Popular Culture
by Carla Freccero
Presenters
Jennifer Santos & Sarah Szeliga
Carla Freccero
“To study popular culture is to be politically
literate, to understand what issues are at stake
when political leaders and other condemn or
praise its representations.”
“This book is about the relationship between
CULTURAL ARTIFACTS and our social order
and its various “subcultures” in the US and
their cultural productions.”
Race and Class in America
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Music
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soundtracks
rap
rock
pop
Movies
Film Soundtracks
The Bodyguard 1992
• Hollywood “helping roles” film
• very conservative politics around race:
the great and good white man “saves” the
black woman from danger
• Single black woman with a child
• Houston is clearly the driving force in
the musical production of the soundtrack
• gospel music - a black cultural tradition
• Consider the album cover - about
launching Houston’s acting career?
I Will Always Love You - I Have Nothing - I’m Every Woman - Run to You
- Queen of the Night - Jesus Loves Me
Dead Man Walking
1996
• The director, Tim Robbins appropriates
international “multiculturalism” into the
soundtrack to avoid the local political issues at
stake
• Political issues are: the death penalty in the US
and the dismissal of the Supreme Court that the
majority of black men are given the death
penalty
• The soundtrack features Pakistani singers and
folk, rock and country singers
• The music of the film argues against the death
penalty while the film confirms and consecrates
the logic of the death penalty
Dead Man Walking, Bruce Springsteen - In Your Mind, Johnny Cash - Woman on the
Tier, Susan Vega - Promises, Lyle Lovett - Face of Love, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan - Fall
of Troy, Tom Waits, Long Road , Eddie Vedder
Rap
• Rap has come to signify the popular resistance of black youth in the
USA
• Rap music as a form of resistance
• Rap is poetry
• Is responsible for bringing to light issues of racism, police violence, drug
use, and sexism - putting it out there for public debate in a way that many
politicians and policy makers have not been successful at doing
• Is politically resistive in that it emanates from urban black life and
protest
• Ice-T’s Cop Killer
• 2 Live Crew’s Nasty as they Wanna Be - obscenity and sexism
Rock
• Rock music is usually a male dominated homosocial
space
• Rock is the music “of the people”
• In the 60’s it came to stand for the counterculture
revolution
• Masculine and white
• Interest in music is a way to be involved in culture
Pop
• Pop holds a degraded space in music
• Does not feature “artist” musicians, the music is not
considered original or creative; it privileges the vocal
over the musical and the artist is not thought to be an
artist either but just ventriloquizing
• Pop is the domain of the feminine
• Not art, not serious, not politically resistive
Movies
Do the Right Thing 1989
• Movie is a discourse for casual
prejudice
• Prejudice for the group that is
“below you”
• Deals with class and economic
relation that results in tragedy
• Political Mission of the film: it
is a narrative of the resistance that
develops between race groups
and the situations that occur as a
result
Gender and Sexuality
in Pop Culture
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Serial Killers
Madonna
The Queer Subculture
Serial Killers
Serial Killers are a study in the psychopathic
perversion - usually a man with a sexual dysfunction
The US has 5% of the world’s population
and 75% of its serial killers
• Buffalo Bill is the serial killer in The Silence
of the Lambs
• Dr. Lecter says that Buffalo Bill was not
born, but made through years of child abuse
• Buffalo Bill dresses like a woman, wears
makeup, hides his penis = gay lifestyles?
• Film perpetuates the idea that if you are gay
and a man you really want to be a woman
• Film links homosexuality, transsexuals, and
female impersonation directly to killing
Madonna
The Postmodern Diva of Pop Culture
• She invokes a sex positive identity, desire, practice, and
subjective agency with a view towards post-AIDS
“sensible” sex practices
• In her videos she likes to place the female in the
position of supreme control
• Justify My Love - is a fantasy about bodies and
pleasures, shows that erotic need is not linked to
genital sexuality, actual acts, and does not have
to confine anyone to fixed identities or roles
• Like a Virgin - auto-eroticism, “sensible” sex
and masturbating
• Like a Prayer - Integrates religion and sex
• As a powerful and important white woman in this
culture, Madonna was being represented as vicious,
aggressive, cold, heartless, unfeminine, greedy,
unnatural and denatured
• She has now turned to a “Maternalism” portrayal
• Motherly and religious to defend herself from some
of the charges directed at her
And We All Know Who This Has Happened to
Also...
The Queer Subculture
• Represented through style: clothes, practices,
costumes, body markings, hairstyles, and ways of
gathering in places
• Has come to be identified with the struggle to
acquire “civil” rights - to be equal in the eyes of the
law
Technoculture
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21st Century Tech Toys
Technological Influence
Alien Trilogy
• Alien - 1979
• Aliens - 1982
• Alien3 - 1992
Tech Toys and Its Influences
“We have a romance and disillusionment with
technological developments.”
• Having Tech Toys is a sign of being “in”
• Tech is the defining mark of the late 20th century
• “First World” cultures are ridden with technology
• In the “Age of Copy”
• Students today have a whole new type of literacy,
one that integrates a graphical interface which, easily
lets you move through multiple texts and images.
Alien
Directed by Ridley Scott, 1979
• Film reads as a parable about the revenge of Mother Nature against mankind’s
audacious claim to conquer her through technological perfection - social
commentary
• The ending celebrates the triumph of humanism over the alienness of nature,
albeit after demonstrating technology’s failure to do so through scientific means
• The humanism that triumphs is no longer the heroic technocrat but a woman
• Movie represents the oil crisis of ‘79 by its ship - it looks like an offshore oil
rig
• Celebrates the second wave of the woman’s movement - feminists have taken
up this movie as a progressive political representation
• It’s the realization that the high tech land of the USA is ruining its resources
• The alien is seen as a revenge of nature: the perfect killing machine that is not
a machine, the perfect organism that can make even inorganic substances
become part of itself
• Also a nightmare of reproduction - birth of an alien from the chest cavity of
Cain, the “weak”, British, feminine-like character
• Ripley is portrayed as a feminine heroine
Aliens
Directed by James Cameron, 1986
• This film retreats from social commentary and moves to the realm of the
personal, the private, and the individual
•This is a story about a domestic quarrel between two women - two mothers
• Ripley has a single-minded rage agains the aliens and her desire to destroy them
• Ripley is private, personal and has selfish concern for her “adopted” daughter
Newt
• Aliens is thus a movie about maternal jealousy
• Ripley goes after the alien’s eggs and the alien goes after Newt
• Film invokes arguments for the colonization of America
• Racial politics of the film: Vasquez dies invoking the theme of ultimate sacrifice
as the mark of “good” people of color in the nation
• Alien can be seen as a “welfare queen”: the bad (black) alien mother lays tons of
eggs, creates teeming masses of baby aliens that will take over the world by
devouring the rest of us, while the “good” white mother had just one “adopted”
child
Aliens3
Directed by David Fincher, 1992
• Representation of the AIDS epidemic
• Reaches out to the gay spectator
• Ripley shaves her head, wears fatigues and boots
• Ripley “shoots up”
• Crew belongs to ACT UP a community of activists
• ACT UP elaborates the discourse of AIDS with its gay
sympathies
• The mourning of the characters in the film speak to the
mourning of gay men - survivor’s guilt
• Most people found this movie depressing - death was
addressed as cruel, involuntary, and senseless = AIDS
Reviews of Popular Culture
• Freccero uses a traditional close-reading technique in her
analysis of popular culture. By doing this, she shows how
a methodology can weed out layered meanings of complex
cultural artifacts.
• She also embraces the political aspirations of cultural
studies, seeking a better world by deconstructing the past
and envisioning alternative futures. Freccero does this by
questioning societal assumptions about the relationship
between nature and culture.
• Freccero sometimes essentializes and personalizes the
alternative readings of the artifacts that she supports in
sloppy ways.
Oppositional Politics and Alternative Futures,
George Beatty: University of Iowa
Reviews of Popular Culture
• Carla Freccero proposes good guiding questions aimed at
understanding the relationship between rhetoric,
representation, and politics.
• Freccero’s questions situate out examination of media
representations as an ideological inquiry.
Ravers on the Web: Resistance, Multidimensionality, and
Writing (about) Youth Cultures,
Jonathan Alexander: University of Cincinnati
Reviews of Popular Culture
• Freccero’s book is an excellent overview of the field of
cultural studies.
• Freccero adds a dynamic and often spirited approach to
the texts she explores.
• One criticism is that the book does read at times as if it
was transcribed directly from her lecture notes, and some
readers may become frustrated because she doesn’t always
answer the questions she poses.
Review of: Popular Culture – An Introduction
Rosalind Sibielski: Literature and Psychology
Reviews of Popular Culture
• The book’s real strength is the way it so consistently
keeps the rationality of cultural differences at the very
center of its textual readings and analytical critiques
Review of: Popular Culture – An Introduction
Bethany Ogdon: College English
How This Book Relates
to Our Class
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This book is a study of CULTURAL
ARTIFACTS
This book is a study of CULTURAL
HEGEMONIES
Cultural Artifacts
Like us, Freccero deconstructed certain artifacts
to ascertain its information infrastructures. By
doing this, she was able to read many systems
from the object and tell us what they meant and
say about our society. Freccero commented on
the social, political, and technological influence
these artifacts have made on the American
society in Popular Culture. The author mixes
the physicality and the inherent narrative
structure of each icon and gives the reader a
good understanding of its place in the world.
Cultural Hegemonies
Freccero is adept at explaining the role of hegemony and the link
between knowledge production and social control. The issues of
knowledge and power, multiculturalism, and how knowledge
establishes a particular moral order are dominant themes within
her work. Her perspective is that knowledge may be power, but
“popular culture is a currency.” As such, it must be understood as
an important means of transmitting knowledge, of both the “other’
and ourselves as the “other”. This knowledge provides the
possibility of managing, changing, and even controlling relations
between disparate groups. Her point that “binary oppositions”
construct a “logic of absolute difference that produces the
degradation of one term and the elevation of another, clearly
relates to how structured knowledge systems operate, and how
images and meanings are manipulated to produce certain
privileged types of knowledge and common sense.
Our Comments...
We agree with a statement that was included on the back jacket of
the book, “the beauty and utility of Freccero’s book lies in the way
skips the familiar dutiful descriptions to instead perform the study of
popular culture.” Freccero seems not to concern herself with
whether or not her opinion will be considered to be “right” or
“wrong” but with the important need to have and share an opinion.
In demonstrating the need to study popular culture, she makes a
valiant attempt of demonstrating precisely how to just do that. She
takes an interesting array of cultural objects (neglecting important
issues such as television and video games) and summarizes, what she
perceives to be their messages perfectly.
We also feel that her emphasis on the leftist point of view to the
exclusion of other perspectives and her reliance on older artifacts in
need of updating are the serious flaws of this work.
Discussion Questions
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How do you feel about some of Freccero’s arguments? Do you agree?
What other cultural artifacts can you think of that would support her
claims?
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Do you think her arguments are as valid today as they were 5 years ago?
Has much progress been made?
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Can everything produced as popular media be considered a cultural
artifact? Where is the limit? Is this the problem with political correctness?
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Why do people live and die by cultural hegemonies? Why are they so
important to society, and what do they say about us as a people?
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Is Technoculture going to destroy us? Do you think we will get to a point
where technology ruins our culture and society? Or do you think it will
bring us closer together i.e. the Internet?
Works Cited
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Alexander, J. (2003). Some Critical Backgrounds… Retrieved
October 20, 2004 from Ravers on the Web: Resistance,
Multidimensionality, and Writing (about) Youth Cultures
Website:http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/7.3/coverweb/RaveWrite/index
.htm
Beatty, G. (2001). Oppositional Politics and Alternative Futures.
Retrieved October 20, 2004, from Science Fiction Studies
Web
Site: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/birs/bir83b.htm
Freccero, C. (1999). Popular Culture: An Introduction. New York:
New York University Press.
Ogdon, B. (2001). Review of Popular Culture – An Introduction, by
Carla Freccero, College English 63, no.4: 500-516.
Sibielski, R. (2001). Review of Popular Culture – An Introduction,
by Carla Freccero, Literature and Psychology 47, no.3: 56.