as a whole

WHY STUDY POPULAR CULTURE?

• because popular culture is an integral part of culture in the United States as a whole

• it allows students to recognize and draw on their already existing literacies and the cultures they know in order to analyze and think critically

• provides an approach for students to become informed consumers of technologies

• close gap between elite class (holding knowledge) and rest to “develop a kind of knowledge and critical practice that all could share”

THE DANGER IN NOT STUDYING POPULAR CULTURE…

“This project is […] about changing our position as ‘mere’ consumers of mass culture and making us into critics, meaning that we approach our culture critically and we analyze it, not only in order to denounce it, but in order to understand the way it works on us, the ways we are implicated in it. It is about understanding how our culture represents us and how we are represented in it.”

HOW DOES ONE STUDY POPULAR CULTURE?

ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE:

• SEMIOTIC DIMENSION: study of signs

• ALLEGORICAL DIMENSION: representation tells multiple stories at many levels

HOW DOES ONE STUDYPOPULAR CULTURE?

ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE:

• “sixties-within-the-eighties”• the counterculture, social movements, and social

figures of the sixties are important to the popular culture imagination of the eighties, nineties, and today

• “The ‘sixties-in-the-eighties’ […] inform both the issues guiding this study and the content of materials included in the book.”

TERMS TO NOTE:

• hegemonic culture:

“the culture that expresses the ruling order of any given social formation”

• subculture:

“a social group that is both subversive of some of the dominant culture’s cherished rules and oppressed by them, struggling for a different way to live”

“subcultures might be directly oppositional but usually are not--they challenge the hegemony indirectly or obliquely, through style: clothes, practices, costumes, body markings, ways of gathering in public spaces, hairstyles, hair colors”

Chapter 2: CULTURAL STUDIES, POPULAR CULTURE, AND

PEDAGOGY

QUESTIONS TO ASK OF REPRESENTATIONS…

• What work are they doing?

• What motivates the representation?

• What does this representation say about the representers and the imagined viewers What elements are combined in a cultural representation?

• What contradictions get highlighted?

QUESTIONS TO ASK OF REPRESENTATIONS, continued…

• How does it speak about the social context that produces it?

• How do representations affect the lives of the people and situations they represent?

• How do they influence decision making about their subject matter?

TERM TO NOTE:

• interpellation:

“how a social formation constructs and locates us as subjects who respond and consent to it in certain ways”

cultural studies analysis of pop culture text: Basic Instinct

• How does Basic Instinct put gender roles into play?

• “Situate this film in the context the women’s movements of the last 20 years and explore the way it seems to react to those movements by talking about how women have become rich, dangerous, and educated […] at the expense of ‘ordinary’ (working-class) white guys.”

• What does it mean that the characters are represented the ways they are?

cultural studies analysis of pop culture text: Basic Instinct

Chapter 3: SEXUAL SUBCULTURES

Freccero “raises questions about […] efforts on the part of the state to legislate the conduct of bodies and their representations in public culture.”

• public versus private body

PUBLIC VERSUS PRIVATE BODY

• feminist antipornography movement of early to mid-1980s

• “queer” and “gay/lesbian” as terminology

• Madonna

“Madonna is perhaps the best-known popular culture figure whose career has, in part, been forged in the representations of sexualities […] and who has consistently celebrated sexual explicitness in her performances. […] This is why I think she is a good choice of an object to analyze. She introduces these questions [of gender, race, and sexuality] forcefully into the cultural arena, the arena of cultural production and critique. Her work invites us aggressively to ask questions about the constructions and deployment of gender, race, and sexuality.