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, massproduced 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 STUDY
POPULAR 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.