Dr. Sara DiazWGST 280: Gender, Sex, & Popular CultureGonzaga University

Cultural Studies

What is Culture?

• A process: intellectual, spiritual, aesthetic development• Philosophy, great works (HIGH CULTURE)

• A way of life for a group of people for a period of time.• A set of holidays, religious festivals, sports etc

practiced by a group of people (anthropological culture)

• The works & practices of intellectual and artistic activity• Popular culture (LOW CULTURE)

What is Culture?

• Political Economy: “culture includes the organization of production, the structure of the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern social relationships, the characteristic forms through which members of the society communicate” (Raymond Williams)• Meaning: “culture is simply the ensemble of stories

we tell ourselves about ourselves” (Clifford Geertz)• Social Effects/Interactivity – “culture is the learned

behavior of a society or a subgroup” (Margaret Mead)

Interdisciplinarity

• Multiple Methods: • political economy (socioeconomic and historical

context of creation, production, distribution)• textual analysis (visual, verbal, auditory codes)• audience reception/media effects (ethnography)

• Multiple Modes of Inquiry: • anti-racism• Marxism• queer theory• feminism

Cultural Studies Methodology

•Political Economy (structure)• Textual Analysis (meaning)• semiotics•Media Effects (interactivity)• Reception and use of texts/meaning

Power Analysis

• Cultural Studies aims to examine subject matter in terms of cultural practices and representations and their relationships to power. • Power analysis asks questions like:• How does culture produce power? • How does power produce culture?• Who gains/who looses, by what mechanisms

of power?

Power of Representation

• Stuart Hall, a founder of cultural studies: • Representation is one of the central

practices which produces culture AND meaning

• “Symbolic Annihilation”• Lack of representation signals that a

group is not considered important.

Political Economy

“sets out to show how different ways of financing and organizing cultural

production have traceable consequences … in the public domain.”

(D&H 629)

Semiotics

The study of “signification,” or the ways in which both languages and

nonlinguistic symbolic systems operate to associate [code] meanings with

arbitrary “signs” such as words, visual images, colors, or objects.” (D&H 630)

Semiotics• Sign – Anything that conveys meaning• Signifier – Thing that give meaning (word, image, color, etc)• Signified – What is evoked by in the mind by that signifier

• For example: How to read the sign of a rose.

Semiotics

Encoding/decoding: meaning does not simply reside in a media text’s codes but is the result of a complex negotiation between specific audiences and texts. (D&H 625)

Sender<->message<->receiver

Encoding

Media producers encode messages according to meanings preferred within dominant ideology.

1. World view of encoders 2. Nature of media production and practices

Decoding

Receivers may or may not interpret media messages according to encoded meanings.

Three decoding strategies:1. Dominant or preferred reading 2. Negotiated reading3. Oppositional reading

Polysemic Texts

• “A polysemic text is one that is ‘open’ to various readings or has multiple meanings.”• Double-speak, code-switching

• There is no single answer to questions like “what does the image mean?” (there are wrong answers).• When you assert a certain way of decoding a text,

you have to give concrete/specific examples from the text to justify your reading.

• Meaning is not straightforward or transparent and it is never finally fixed. • HOWEVER, there are limits to this openness.

Media Effects

• Damaging Effects• Is emotionally destructive: brutalizing in its

emphasis on violence and sex• Is intellectually destructive: offers escapist

content which inhibits people’s ability to cope with reality• Is culturally destructive: impairs people’s

ability to fully/freely participate in cultural production

• Void of deep realities (sex, death, failure, tragedy)

Media Effects• http://youtu.be/GSvEOEB7UW0?t=16m57s

Media Effects

“All mass media in the end alienate people from personal experience and though appearing to offset it, intensify their moral isolation from each other, from reality and from themselves. One may turn to the mass media when lonely or bored. But mass media, once they become a habit, impair the capacity for meaningful experience… The habit feeds on itself, establishing a vicious circle as addictions do… Even the most profound of experiences, articulated too often on the same level (by the media), is also reduced to a cliché…They lessen people’s capacity to experience life itself” –Van de Haag

Media Effects

• Positive Effects• Is emotionally supportive: can eradicate a

sense of isolation• Is intellectually supportive: offers educational

content which enhances people’s ability to contextualize their lives and the world us.• Is culturally restorative: allows for a diversity

of expressions and encourages participate in cultural production

• Grounded in deep realities

Examples from Kellner?

•Political Economy

• Textual Analysis

•Response to/Use of Texts