Marginalized Audiences and

Popular Culture Consumption

Cindy Cruz 86-16518PhD Media Studies

Media 331Dr . Roland Tolentino

TEDTalks Diliman: “Art Art Ka Diyan”

• Marginalized Audiences (class, gender, race)– Women– Bakla / gay in diaspora– The Philippine masses – postcolonial psyche

• Popular Culture Consumption– Creation of meaning based on experience and outlooks– Interpretation– Negotiation– Assertion

• Validity of Consumption, Meaning-making• Theodor Adorno vs. John Fiske• Continuously contested and negotiated meanings,

anomalous categories (nature/culture)

• From Darna to Zsazsa Zaturna: Desire and Fantasy by Soledad Reyes

• Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora by Martin Manalansan

• Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader edited and introduced by John Storey– “Dallas and the Ideology of Mass Culture” by Ien

Ang – “Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure” by Ien Ang– “Reading Reading the Romance” by Janice Radway– “Feminism and Popular Culture” by Morag Shiach

“Dallas and the Ideology of Mass Culture”

by Ien Ang

• Analysis: “I wanted... to understand this pleasure without having to pass judgment on whether Dallas is good or bad.”

• Ideology of Mass Culture: popular cultural products and practices as “bad mass culture”

• Identity as a “person of taste” or (self-appointed) “cultural expert” distinguishes one from others who don’t recognize “bad mass culture”

• Dismissive of mass culture and those who are taken by it

• Popular culture and ideology of mass culture: ways people talk about culture vs. people’s cultural practices

• Populist position: refusal to let preferences be determined by the ideology of mass culture

• Dialectic between the intellectual dominance of the ideology of mass culture and the spontaneous, practical attraction of the populist ideology

• Bourgeois aesthetic: an art object is judged according to extremely formal, universalized criteria devoid of subjective passions and pleasures

• Popular “aesthetic”: significance of a cultural object can differ from person to person and from situation to situation – Based on affirmation of continuity of cultural

forms and daily life, a deep-rooted desire for participation, and emotional involvement

– the recognition of pleasure, and that pleasure is a personal thing

From Darna to Zsazsa Zaturna:

Desire and Fantasy by Soledad Reyes

“Of Borders and Margins: Some Perspectives on Philippine Popular Texts”

• The “bakya” crowd: term for popular taste that captured elitist contempt for products produced for and consumed and positively lapped up by the lower class

• Arbiters of taste: authority figures (educated elite, literati, culturati, intelligensia) - prescribed how texts must be written and analyzed

• Public: incapable of doing anything but uncritically accept fare served to them

• Can interpret and produce their own meanings, shaped by their own experience and understanding of life

• Text as site of complex contestations, prolonged negotiations colonial discourse, values inversion and rejection

• Native vs. Foreign (the quintessential “second-rate, trying-hard copycat”)

“Fernando Poe, Jr.: The Making of a Legend”

• FPJ films: deeply immersed codes and conventions of popular literature

• FPJ acted in and directed films which remained traditional and conformed to conventional patterns in plot structure, character delineation, point of view, language development, and utilization of a recurring and universal theme.

• The rich and the intelligent are powerless to regulate popular perceptions.

“Readers and Viewers and the League of Extraordinary Creators”

• Television series resonate with the viewers’ needs that go beyond the wish to occupy their time, to be offered entertaining fare.

• There is something more to discover in these popular forms that labels such as “bad art that provides instant gratification” can ever approximate.

• Because these texts have been products of specific sociohistorical conditions... they deserve to be treated with more respect, especially in the academe that still subscribes to the “Great Western Tradition”.

“Feminism and Popular Culture” by Morag Shiach

• Culture is a space of meaning, creativity and humanism

• It is “ordinary” and “the way of life as a whole” of any particular social or national group

• Popular culture as a site of resistance• The working-class people participated in history,

struggling to shape it, rather than being subjected to it (not helpless victims of historical change)

• Cultural forms exclude or marginalize women, describing them as representative of the “typical working-class condition”

• The production of popular texts assumed masculinity in models of collective and public cultural consumption.

• The attempt to develop a feminist critique has driven women increasingly towards questions of pleasure and consumption, and away from those of history and production.

• Examination of isolated economic and cultural role of housewife, relations of reproduction, and ideology of romance fiction

• Consumption of soap operas and romance fiction is a transgressive act, if not progressive

• Transgressive relations with cultural commodities

“Reading Reading the Romance” by Janice Radway

“Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure” by Ien Ang

“Reading Reading The Romance”• Romance fiction: the differences between

popular” and “elite” literature• Even an ethnographic description of a “native’s” point of

view must be an interpretation... my own construction of my informants’ construction of what they were up to in reading romances.

• Romance reading is a profoundly conflicted activity centered upon a profoundly conflicted form ( constituted a rebellion against the patriarchal role they subscribed to)

• The hero is constructed androgynously: spectacular masculine phallic power and capacity for tenderness and attentive concern.

“Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure”• The pleasureableness of the pleasure of romance

reading is missing from Radway’s interpretive framework

• The intrusion of Radway’s politicizing agenda in the ethnography is suspect

• The judgment on romance reading and their social practice: “An illusion of pleasure while it leaves their real situation unchanged”

• The repetitious reading of romantic fictions offers... the opportunity to continue to enjoy the excitement of romance and romantic scenes without being intereupted by the dark side of sexual relationships.

Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora

by Martin Manalansan

• Bakla vs. Gay• Byuti and Drama• Philippine vs. American cultural icons and

representations (Philippine bading’s language and accompanying body language vs. the “disco-dancing Oscar Wilde-reading Streisand ticket-holding friend of Dorothy’s)

• Body image and codes of dressing• Places and spaces: homes, gay establishments• Fear of Tita Aida (AIDS) and Tita Imee

(Immigration)

• Events: Voguing parties, Santa Cruzan• The discriminated, feminized gay who spends

to the valorized and desired diasporic Asian who is spent for/on

• Kinship in diaspora - other baklas as family, relationships with friends are deemed incestuous

• Socioeconomic class: Philippine class consciousness carried over to the US, US class not so easily determined

• Diasporic queers in particular refuse the assimilative framework not because they carry with them much of the baggage of tradition but that their sense of selfhood and belonging are framed in the process of cultural translation and transformation. (p.124)

• Filipino gay men are continually positioning and repositioning their performances and themselves through varying modes of drama and biyuti depending on the kinds of exclusions and affinities they face in daily life. (p.124)

• Memories of the homeland and the issue of postcolonial cultural and psychic displacement persist in many Filipino gay immigrant lives. (p.137)

• For the Filipino bakla who has indeed crossed borders, living in New York City – the iconic place for America – mimicry is transformed from a longing for an America whose physical space he now occupies into a struggle for a symbolic place in the US social imaginary. (p.139)

• Stereotypically, the bakla is viewed as an artisan in crafts that involve mimicry and transformation such as lip-synching, cosmetology, and female impersonation. (p.130)

• The church is a space for nostalgia, a place for remembering as well as a way of settling in. (p118)

• I use the idioms of drama and byuti as a valuable means by which to understand the Filipino gay men’s shifting notions of self and identity in specific moments and, conversely, the relative experience of stability, essence, and placement. (p.92)

• Ang, Ien. “Dallas and the Ideology of Mass Culture”, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (John Storey ed.)

• Ang, Ien. “Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure”, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (John Storey ed.)

• Manalansan, Martin. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora.

• Radway, Janice. “Reading Reading the Romance”, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (John Storey ed.)

• Reyes, Soledad. From Darna to Zsazsa Zaturna: Desire and Fantasy.

• Shiach, Morag. “Feminism and Popular Culture”, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (John Storey ed.)

• TEDTalks: “Art Art Ka Diyan” (excerpts)