One of the major influences on cultural studies has been feminist theory, foregrounding how gender operates within popular culture, especially concerning audience practices. What key insights come from this work (as summarized by Storey and excerpted in our Reader) that strike you as particularly useful? Choose one of the articles in the reader and highlight what arguments this article brings to the study of popular culture that might augment or shift what we’ve discussed thus far.
Theories of Popular Culture
Class blog for AMST0355, Spring 09, Middlebury College
I find it difficult to pinpoint any “key insights” that feminism brings to the discussion of popular culture, since there is considerable overlap with other perspectives we have studied so far. This is not to be interpreted negatively; feminism’s primary achievement has been precisely the “foregrounding [of] how gender operates within popular culture” – a very broad paradigm shift. The fact that modern academia has institutionally absorbed feminism and gender studies testifies to the legitimacy of its research and theory. In other words, I’m not comfortable with ascribing the revelation that there has historically been an underrepresented female perspective the humble title of “key insight.”
As far as useful concepts go, I think Queer Theory is a good tool to examine shifting/stagnant notions of masculinity in the films we’ve been watching. The specific example that comes to mind is the portrayal of men drinking champagne. In both “My Darling Clementine” and “Die Hard” champagne is used to delineate normative male behavior from the opposite (Doc Holiday is partially absolved, because we learn he drinks champagne for medical reason).
I also appreciated Storey’s long and detailed summary of “Men’s Studies.” The number of insights I gained from reading that section of the intro is beyond the character limit of this modest discussion forum.
I agree with Andrey in that the insights yielded by feminist approach to the study of popular culture are hard to decipher. Each of the approaches Rakow outlines in her essay on feminism and popular culture are similar to theories we have already studied. Though she describes a hitherto unexplored aspect of the organization of power in society – that being its undeniable patriarchic foundation – the fundamental structures she describes are essentially the same. This aspect of power-organization is useful insofar as it enables further insight as to the oftentimes-concealed depth with which power structures pervade cultural norms. That being said, recognizing gender binaries as a sight of contested cultural legitimacy is undoubtedly a worthwhile endeavor, for doing so has to potential to reveal the constructed nature of cultural values and principles. Though gender theory may differ from Marxism or semiotics – insofar as the former deals with an aspect of society while the latter purports to reveal the fundamental nature of society via holistic theory – its function is quite similar.
Like Will and Andrey, feminism (as its represented here by Storey) is hard to see as a theory on its own as much as a very interesting supplement to many of the theories we’ve learned about thus far. Radical and liberal feminism are the two forms I’m most familiar with outside of class (to be honest, I’d never thought of different schools of thought within feminism, although now it makes perfect sense). The Marxist and dual-systems theories represent new and thought-provoking ideas. It made me think about how capitalism reinforces the patriarchal system, and vice versa. This in relation to some of the movies we’ve watched (Die Hard and Animal House spring to mind) brings some interesting angles to light which I’d never realized before.
In any case, the feminist tint that feminism brings to theories such as Marxism are very interesting, and beg a revisiting of some of our earlier Marxist texts. And again, like Andrey, I found the “Men’s Studies” portion of the intro to be one of the more interesting sections so far. The role of gender has been conspicuously missing from our discussions until now, and this chapter in some ways satisfies the elephant in the room — that pop culture affects the two genders differently in a fundamental way. It’s refreshing to read not so much a new idea, but a new take on older ideas.
I also agree that there are many similarities between feminist theory and other approaches we’ve previously studied. Although this is similar to several theories we’ve studied (including Althusser’s ideology, Marxism, and cultural studies), I think a key insight from Radway’s Reading Romance is the complexity of the cultural significances of a particular genre. She suggests that one must understand both the meaning of reading the text, as well as the meaning of the text in order to fully understand cultural significance. Using the example of romance fictions, Radway shows that these two meanings can be contradictory. In the act of reading the romance, a woman is escaping her familial and domestic duties and opposing patriarchal society. On the other hand, the meaning of the romance promotes male dominance. Radway’s analysis of romance novels provides helpful insight for the study of pop culture by demonstrating that one must consider multiple meanings in analyzing a text.
Similarly, an important insight from Hermes is the idea that the meaning one creates from reading a text can be separate from the meaning of the text itself. She suggests that one’s interpretation of a particular text does not and is not necessarily reliant on the dominant reading of the text. She argues that cultural texts have a “fallacy of meaningfulness” (122) in which they should be understood not simply in terms of the making of meaning but rather in conjunction with people’s everyday lives. According to Hermes, there are various repertoires that readers use in interpreting the text and that generate meaning from the text. She shows that the meanings created from repertoires are not necessarily dependent on the meanings of women’s magazines. This is important because it suggests that a form of popular culture (in this case, the genre of women’s magazines) can be analyzed apart from the dominant reading of it. However, this is somewhat similar to other approaches: it seems to build off of negotiation (with a focus on context and the text) and is similar to psychoanalysis and carnivalesque in that the focus of interpreting meaning is more on the individual rather than simply the cultural text.
I found Janice Radway’s article “Reading Reading the Romance” interesting because it provides feminist theoretical arguments that contribute to our understanding of popular culture, especially with regard to women and negotiation. She discusses romance literature and both the women who create it and the women who consume it. Radway examines how women’s responses to the literature are related to their social situations. The topic of romance literature is especially interesting because I have always assumed that the books impress patriarchal messages on their readers: the man as a hero who is able to satisfy and complete the incomplete woman. But Radway discusses a new way of viewing romance literature, because she talks to women who declare that reading romance literature is a method of temporarily refusing their roles as wives and mothers. By reading the literature, they become temporarily unavailable to their children and husbands. In this way, they use the texts of popular culture to negotiate their identities as individuals. Radway notices that these women are searching for both nurture and power, which are available through the literature’s hero figures. When women identify with the heroine of the novel, they achieve satisfaction and completion with union to the hero. Radway adds in her notes that it is also possible for the reader to identify with the hero, and Storey suggests in his Introduction that identification with a powerful figure can influence readers to seek power in their real lives (Storey, Introduction, 108). Radway also provides an interesting discussion of romance literature writers. Though I have always seen these writers as women who promote patriarchal oppression, Radway argues that these women create space for their own work and careers, and they create space for the discourse of women’s sexuality. They write to provide pleasure for women, and they unite women by creating audiences for their works. Through their literature they can even move women to speak about and act on their own opinions of gender and sexuality.
While I agree with many of the above comments in terms of feminism incorporating many different theories, it most certainly acts as a supplement—especially “The Reception and Experience Approach” outlined by Rakow.
The R & E approach surpasses the recovery approach in that involves a masculine and feminine sphere—when looking at a cultural text, I feel as though you cannot separate it into gender lines, but instead take a gendered response to it.
Unlike the images approach suggests, we cannot look solely at the text—Animal House was a different movie than it was in the the 70s, 80s, 90s, and now.
In my opinion, when look at a text culturally (excluding artistically) reader’s response is the most vital—if not only—way to approach it.
In this way, the R & E approach studies the multiple different ways women engage in culture—providing valuable historical, societal, and psychological feedback of the times.
The discussion of ‘reciprocation’ and nurturing in the Radway article brought an new perspective to the study of popular culture. I feel these emphasize the importance of context in culture studies. It shows that cultural studies can present results that are not universal but instead gender specific. I think that reciprocation and notion that women long for a nurturer present a new way to analyze culture texts. It places an emphasis on personal experience and relationships with other people and family. I feel that pyscho-analysis began to address relationships, but I believe that many elements of feminist theory address these issues better.
I don’t have too much to add at this point in the discussion. I’d definitely agree that feminism builds upon the theories we have studied thus far. I found it interesting that feminists (or at least those featured by Storey) strongly proclaim their belief that they “cannot afford to dismiss the popular by always positioning [themselves] outside it”. Instead, they acknowledge the role of pleasure in the consumption of popular culture and through personal investigation attempt to investigate the roots of such pleasures.
I found the fact that 60% of the Smithton readers “read the ending first, to ensure that the experience of the novel will not counteract the satisfactions of the underlying myth” to be rather frightening. I believe that just skipping to the end invalidates the rest of the novel and illustrates an extreme dependence on the dominant, reinforcing the defining concept of genre.
I think Rakow’s article does a good job at highlighting a specific power relation in order to look at popular culture as a whole. I think that so far, other schools of thought have focused very much on class relations, seeing such social relations as the core structure of the power hierarchy of U.S. society. I don’t think they would deny the existence of patriarchy but would argue that ultimately questions of gender and race are subordinate to class.
I think the Recovery and Reappraisal approach bears important similarities with the populist approach of some Dallas viewers in Ien Ang’s study. It gives some needed vocabulary to the (seemingly) bare lexicon of populist thinking: Janet Wolff’s view of art as a cultural artifact situated in a particular time and place is helpful.
I think the reception and experience approach goes back to Hegemony theory’s notions of negotiations for meaning in term of how it analyses women’s relationship to popular culture. Feminists must avoid the trap of deterministic ideologies that ignore context and reception of texts.
Also, I find Butler’s argument that sex has no biological reality problematic. Going with her line of thought, physical and biological differences between people are mere social constructions not based in any objective reality: a notion i have a hard time buying. One could extend this argument to philosophical questions on the nature and existence of physical reality itself, a realm far removed from the concerns of feminism.
I found the Images and Representations Approach in Rakow’s article helpful in our additional studies of focusing on historical context to understand popular culture. One of the questions poised by this method asks, for example, what kind of images are present and what do those images reveal about women’s position in the culture? The comparisons over centuries of images of women in movies, magazines, and advertising appeared to give off this popular cultural portrayal of women as possible “housewifely, passive, wholesome, and pretty” according to one feminist observer. But I also found the Reception and Experience Approach useful in the shift of studies of popular culture. What I find interesting about it is that the study of popular culture concerning feminism involves the reaction of how women view certain images and how feminist observers take account these reactions and use towards “critique and development.”
The part about Men’s studies and Queer theory was also useful. It got me thinking that Men’s studies can be viewed in a variety of ways, including a reaction of independence in response to strong studies in feminism, or a reassertion of the male patriarchy in culture. Also, the idea of the rules and regulations of gender coming from culture reminds me of what we studied in Semiotics and Structuralism, and how it is yet another aspect of life that is not clearly defined as something natural.