Gender race and class in media summary

Gender, Ethnicity, Class, And The Media (Discussion Post)

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gender, Race, and Class in Media : A Critical Reader / editors, Gail Dines, Wheelock College, Jean M. Humez, University of Massachusetts, Boston. — Fourth Edition.

pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4522-5906-2 (paperback : acid-free paper)

1. Mass media and culture—United States. 2. Mass media and sex—United States. 3. Mass media and race relations—United States. 4. Social classes in mass media. 5. Mass media—Social aspects—United States. 6. Popular culture—United States. 7. United States—Social conditions—1980- I. Dines, Gail. II. Humez, Jean McMahon, 1944-

P94.65.U6G46 2014 302.23'0973—dc23 2013039084

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgments

PART I. A CULTURAL STUDIES APPROACH TO MEDIA: THEORY

1. Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture Douglas Kellner

2. The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs George Lipsitz

3. The Economics of the Media Industry David P. Croteau, William D. Hoynes, and Stefania Milan

4. Hegemony James Lull

5. The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney

6. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition: An American Fairy Tale Gareth Palmer

7. Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context Janice Radway

8. Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching Henry Jenkins III

9. Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans Mark Andrejevic

10. Reconsidering Resistance and Incorporation Richard Butsch

PART II. REPRESENTATIONS OF GENDER, RACE, AND CLASS

11. The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media Stuart Hall

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12. “Global Motherhood”: The Transnational Intimacies of White Femininity Raka Shome

13. Pornographic Eroticism and Sexual Grotesquerie in Representations of African American Sportswomen James McKay and Helen Johnson

14. Hetero Barbie? Mary F. Rogers

15. Transgender Transitions: Sex/Gender Binaries in the Digital Age Kay Siebler

16. The “Rich Bitch”: Class and Gender on the Real Housewives of New York City Michael J. Lee and Leigh Moscowitz

17. Big Talkers: Rush Limbaugh, Conservative Talk Radio, and the Defiant Reassertion of White Male Authority Jackson Katz

PART III. READING MEDIA TEXTS CRITICALLY

18. Pretending to Be “Postracial”: The Spectacularization of Race in Reality TV’s Survivor Emily M. Drew

19. Television’s ‘New’ Feminism: Prime-Time Representations of Women and Victimization Lisa M. Cuklanz and Sujata Moorti

20. More Than Baby Mamas: Black Mothers and Hip-Hop Feminism Marlo David

21. Political Culture Jamming: The Dissident Humor of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Jamie Warner

22. Educating The Simpsons: Teaching Queer Representations in Contemporary Visual Media Gilad Padva

23. Resisting, Reiterating, and Dancing Through: The Swinging Closet

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Doors of Ellen DeGeneres’s Televised Personalities Candace Moore

24. “Sexy Like a Girl and Horny Like A Boy”: Contemporary Gay “Western” Narratives About Gay Asian Men Chong-suk Han

25. When in Rome: Heterosexism, Homophobia and Sports Talk Radio David Nylund

PART IV. ADVERTISING AND CONSUMER CULTURE

26. Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture Sut Jhally

27. The New Politics of Consumption: Why Americans Want So Much More Than They Need Juliet Schor

28. Inventing the Cosmo Girl: Class Identity and Girl-Style American Dreams Laurie Ouellette

29. Sex, Lies, and Advertising Gloria Steinem

30. Supersexualize Me! Advertising and the “Midriffs” Rosalind Gill

31. Branding “Real” Social Change in Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty Dara Persis Murray

32. Nothing Less Than Perfect: Female Celebrity, Ageing, and Hyperscrutiny in the Gossip Industry Kirsty Fairclough

33. To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter Alice Marwick and danah boyd

34. How to “Use Your Olympian”: The Paradox of Athlete Authenticity and Commercialization in the Contemporary Olympic Games Momin Rahman and Sean Lockwood

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35. Mapping Commercial Intertextuality: HBO’s True Blood Jonathan Hardy

PART V. REPRESENTING SEXUALITIES

36. That Teenage Feeling: Twilight, Fantasy, and Feminist Readers Anne Helen Petersen

37. Deadly Love: Images of Dating Violence in the “Twilight Saga” Victoria E. Collins and Dianne C. Carmody

38. The White Man’s Burden: Gonzo Pornography and the Construction of Black Masculinity Gail Dines

39. The Pornography of Everyday Life Jane Caputi

40. There Are Bitches and Hoes Tricia Rose

41. The Limitations of the Discourse of Norms: Gay Visibility and Degrees of Transgression Jay Clarkson

42. Sex Lives in Second Life Robert Alan Brookey and Kristopher L. Cannon

43. Queering Queer Eye: The Stability of Gay Identity Confronts the Liminality of Trans Embodiment E. Tristan Booth

PART VI. GROWING UP WITH CONTEMPORARY MEDIA

44. The Future of Childhood in the Global Television Market Dafna Lemish

45. Growing Up Female in a Celebrity-Based Pop Culture Gail Dines

46. La Princesa Plastica: Hegemonic and Oppositional Representations of Latinidad in Hispanic Barbie Karen Goldman

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47. Monarchs, Monsters, and Multiculturalism: Disney’s Menu for Global Hierarchy Lee Artz

48. Constructing the “New Ethnicities”: Media, Sexuality and Diaspora Identity in the Lives of South Asian Immigrant Girls Meenakshi Gigi Durham

49. HIV on TV: Conversations With Young Gay Men Kathleen P. Farrell

50. Video Games and Machine Dreams of Domination John Sanbonmatsu

51. Strategic Simulations and Our Past: The Bias of Computer Games in the Presentation of History Kevin Schut

52. “You Play Like a Girl!” Cross-Gender Competition and the Uneven Playing Field Elena Bertozzi

PART VII. IS TV FOR REAL?

53. Six Decades of Social Class in American Television Sitcoms Richard Butsch

54. Marketing “Reality” to the World: Survivor, Post-Fordism, and Reality Television Chris Jordan

55. Critiquing Reality-Based Televisual Black Fatherhood: A Critical Analysis of Run’s House and Snoop Dogg’s Father Hood Debra C. Smith

56. A Shot at Half-Exposure: Asian Americans in Reality TV Shows Grace Wang

57. “Take Responsibility for Yourself”: Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen Laurie Ouellette

58. Television and the Domestication of Cosmetic Surgery

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Sue Tait

59. Drama Is the Cure for Gossip: Television’s Turn to Theatricality in a Time of Media Transition Abigail De Kosnik

60. Free TV: File-Sharing and the Value of Television Michael Z. Newman

PART VIII. INTERACTIVITY, VIRTUAL COMMUNITY, AND FANDOM

61. Pop Cosmopolitanism: Mapping Cultural Flows in an Age of Convergence Henry Jenkins III

62. The Political Economy of Privacy on Facebook Christian Fuchs

63. Showtime Thinks, Therefore I Am: The Corporate Construction of “The Lesbian” on Sho.Com’s The L Word Site Kelly Kessler

64. Reading the Romance of Fan Cultural Production: Music Videos of a Television Lesbian Couple Eve Ng

65. “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game”: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft Lisa Nakamura

66. Accidental Activists: Fan Activism in the Soap Opera Community Melissa C. Scardaville

67. Fan Activists and the Politics of Race in The Last Airbender Lori Kido Lopez

68. GimpGirl Grows Up: Women With Disabilities Rethinking, Redefining, and Reclaiming Community Jennifer Cole, Jason Nolan, Yukari Seko, Katherine Mancuso, and Alejandra Ospina

69. The Latino Cyber-Moral Panic Process in the United States Nadia Yamel Flores-Yeffal, Guadalupe Vidales, and April Plemons

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70. How It Feels to Be Viral Me: Affective Labor and Asian American YouTube Performance Christine Bacareza Balance

Alternative Contents Index

Resources and Media Activist Organizations

Glossary of Terms

Author Index

Subject Index

About the Editors

About the Contributors

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I

PREFACE

n this fourth edition of Gender, Race, and Class in Media, our overall goal remains the same as in previous editions: to introduce undergraduate students to some of the richness, sophistication, and diversity that characterizes

contemporary media scholarship, in a way that is accessible and builds on students’ own media experiences and interests. We intend to help demystify the nature of mass media entertainment culture and new media by examining their production, analyzing the texts of some of the most pervasive forms or genres, and exploring the processes by which audiences make meaning out of media imagery or texts— meaning that helps shape our economic, cultural, political, and personal worlds.1 We start from the position that, as social beings, we construct our realities out of the cultural norms and values that are dominant in our society. The mass media are among the most important producers and reproducers of such norms and values.

We have designed this as a volume to help teachers (1) introduce the most powerful theoretical concepts in contemporary media studies; (2) explore some of the most influential and interesting forms of contemporary media culture; and (3) focus on issues of gender and sexuality, race, and class from a critical perspective. Most of the readings in this book take an explicitly critical perspective that is also informed by a diversity of approaches, such as political economy, feminism, cultural studies, critical race theory, and queer theory. We have chosen readings that make the following assumptions, as we do: (1) that industrialized societies are stratified along lines of gender and sexuality, race, and class; (2) that everyone living in such a society “has” gender and sexuality, race, and class, and other aspects of social identity that help structure our experience; and (3) that economic and other resources, advantages, and privileges are distributed inequitably in part because of power dynamics involving these categories of experience (as well as others, such as age, ethnicity, ability, or disability). Our selection of material has been guided by our belief that an important goal of a critical education is to enable people to conceptualize social justice clearly and work toward it more effectively. For us, greater social justice would require a fairer distribution of our society’s economic and cultural resources.

Our book is situated within both media studies and cultural studies. When we started working on the first edition of Gender, Race, and Class in Media in the early 1990s, cultural studies was a relatively new academic field in the United States, although it had been popular for some time in England (where it originated at The Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham). The cultural studies approach has now been dominant in U.S. media studies for

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more than a generation. Several other interdisciplinary fields concerned with social issues and representation, such as American studies and women’s studies, have been heavily influenced by cultural studies.

The field of cultural studies is actually multidisciplinary, drawing on insights and approaches from history, critical race studies, literary studies, philosophy, sociology, and psychology. Because of its progressive politics and because it offers a much broader and apparently more democratic definition of culture than was used in humanistic studies such as literary criticism in the past, many scholars and students particularly interested in race, gender, and class have been attracted to its theories and activist potential. (For a more extended discussion of the development of multiculturalism and cultural studies in the last decades of the 20th century, see Douglas Kellner’s reading in Part I.)

In this fourth edition, we continue to emphasize, with Kellner, three separable but interconnected areas of analysis: political economy, textual analysis, and audience reception. For Kellner, it is crucial to link all three to provide a full understanding of the entire media culture communication process, from production through consumption. Indeed, one of the initial goals of cultural studies was to contextualize the media text within the wider society that informs its production, construction, consumption, and, more recently, distribution along a range of media platforms.

Traditionally, political economy has looked at the ways the profit motive affects how texts are produced within a society marked by class, gender, and racial inequality. Who owns and controls the media? Who makes the decisions about content? How does financing affect and shape the range of texts produced? In what other ways does the profit motive drive production? These are central questions asked by political economists. Examining this economic component is still essential to an understanding of what eventually gets produced and circulated in the mainstream commercial mass media industries. However, with the advent of new media technologies that enable consumers to produce and widely distribute their own content, we must broaden our view of production, as many of the readings in this book do.

Media representations are never just mirrors or “reflections of reality” but, rather, always artfully constructed creations designed to appeal to our emotions and influence our ideas, and especially our consumer behavior. Therefore, to educate ourselves as consumers, we need tools to help us closely examine the ways all cultural texts—from TV sitcoms, dramas, or reality shows to fan-produced music videos—are structured, using complex combinations of words, sounds, and visual languages. Critical textual analysis provides a special focus on how to analyze the ideological significance of media texts—that is, to look at how, through the use of certain codes and conventions, they create or transmit meanings that generally

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support the economic, social, and political status quo.

Media studies has long acknowledged that audiences also have a role in creating the meanings of media texts, and for at least a generation, ethnographic audience reception research has focused on this dimension. By observing and talking with actual consumers of media texts—as opposed to critics—much has been learned about how we are active as we interpret, make sense of, understand, and use such texts within our everyday social and private lives. These studies have played an important role in complicating the older view of media audiences as passive, or even brainwashed, recipients of prepackaged meanings. Clearly, gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, political beliefs, and age are important factors that can help explain the different meanings that various audiences appear to take away from an advertisement, movie, or sitcom. Studies of fans—those dedicated consumers of media texts who build community around their experiences of consumption—go even further in exploring how consumers of media texts can produce meanings quite different from those intended by the original text producers. With the advent of new media aided by the Internet, the debate over audience exploitation versus empowerment has only intensified.

However we conceptualize the media audience in the age of the Internet, it is still vital to study all three components of media representations—production, text, and consumption—to understand how such texts can and do strengthen—or perhaps in some ways undermine—our dominant systems and ideologies of gender, race, and class inequality.

In this fourth edition, we have maintained our thematic focus on gender (including sexuality), race, and class, since we believe that media studies need to address the issues of social inequality that continue to plague our society and undermine its democratic potential. Some of the readings in this book employ an intersectional analysis—that is, one that complicates each of these social categories by examining how they interact with one another. Whenever possible, we have selected articles that give voice to the multiple levels of analysis needed to make media studies a truly multicultural endeavor. We acknowledge the ever- intensifying interrelationships among media cultures globally while continuing to focus primarily on the North American examples of media texts that we see as most likely to be familiar to instructors and students working with this book.

For the fourth edition, we again located, read, and discussed many new journal articles and book chapters. We consulted with colleagues who teach media courses, and we spoke to students to see what they found compelling in former editions. Thirty readings in this edition are either new or substantially updated. This reflects both the rapid evolution of the field and our desire to provide analysis of relatively recent and current media texts likely to be familiar to students. Several “classic” readings reprinted from earlier editions of this book were at one time key to highly

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significant developments in the field, and they still offer important and clearly articulated historical and theoretical insights into media analysis.

We’ve grouped our selections into thematic parts that highlight some of the important changes that have taken place in the worlds of entertainment mass media and new media over the past several years and that also reflect our experience of student interest. As in the third edition, we include an index of individual reading topics, which will allow instructors to create alternative groupings of readings to suit their own course designs. We hope that instructors and students will find the themes and genres represented in this collection provocative, stimulating, and an invitation to engage in further thinking, research, and perhaps even media activism.

In condensing previously published journal articles and book chapters, we have often had to omit quite a lot of detail from the originals, while preserving central arguments and challenging ideas. The omissions are carefully noted with the use of ellipses (. . .). By judiciously cutting the overall length, we have aimed to make cutting-edge scholarship as accessible as possible for undergraduate and graduate students alike. Our brief introductory essays to each part highlight key concepts and identify some interesting connections we see among the readings in that section. Of course we welcome comments from users of this book about our selections, about what worked well in the classroom and what did not. We especially invite suggested articles for future editions.

At the end of the book, we have provided some supplementary resources for the teacher. In addition, we have included a selective list of the many media activist organizations easily located on the Internet. We hope this will be useful for those who, inspired by the progressive ideals espoused by many of the writers in this collection, would like to explore this kind of grassroots consumer and citizens’ activism on behalf of a more democratic media culture in the future.

Ancillary Material

Visit www.sagepub.com/dines4e to access online resources including articles from previous editions, video links, web resources, eFlashcards, recommended readings, SAGE journal articles, and more.

Note

1. Throughout our book, key concepts important for students to discuss and digest appear in boldface. These are defined in more detail in the Glossary at the end of the volume. Some instructors have found it useful to assign the Glossary

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http://www.sagepub.com/dines4e
itself as a reading early in a course, for the benefit of students new to media theory and critical cultural studies.

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W

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

e would like to thank the many colleagues and students who have contributed over the years to our thinking about the questions raised in this book. They are too many to be mentioned individually, but they include faculty and students at

the University of Massachusetts Boston and Wheelock College, as well as colleagues and associates with whom we have worked in multiple other locations.

Both authors would especially like to thank Susan Owusu, director of the Communications and Media Literacy Program at Wheelock College, for her insights, advice, and help with developing the new edition.

We appreciate all the writers whose essays and edited articles have been included in the four editions, for their original insights and their willingness to allow us to shorten their texts.

We gratefully acknowledge Matt Byrnie, Nancy Loh, Laura Barrett, and Megan Granger at SAGE Publications, for their belief in the book and their careful work in bringing the fourth edition into print.

We are indebted to the external reviewers of all four editions of the book, and most recently to the reviewers of this edition: Jennifer Brayton (Ryerson University), Kenneth Campbell (University of South Carolina), Bobbie Eisenstock (California State University, Northridge), Breanne Fahs (Arizona State University), Ted Gournelos (Rollins College), Heloiza G. Herscovitz (California State University, Long Beach), Kristyn E. Hunt (Lamar University), Cynthia P. King (Furman University), Suzanne Leonard (Simmons College), Heather McIntosh (Boston College), Melinda Messineo (Ball State University), Erin A. Meyers (Oakland University), Margaret Montgomerie (De Montfort University), Amy Kiste Nyberg (Seton Hall University), Robert Rabe (Marshall University), Robin L. Riley (Syracuse University), Tracy M. Robison (Michigan State University), Margaret Schwartz (Fordham University), and Phyllis S. Zrzavy (Franklin Pierce University).

And again, we salute the members of our families, who provided much-needed moral support as we pursued our research and editorial labors.

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I

PART I

A CULTURAL STUDIES APPROACH TO MEDIA: THEORY

n this book, we offer a selection of critical discussions of mass media entertainment culture and new media to exemplify a powerful method of analysis you will be able to apply on your own to other examples. In this way, we hope to

promote and support critical media literacy. While there are many ways to think about media literacy, for the purposes of this book, we argue that in a postindustrial society in which public regulation of a for-profit media system is weak, media literacy can be one tool to help limit the discursive power of media in our lives. While a sophisticated level of media literacy cannot replace other efforts to democratize our society’s economic and cultural resources, in our view, it does give audiences the skills necessary to analyze and question the ideologies that often work at a subtextual level within media texts.

We begin with media theory because we think students will find it useful to have a good grasp of several central concepts illustrated in an introductory way here, before going on to tackle later readings in which an understanding of these concepts is often presumed. In the media theory section, we especially highlight the central concepts and terms of the field of cultural studies as applied to mass media. As in all the other sections of this book, the chapters in this section are in dialogue with one another in many ways. In these opening comments, we give only one possible reading of the ways their main themes connect.

We open with “Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture,” by Douglas Kellner (I.1). This sets out the three-part approach to cultural studies (political economy/production, textual analysis, and audience reception/consumption) that characterizes this field. With Kellner, we believe that to understand a media product such as a TV show, advertising image, or online digital game, one must be able to understand the socioeconomic context in which it is created (political economy/production); analyze its constructed meaning(s) through careful attention to its particular visual/verbal/auditory languages, or codes (textual analysis); and determine through ethnographic research what its real- world audiences contribute to the meaning-making process, and even to the production and distribution of cultural products (audience

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consumption/production). In addition, Kellner points to the importance of better integrating considerations of gender, race, and class as categories of social analysis in cultural studies work in the future.

In “The Meaning of Memory” (I.2), an important historical background piece that sheds light on how and why corporations came to dominate media culture so heavily in the United States, George Lipsitz shows how the needs of the national economy in the post–World War II period facilitated the development of mass television production. He explores how the increase in the sale of televisions and the development of a group of situation comedies were used to transform a traditional, ethnic immigrant ideology that stressed values of community, thrift, and commitment to labor unions into an American Dream ideology that stresses individualism, consumerism, and suburban domesticity—values consistent with the needs of the expanding postwar capitalist economy.

In subsequent decades, media industries have changed dramatically as a result of mergers and buyouts. Commercial entertainment today is a highly profit-oriented business controlled for the most part by a small number of giant corporations. In “The Economics of the Media Industry” (I.3), David P. Croteau, William D. Hoynes, and Stefania Milan focus on the concentration of ownership in these industries, showing why this is an important problem in a democratic society.

Giant media conglomerates are able to “assemble large portfolios of magazines, television stations, book publishers, record labels, and so on to mutually support one another’s operations” (a process called “horizontal integration”). They also use “vertical integration”—“the process by which one owner acquires all aspects of production and distribution of a single type of media product”—to gain further control over the market. As the authors point out,

In this era of integrated media conglomerates, media companies are capable of pursuing elaborate cross- media strategies, in which company-owned media products can be packaged, sold, and promoted across the full range of media platforms. Feature films, their accompanying soundtracks and DVD/Blu-ray Disc releases, spin-off television programs, and books, along with magazine cover stories and plenty of licensed merchandise can all be produced and distributed by different divisions of the same conglomerate. (p. 34)

In these ways, the owners of the media giants benefit economically from conglomeration and integration and, arguably, make it “more difficult for smaller media firms to compete,” but even more worrisome is the potential for such conglomerates to translate media ownership into political power. Giving examples from the United States (Mayor Bloomberg of New York), Europe (Italy’s Berlusconi), and the United Kingdom and Australia (Rupert Murdoch), the authors warn that “owners can systematically exclude certain ideas from their media products.” Building on political economist Herb Schiller’s concept of “the corporate voice,” they ask us to consider whether

“the corporate voice” has been generalized so successfully that most of us do not

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even think of it as a specifically corporate voice: That is, the corporate view has become “our” view, the “American” view, even though the interests of the corporate entities that own mass media are far from universal. (p. 37)

One way of thinking about how the corporate view becomes woven into the dominant ways of thinking about the world is the theory of hegemony that James Lull explores in his chapter (I.4). While Karl Marx was one of the first major theorists to explore how the ideologies of the ruling class become the mainstream ideas of the time, theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Stuart Hall helped develop the more nuanced concept of hegemony that Lull defines as “the power or dominance that one social group holds over others” (p. 39). As Lull points out,

Owners and managers of media industries can produce and reproduce the content, inflections, and tones of ideas favorable to them far more easily than other social groups because they manage key socializing institutions, thereby guaranteeing that their points of view are constantly and attractively cast into the public arena. (p. 40)

Though many critical studies of media owned by private companies use the concept of hegemony, at first it seems more difficult to apply this notion to the Internet, which has been seen as a kind of “public sphere” in which many voices are heard, because there is an often-obscured, profit-oriented entity in control of production and distribution of media products. Indeed, somewhat grandiose and utopian claims were made in some circles about the new era of free expression and democratic cultural production the Internet would bring with it. But as John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney remind us in “The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism” (I.5), there is a need to think more critically about the relationship between the Internet and capitalism. They argue: “There was—and remains—extraordinary democratic and revolutionary promise in this communication revolution. But technologies do not ride roughshod over history, regardless of their immense powers. They are developed in a social, political, and economic context” (p. 44).

The authors provide an account of the Internet’s origins and an extensive analysis of the ways its development has been shaped by market forces. They conclude:

In a world in which private riches grow at the expense of public wealth, it should not surprise us that what seemed at first the enormous potential of the internet—representing a whole new realm of public wealth, analogous to the discovery of a whole new continent, and pointing to the possibility of a vast new democratic sphere of unrestricted communication—has vaporized in a couple of decades. (p. 48)

Like the Internet, reality television was once seen as an innovative media sphere where noncorporate voices could potentially predominate—in this case, because the audience supposedly can view real people filmed in the midst of an unpredictable, unscripted situation, rather than a drama scripted by writers and performed by professional actors. However, as Gareth Palmer’s chapter (I.6) on

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the reality show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition argues, reality TV is no less ideological than other forms of media storytelling in the way it constructs our ideas about market forces, individualism, and economic inequality. Palmer sees this show, in which individual homeowners are assisted by neighbors and businesses in their quest for a dream home, as a kind of fairy tale with a happily-ever-after ending. According to Palmer’s analysis, this television text tries to render invisible what he calls “the massive cracks . . . in the American Dream” (p. 56). It does this by encoding the idea that government assistance no longer has any significant role to play in improving the lives of its citizens, a neoliberal theme that is also apparent in other media entertainment discussed in this book.

Textual analysis of the ideological dimension in media entertainment, such as that provided by Palmer, is an important component in understanding how the text works, especially when linked with background knowledge about the producers’ political and economic interests; however, there is another element that students of media culture need to take into account. Irrespective of whether the media text appears to encode dominant or subversive cultural ideas, Kellner reminds us that as students of media culture, we cannot simply assume that we know how consumers of media texts actually read or decode them (constructing meaning from texts for themselves). For that piece of the equation, we must turn to studies of audience reception—how particular media consumers understand and use media texts.

Scholars widely agree that consumers of the media should not be conceptualized as passive pawns of media imagery, completely controlled by the dominant culture, but there are several different ways of understanding audience activity. First, according to the influential concept of oppositional readings, initiated by Stuart Hall (and also discussed by Kellner in I.1), the meaning of media texts cannot be established by only one critic’s decoding of the text—no matter how subtle and full —because all texts are to some degree “open” (polysemic, or capable of multiple meanings). Therefore, we must also seek to know how audiences, both as individuals and as members of various communities, bring different experiences and complex identities to the processes of reading/viewing by which they actually feel, think about, and come to understand these texts.

According to Hall’s paradigm, readers or audience members may do one of three things in relation to the intended or preferred meanings encoded in the text: (1) accept them uncritically and read the text as its producers intended, (2) produce a negotiated reading (partially resisting the encoded meaning), or (3) create an oppositional reading of their own, completely rejecting the preferred meaning of the text.

Janice Radway’s classic ethnographic research into the audience reception of romance novels was an early and influential study of how specific readers actually engage with a mass media text. In “Women Read the Romance” (I.7), Radway looks

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closely at how a group of White lower-income women in the 1970s and 1980s negotiated with the genre of the romance novel, in terms of both the books they selected and the ways they actually read the text and appropriated and changed its meanings. Radway acknowledges that “romance reading . . . can function as a kind of training for the all-too-common task of reinterpreting a spouse’s unsettling actions as the signs of passion, devotion, and love” (p. 65). Yet she sees, in these women’s selection of certain books as favorites and their rejection of others, an active tendency to critique certain patriarchal masculine behaviors, substituting an ideal of the “nurturing” male that might have been missing in their own family lives. Through the act of reading itself, she argues, this group of women romance readers escaped temporarily from familial demands on their time, and Radway interprets this action as potential resistance to, or refusal to accept completely, the patriarchal restrictions on their lives. While encouraging respect for women’s own experiences as cultural consumers, however, Radway warns that we should not confuse modes of resistance that reside in textual consumption with more practical, real-world modes of resistance (such as organized protest against the patriarchal abuses women such as these meet in real life).

Radway’s work helped establish the field of audience studies, which has since developed into a rich body of research and interpretation. At the same time, over the past two decades or so, a distinct subfield of audience study has emerged, devoted to one particularly active kind of text consumer—the fan. In an early and influential essay, “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching” (I.8), Henry Jenkins III drew our attention to “a largely unexplored terrain of cultural activity, a subterranean network of readers and writers who remake [media texts] in their own image.” For Jenkins and many who have been influenced by his work,

“fandom” is a vehicle for marginalized subterranean groups (women, the young, gays, etc.) to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations; it is a way of appropriating media texts and rereading them in a fashion that serves different interests, a way of transforming mass culture into popular culture. (p. 70)

Drawing on his studies of fans organized around their mutual appreciation of the long-running television series centered on space exploration by a team of diverse characters, Jenkins brought to light a fascinating body of fan fiction written for the most part by female fans, whom he conceptualized as

reluctant poachers who steal only those things that they truly love, who seize televisual property only to protect it against abuse by those who created it and who have claimed ownership over it. In embracing popular texts, the fans claim those works as their own, remaking them in their own image. . . . Consumption becomes production; reading becomes writing; spectator culture becomes participatory culture. (p. 76)

Following Jenkins’s lead, contemporary fandom studies foreground the agency and creativity of culture consumers who go on to produce their own cultural

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materials, often through such “poaching” of ideas and materials from the original mass-produced texts. New digital technologies have clearly added to the opportunities available to do-it-yourself cultural producers outside of the commercial world of the media industries, including fans. Moreover, some fans have taken advantage of social networking sites on the Internet to facilitate not only their own fan networking but also a more politicized fan activism to protect favorite mass media culture texts from fates such as cancellation. (See Part VIII for examples of these kinds of fan activity and fan activism.)

Some critical media theorists have warned (as Kellner does) of the dangers of overemphasizing the power of media audiences to resist or effectively challenge the dominant ideologies that normalize social and economic inequities, simply through their activities as consumers—even if they become active fans. Mark Andrejevic, in “Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans” (I.9) complicates our understanding of active audiences by examining the unpaid productive labor of fans who provide extensive viewer feedback to television writers and producers through an ostensibly independent and often highly critical website. As this ethnographic study of the fan forums argues, the producers have learned how to profit from this unpaid labor:

As in the case of other forms of interactive commerce, the information provided by the viewers does not just add value to the product; it doubles as audience research. . . . TWoPpers [Television Without Pity contributors] may be working for free, but that does not mean they are not producing value. The work they do —the work of making their preferences transparent, of allowing themselves to be watched as they do their watching—is an increasingly important component of the emerging interactive economy. (p. 82)

The study found that many of the posters on this website see themselves as savvy, sophisticated media consumers/critics and often enjoy exercising their analytical and writing skills, as well as their ability, if limited, to influence the future development of their favorite shows. But Andrejevic points out,

It is one thing to note that viewers derive pleasure and fulfillment from their online activities and quite another to suggest that pleasure is necessarily either empowering for viewers or destabilizing for entrenched forms of corporate control over popular culture. (p. 84)

He concludes that “a savvy identification with producers and insiders facilitated by interactive media fosters an acceptance of the rules of the game” (p. 85).

Throughout this section, the notion of resistance has already frequently surfaced, as it will throughout the rest of the book. Richard Butsch provides us with a detailed and challenging discussion of this notion in our final chapter of the section, “Reconsidering Resistance and Incorporation” (I.10). Some strands of cultural studies work on the media tend to ignore the more structured analysis of political economy, which foregrounds the inequality of access to media resources. Butsch’s chapter is both a critique of an overly celebratory use of the idea of audience resistance and a call for a more nuanced understanding of how resistance and

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“incorporation” (the process by which resistance is co-opted and contained within hegemony) work together. In this way, he works to bridge competing paradigms within media studies.

We have aimed in this book to contribute to the project Butsch calls for. We invite you, the reader, to engage in a critical analysis of your own media consumption, exploring how you may be at times resisting the dominant ideologies while at other times unwittingly internalizing the “corporate voice” and seamlessly weaving it into your own social construction of reality.

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Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture

Douglas Kellner

adio, television, film, popular music, the Internet and social networking, and other forms and products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities, including our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it

means to be male or female; our conception of class, ethnicity and race, nationality, sexuality; and division of the world into categories of “us” and “them.” Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture. Media spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the power of the forces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be oppressed.

We are immersed from cradle to grave in a media and consumer society, and thus it is important to learn how to understand, interpret, and criticize its meanings and messages. The media are a profound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy: They contribute to educating us how to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear, and desire—and what not to. The media are forms of pedagogy that teach us how to be men and women. They show us how to dress, look, and consume; how to react to members of different social groups; how to be popular and successful and how to avoid failure; and how to conform to the dominant system of norms, values, practices, and institutions. Consequently, the gaining of critical media literacy is an important resource for individuals and citizens in learning how to cope with a seductive cultural environment. Learning how to read, criticize, and resist sociocultural manipulation can help one empower oneself in relation to dominant forms of media and culture. It can enhance individual sovereignty vis-à-vis media culture and give people more power over their cultural environment.

In this chapter, I will discuss the potential contributions of a cultural studies perspective to media critique and literacy. From the 1980s to the present, cultural studies has emerged as a set of approaches to the study of culture, society, and

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politics. The project was inaugurated by the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which developed a variety of critical methods for the analysis, interpretation, and criticism of cultural artifacts. Through a set of internal debates, and responding to social struggles and movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the Birmingham group came to focus on the interplay of representations and ideologies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality in cultural texts, including media culture. They were among the first to study the effects on audiences of newspapers, radio, television, film, advertising, and other popular cultural forms. They also focused on how various audiences interpreted and used media culture differently, analyzing the factors that made different audiences respond in contrasting ways to various media texts, and how they made use of media in their personal and social lives in a multiplicity of ways.1

This piece is an original essay that was commissioned for this volume. It has been updated from an earlier version that appeared in the third edition.

Through studies of youth subcultures, British cultural studies demonstrated how culture came to constitute distinct forms of identity and group membership for young people. In the view of cultural studies, media culture provides the materials for constructing views of the world, behavior, and even identities. Those who uncritically follow the dictates of media culture tend to “mainstream” themselves, conforming to the dominant fashion, values, and behavior. Yet cultural studies is also interested in how subcultural groups and individuals resist dominant forms of culture and identity, creating their own style and identities. Those who obey ruling dress and fashion codes, behavior, and political ideologies thus produce their identities as members of specific social groupings within contemporary U.S. culture, such as White, middle-class, conservative American men, or lesbian African American women, for instance. Persons who identify with subcultures, such as punk culture or Latino subcultures, dress and act differently than those in the mainstream and thus create oppositional identities, defining themselves against standard models.

Cultural studies insists that culture must be studied within the social relations and system through which culture is produced and consumed and that the study of culture is thus intimately bound up with the study of society, politics, and economics. Cultural studies shows how media culture articulates the dominant values, political ideologies, and social developments and novelties of the era. It conceives of U.S. culture and society as a contested terrain, with various groups and ideologies struggling for dominance (Kellner, 1995, 2010). Television, film, music, and other popular cultural forms are thus often liberal or conservative, or occasionally express more radical or oppositional views—and can be contradictory and ambiguous as well in their meanings and messages.

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Cultural studies is valuable because it provides some tools that enable individuals to read and interpret culture critically. It also subverts distinctions between “high” and “low” culture by considering a wide continuum of cultural artifacts, from opera and novels to soap operas and TV wrestling, while refusing to erect any specific elite cultural hierarchies or canons. Earlier mainstream academic approaches to culture tended to be primarily literary and elitist, dismissing media culture as banal, trashy, and not worthy of serious attention. The project of cultural studies, in contrast, avoids cutting the field of culture into high and low, or popular versus elite. Such distinctions are difficult to maintain and generally serve as a front for normative aesthetic valuations and, often, a political program (i.e., either dismissing mass culture for high culture/art or celebrating what is deemed “popular” while scorning “elitist” high culture).

Cultural studies allows us to examine and critically scrutinize the whole range of culture without prior prejudices toward one or another sort of cultural text, institution, or practice. It also opens the way toward more differentiated political, rather than aesthetic, valuations of cultural artifacts in which one attempts to distinguish critical and oppositional from conformist and conservative moments in a given cultural artifact. For instance, studies of Hollywood film show how key 1960s films promoted the views of radicals and the counterculture and how film in the 1970s was a battleground between liberal and conservative positions; late 1970s films, however, tended toward conservative positions that helped elect Ronald Reagan as president (see Kellner & Ryan, 1988). During the Bush–Cheney era, there were many oppositional films, such as the work of Michael Moore, and liberal films that featured black heroes and anticipated the election of Barack Obama (Kellner, 2010). For instance, African American actor Will Smith was the top grossing U.S. actor during the Bush–Cheney era, Denzel Washington won two Academy Awards and played a wide range of characters, and Morgan Freeman played a president, corporate executive, crime figure, and even God, attesting that U.S. publics were ready to see African Americans in major positions in all arenas of society. This is not to say that Hollywood “caused” Obama’s surprising victory in 2008 but that U.S. media culture anticipated a black president.

There is an intrinsically critical and political dimension to the project of cultural studies that distinguishes it from objectivist and apolitical academic approaches to the study of culture and society. British cultural studies, for example, analyzed culture historically in the context of its societal origins and effects. It situated culture within a theory of social production and reproduction, specifying the ways cultural forms served either to further social domination or to enable people to resist and struggle against domination. It analyzed society as a hierarchical and antagonistic set of social relations characterized by the oppression of subordinate class, gender, race, ethnic, and national strata. Employing the Italian sociologist Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) model of hegemony and counterhegemony, it sought to analyze “hegemonic” or ruling, social, and cultural forces of domination and to

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seek “counterhegemonic” forces of resistance and struggle. The project was aimed at social transformation and attempted to specify forces of domination and resistance to aid the process of political struggle and emancipation from oppression and domination.

For cultural studies, the concept of ideology is of central importance, for dominant ideologies serve to reproduce social relations of domination and subordination.2 Ideologies of class, for instance, celebrate upper-class life and denigrate the working class. Ideologies of gender promote sexist representations of women, oppressive ideologies of sexuality promote homophobia, and ideologies of race use racist representations of people of color and various minority groups. Ideologies make inequalities and subordination appear natural and just and thus induce consent to relations of domination. Contemporary societies are structured by opposing groups who have different political ideologies (liberal, conservative, radical, etc.), and cultural studies specifies what, if any, ideologies are operative in a given cultural artifact (which could involve, of course, the specification of ambiguities and ideological contradictions). In the course of this study, I will provide some examples of how different ideologies are operative in media cultural texts and will accordingly provide examples of ideological analysis and critique.

Because of its focus on representations of race, gender, sexuality, and class, and its critique of ideologies that promote various forms of oppression, cultural studies lends itself to a multiculturalist program that demonstrates how culture reproduces certain forms of racism, sexism, and biases against members of subordinate classes, social groups, or alternative lifestyles. Multiculturalism affirms the worth of different types of culture and cultural groups, claiming, for instance, that Black; Latino; Asian; Native American; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (LGBTQ); and other oppressed and marginalized voices have their own validity and importance. An insurgent multiculturalism attempts to show how various people’s voices and experiences are silenced and omitted from mainstream culture, and struggles to aid in the articulation of diverse views, experiences, and cultural forms from groups excluded from the mainstream. This makes it a target of conservative forces that wish to preserve the existing canons of White male, Eurocentric privilege, and thus attack multiculturalism in cultural wars raging from the 1960s to the present over education, the arts, and the limits of free expression.

Cultural studies thus promotes a critical multiculturalist politics and media pedagogy that aims to make people sensitive to how relations of power and domination are “encoded” in cultural texts, such as those of television and film, or how new technologies and media such as the Internet and social networking can be used for oppositional pedagogical or political purposes (Kahn & Kellner, 2008). A critical cultural studies approach also specifies how people can resist the dominant encoded meanings and produce their own critical and alternative readings and media artifacts, as well as new identities and social relations. Cultural studies can

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show how media culture manipulates and indoctrinates us and thus can empower individuals to resist the dominant meanings in media cultural products and produce their own meanings. It can also point to moments of resistance and criticism within media culture and thus help promote development of more critical consciousness.

A critical cultural studies approach—embodied in many of the articles collected in this reader—thus develops concepts and analyses that will enable readers to analytically dissect the artifacts of contemporary media culture and gain power over their cultural environment. By exposing the entire field of culture and media technology to knowledgeable scrutiny, cultural studies provides a broad, comprehensive framework to undertake studies of culture, politics, and society for the purposes of individual empowerment and social and political struggle and transformation. In the following pages, I will therefore indicate some of the chief components of the type of cultural studies I find most useful for understanding contemporary U.S. society, culture, and politics.