Popular Culture by Carla Freccero

Presenters

Jennifer Santos & Sarah Szeliga

“To study popular culture is to be politically literate, to understand what issues are at stake when political leaders and other condemn or

praise its representations.”

“This book is about the relationship between CULTURAL ARTIFACTS and our social

order and its various “subcultures” in the US and their cultural productions.”

Carla Freccero

Race and Class in America

Music• soundtracks • rap• rock• pop

Movies

Film SoundtracksThe Bodyguard 1992

• Hollywood “helping roles” film

• very conservative politics around race: the great and good white man “saves” the black woman from danger

• Single black woman with a child

• Houston is clearly the driving force in the musical production of the soundtrack

• gospel music - a black cultural tradition

• Consider the album cover - about launching Houston’s acting career?

I Will Always Love You - I Have Nothing - I’m Every Woman - Run to You - Queen of the Night - Jesus Loves Me

Dead Man Walking

1996

• The director, Tim Robbins appropriates international “multiculturalism” into the soundtrack to avoid the local political issues at stake

• Political issues are: the death penalty in the US and the dismissal of the Supreme Court that the majority of black men are given the death penalty

• The soundtrack features Pakistani singers and folk, rock and country singers

• The music of the film argues against the death penalty while the film confirms and consecrates the logic of the death penalty

Dead Man Walking, Bruce Springsteen - In Your Mind, Johnny Cash - Woman on the Tier, Susan Vega - Promises, Lyle Lovett - Face of Love, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan - Fall

of Troy, Tom Waits, Long Road , Eddie Vedder

Rap

• Rap has come to signify the popular resistance of black youth in the USA

• Rap music as a form of resistance

• Rap is poetry

• Is responsible for bringing to light issues of racism, police violence, drug use, and sexism - putting it out there for public debate in a way that many politicians and policy makers have not been successful at doing

• Is politically resistive in that it emanates from urban black life and protest

• Ice-T’s Cop Killer

• 2 Live Crew’s Nasty as they Wanna Be - obscenity and sexism

Rock

• Rock music is usually a male dominated homosocial space

• Rock is the music “of the people”

• In the 60’s it came to stand for the counterculture revolution

• Masculine and white

• Interest in music is a way to be involved in culture

Pop

• Pop holds a degraded space in music

• Does not feature “artist” musicians, the music is not considered original or creative; it privileges the vocal over the musical and the artist is not thought to be an artist either but just ventriloquizing

• Pop is the domain of the feminine

• Not art, not serious, not politically resistive

MoviesDo the Right Thing 1989

• Movie is a discourse for casual prejudice

• Prejudice for the group that is “below you”

• Deals with class and economic relation that results in tragedy

• Political Mission of the film: it is a narrative of the resistance that develops between race groups and the situations that occur as a result

Gender and Sexuality in Pop Culture

Serial Killers Madonna The Queer Subculture

Serial KillersSerial Killers are a study in the psychopathic

perversion - usually a man with a sexual dysfunction

The US has 5% of the world’s population and 75% of its serial killers

• Buffalo Bill is the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs

• Dr. Lecter says that Buffalo Bill was not born, but made through years of child abuse

• Buffalo Bill dresses like a woman, wears makeup, hides his penis = gay lifestyles?

• Film perpetuates the idea that if you are gay and a man you really want to be a woman

• Film links homosexuality, transsexuals, and

female impersonation directly to killing

Madonna The Postmodern Diva of Pop Culture

• She invokes a sex positive identity, desire, practice, and subjective agency with a view towards post-AIDS “sensible” sex practices

• In her videos she likes to place the female in the position of supreme control

• Justify My Love - is a fantasy about bodies and pleasures, shows that erotic need is not linked to genital sexuality, actual acts, and does not have to confine anyone to fixed identities or roles

• Like a Virgin - auto-eroticism, “sensible” sex and masturbating

• Like a Prayer - Integrates religion and sex

• As a powerful and important white woman in this culture, Madonna was being represented as vicious, aggressive, cold, heartless, unfeminine, greedy, unnatural and denatured

• She has now turned to a “Maternalism” portrayal

• Motherly and religious to defend herself from some of the charges directed at her

And We All Know Who This Has Happened to Also...

The Queer Subculture

• Represented through style: clothes, practices, costumes, body markings, hairstyles, and ways of gathering in places

• Has come to be identified with the struggle to acquire “civil” rights - to be equal in the eyes of the law

Technoculture

21st Century Tech Toys Technological Influence Alien Trilogy

• Alien - 1979• Aliens - 1982• Alien3 - 1992

Tech Toys and Its Influences“We have a romance and disillusionment with

technological developments.”

• Having Tech Toys is a sign of being “in”

• Tech is the defining mark of the late 20th century

• “First World” cultures are ridden with technology

• In the “Age of Copy”

• Students today have a whole new type of literacy, one that integrates a graphical interface which, easily lets you move through multiple texts and images.

Alien Directed by Ridley Scott, 1979

• Film reads as a parable about the revenge of Mother Nature against mankind’s audacious claim to conquer her through technological perfection - social commentary

• The ending celebrates the triumph of humanism over the alienness of nature, albeit after demonstrating technology’s failure to do so through scientific means

• The humanism that triumphs is no longer the heroic technocrat but a woman

• Movie represents the oil crisis of ‘79 by its ship - it looks like an offshore oil rig

• Celebrates the second wave of the woman’s movement - feminists have taken up this movie as a progressive political representation

• It’s the realization that the high tech land of the USA is ruining its resources

• The alien is seen as a revenge of nature: the perfect killing machine that is not a machine, the perfect organism that can make even inorganic substances become part of itself

• Also a nightmare of reproduction - birth of an alien from the chest cavity of Cain, the “weak”, British, feminine-like character

• Ripley is portrayed as a feminine heroine

AliensDirected by James Cameron, 1986

• This film retreats from social commentary and moves to the realm of the personal, the private, and the individual

•This is a story about a domestic quarrel between two women - two mothers

• Ripley has a single-minded rage agains the aliens and her desire to destroy them

• Ripley is private, personal and has selfish concern for her “adopted” daughter Newt

• Aliens is thus a movie about maternal jealousy

• Ripley goes after the alien’s eggs and the alien goes after Newt

• Film invokes arguments for the colonization of America

• Racial politics of the film: Vasquez dies invoking the theme of ultimate sacrifice as the mark of “good” people of color in the nation

• Alien can be seen as a “welfare queen”: the bad (black) alien mother lays tons of eggs, creates teeming masses of baby aliens that will take over the world by devouring the rest of us, while the “good” white mother had just one “adopted” child

Aliens3

Directed by David Fincher, 1992

• Representation of the AIDS epidemic

• Reaches out to the gay spectator

• Ripley shaves her head, wears fatigues and boots

• Ripley “shoots up”

• Crew belongs to ACT UP a community of activists

• ACT UP elaborates the discourse of AIDS with its gay sympathies

• The mourning of the characters in the film speak to the mourning of gay men - survivor’s guilt

• Most people found this movie depressing - death was addressed as cruel, involuntary, and senseless = AIDS

Reviews of Popular Culture• Freccero uses a traditional close-reading technique in her analysis of popular culture. By doing this, she shows how a methodology can weed out layered meanings of complex cultural artifacts.

• She also embraces the political aspirations of cultural studies, seeking a better world by deconstructing the past and envisioning alternative futures. Freccero does this by questioning societal assumptions about the relationship between nature and culture.

• Freccero sometimes essentializes and personalizes the alternative readings of the artifacts that she supports in sloppy ways.

Oppositional Politics and Alternative Futures,

George Beatty: University of Iowa

Reviews of Popular Culture• Carla Freccero proposes good guiding questions aimed at understanding the relationship between rhetoric, representation, and politics.

• Freccero’s questions situate out examination of media representations as an ideological inquiry.

Ravers on the Web: Resistance, Multidimensionality, and Writing (about) Youth Cultures,

Jonathan Alexander: University of Cincinnati

Reviews of Popular Culture• Freccero’s book is an excellent overview of the field of cultural studies.

• Freccero adds a dynamic and often spirited approach to the texts she explores.

• One criticism is that the book does read at times as if it was transcribed directly from her lecture notes, and some readers may become frustrated because she doesn’t always answer the questions she poses.

Review of: Popular Culture – An Introduction

Rosalind Sibielski: Literature and Psychology

Reviews of Popular Culture• The book’s real strength is the way it so consistently keeps the rationality of cultural differences at the very center of its textual readings and analytical critiques

Review of: Popular Culture – An Introduction

Bethany Ogdon: College English

How This Book Relates to Our Class

This book is a study of CULTURAL ARTIFACTS

This book is a study of CULTURAL HEGEMONIES

Cultural Artifacts

Like us, Freccero deconstructed certain artifacts to ascertain its information infrastructures. By doing this, she was able to read many systems

from the object and tell us what they meant and say about our society. Freccero commented on the social, political, and technological influence

these artifacts have made on the American society in Popular Culture. The author mixes

the physicality and the inherent narrative structure of each icon and gives the reader a

good understanding of its place in the world.

Cultural Hegemonies Freccero is adept at explaining the role of hegemony and the link between knowledge production and social control. The issues of

knowledge and power, multiculturalism, and how knowledge establishes a particular moral order are dominant themes within her work. Her perspective is that knowledge may be power, but

“popular culture is a currency.” As such, it must be understood as an important means of transmitting knowledge, of both the “other’

and ourselves as the “other”. This knowledge provides the possibility of managing, changing, and even controlling relations

between disparate groups. Her point that “binary oppositions” construct a “logic of absolute difference that produces the

degradation of one term and the elevation of another, clearly relates to how structured knowledge systems operate, and how

images and meanings are manipulated to produce certain privileged types of knowledge and common sense.

Our Comments...We agree with a statement that was included on the back jacket of the book, “the beauty and utility of Freccero’s book lies in the way

skips the familiar dutiful descriptions to instead perform the study of popular culture.” Freccero seems not to concern herself with whether or not her opinion will be considered to be “right” or

“wrong” but with the important need to have and share an opinion.

In demonstrating the need to study popular culture, she makes a valiant attempt of demonstrating precisely how to just do that. She takes an interesting array of cultural objects (neglecting important issues such as television and video games) and summarizes, what

she perceives to be their messages perfectly.

We also feel that her emphasis on the leftist point of view to the exclusion of other perspectives and her reliance on older artifacts in

need of updating are the serious flaws of this work.

Discussion Questions How do you feel about some of Freccero’s arguments? Do you agree?

What other cultural artifacts can you think of that would support her claims?

Do you think her arguments are as valid today as they were 5 years ago? Has much progress been made?

Can everything produced as popular media be considered a cultural artifact? Where is the limit? Is this the problem with political correctness?

Why do people live and die by cultural hegemonies? Why are they so important to society, and what do they say about us as a people?

Is Technoculture going to destroy us? Do you think we will get to a point where technology ruins our culture and society? Or do you think it will bring us closer together i.e. the Internet?

Works Cited

Alexander, J. (2003). Some Critical Backgrounds… Retrieved October 20, 2004 from Ravers on the Web: Resistance, Multidimensionality, and Writing (about) Youth Cultures Website:http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/7.3/coverweb/RaveWrite/index.htm

Beatty, G. (2001). Oppositional Politics and Alternative Futures. Retrieved October 20, 2004, from Science Fiction Studies Web Site: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/birs/bir83b.htm

Freccero, C. (1999). Popular Culture: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press.

Ogdon, B. (2001). Review of Popular Culture – An Introduction, by Carla Freccero, College English 63, no.4: 500-516.

Sibielski, R. (2001). Review of Popular Culture – An Introduction, by Carla Freccero, Literature and Psychology 47, no.3: 56.