Gender and Popular Culture

Katie Milestone, Anneke Meyer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780745698304
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This fully updated second edition of Gender and Popular Culture examines the role of popular culture in the construction of gendered identities in contemporary society. It draws on a wide range of cultural forms – including popular music, social media, television and magazines – to illustrate how femininity and masculinity are produced, represented, used and consumed. Blending primary and secondary research, Milestone and Meyer introduce key theories and concepts in gender studies and popular culture, which are made accessible and interesting through their application to topical examples such as the #MeToo campaign, intensive mothering and social media, discourses about women and binge drinking, and gender and popular music. Included in this revised edition is a new chapter on digital culture, examining the connection between digital platforms and gender identities, relations and activism, as well as a new chapter on cultural work in digital contexts. All chapters have been updated to acknowledge recent changes in gender images and relations as well as media culture. Additionally, there is new material on the Fourth Wave Women's Movement, audiences and prosumers, and the role of social media. Gender and Popular Culture is the go-to textbook for students of gender studies, media and communication, and popular culture.

1
Introduction

Gender and popular culture are connected in inextricable, pervasive and complex ways. Popular culture is an amorphous concept, which encompasses a vast range of cultural texts and practices, from cinema films to newspaper articles, from designing computer games to playing music. Much of popular culture is media culture; popular culture includes mass media such as radio, the press, film and television, as well as digital media such as the internet, social media and digital games. In this book we concern ourselves with the ways in which gender, that is masculinity and femininity, connects to popular culture. We do not aim to provide a general overview of the field of gender in popular culture, recounting and reviewing all the existing academic literature; this would be virtually impossible in the space of one book and only produce simplistic generalizations. Instead, we aim to offer in-depth and analytical insights into how gender relates to cultural processes of production, consumption and representation by analysing and illustrating each process through exemplary case studies. Some of these studies constitute primary research conducted by the authors, while others are drawn from wider academic literature.

We aim to show how gender is constructed, represented and produced in popular culture, and how in turn this affects gender identities, (in)equality and gendered power relations. We do this by looking at a range of literature, case studies and examples drawn from modern Western culture. The first part of the book is devoted to the process of production. In this part we look at who produces popular culture, including well-known producers such as artists and performers and less visible, behind-the-scenes ones, such as producers and managers. We also investigate patterns of gender in relation to employment and careers, and examine how this links to genres and types of popular culture, and attempt to explain these links by looking at a range of factors such as gender discourses, individual aspiration and economic structures.

The second part of the book focuses on discourses of femininity and masculinity and the ways in which they attribute meanings to gender. Discourses are broadly understood as images and statements that are commonly circulated around an issue and inform our ways of talking, thinking and acting in relation to it. In concrete terms, in this book we are concerned with the ways in which women and men are visually and linguistically represented in popular culture, drawing out similarities and differences, and we examine how normative notions of femininity and masculinity are constructed and sustained. Moreover, we investigate the implications of discursive gender norms in terms of status, power relations and gender (in)equality.

The third part of the book deals with the question of impact and power. The gendered images we consume and the gendered technologies we use have consequences, not just for individuals but for culture at large. For example, there are differences between men’s and women’s user patterns and subject positions set up for men and women in popular cultural texts. We investigate the reasons behind these gendered patterns and their consequences, looking at both the analogue age of mass media and the digital age. The penultimate chapter in the book discusses gender, power and inequality in everyday leisure spaces. Although interactions in digital spaces have come increasingly to dominate our daily lives, we need also to remember that we concurrently operate in spaces that involve ‘face-to-face’ interactions. For many people there are daily experiences of travel to workplaces, education spaces, social spaces and so on. We highlight the often marked differences in experiencing the physical spaces of everyday life depending on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class and disability. For the remainder of this first chapter we outline in detail the key concepts that are used throughout the book.

Popular Culture and the Media

Popular culture is a contested concept. It is vague and diffuse and can therefore be filled with many different meanings. In order to investigate these meanings, we will start by looking at the more general concept of culture.

Raymond Williams (1983) put forward three meanings of the word ‘culture’, arguing that it can refer to (a) intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, (b) a particular way of life of a group or historical period, or (c) texts and practices that produce meanings. The concept of popular culture is of course different from that of culture. Williams’s first definition refers to culture with a capital C, that is, those aspects of culture commonly called high culture, for example literature or opera. We usually do not associate popular culture with this definition. According to John Storey (1993), the notion of popular culture mobilizes Williams’s second and third meanings. On the one hand, popular culture refers to the cultural practices or lived culture in which people engage; for example, going on holiday or religious festivals. And on the other hand, popular culture also refers to cultural texts, which are symbolic and whose main function is the production of meaning; for example, a newspaper article, a television programme or a pop song. The word ‘text’ has a wider meaning in the discipline of cultural studies than it has in everyday life: it refers not only to written or spoken words but to any aspect of culture whose predominant purpose it is to signify, that is, to produce meanings. The terminology reveals the linguistic–humanist roots of the discipline of cultural studies and its concern with textual analysis. In contemporary culture most meanings are produced through language and images, which are our most pervasive communicative systems; but the word ‘text’ also includes deeply symbolic practices, such as getting married or having some tattoos done. At this point it becomes obvious that Williams’s second and third meanings of culture intersect and overlap – cultural practices are both lived culture and cultural texts. This is inevitable; most cultural practices are habitual, in the sense of being part of a way of life, and symbolic, in the sense of signifying certain meanings. Indeed, these two aspects are often inextricably linked. In this book we use the term ‘cultural text’ in its wider, academic sense to include culture, which signifies through language, images and (lived) practices. So, we concern ourselves, for example, with newspaper articles, television images and the practices of people who work in the industries that produce popular culture. At its simplest, popular culture consists of a wide range of cultural texts.

The concept of popular culture has a quantitative dimension (Storey 1993). The word ‘popular’ suggests that it is liked and/or practised by many people. And indeed many aspects of culture that we would commonly class as popular culture are widely appreciated and consumed, such as pop music or television. However, the connections are not always straightforward. There are certain aspects of culture that we would commonly class as ‘high’ culture but which are still popular, in the sense of being liked or practised by many people. We could think here of certain performers of classical music such as Pavarotti. Conversely, certain aspects of popular culture, for example niche television channels, may not have wide audiences at all. Popular and high culture also often mix; for example when classical literature is turned into television serials, which are watched by millions of viewers. Is this high or popular culture? While popular culture has a quantitative dimension, this alone is not necessary or sufficient to define it. The other factor to emerge as important here is that popular culture in all its definitions is compared, explicitly or implicitly, to some ‘other’ culture. Most commonly this other culture is so-called ‘high’ culture, which is usually taken to include serious and classical forms of culture such as works of old literature, paintings, poetry or classical music. The juxtaposition of popular and high culture is a normative one in that high culture is seen as superior (Strinati 2004). High culture is deemed intrinsically worthy, serious, quality art, while popular culture is judged superficial, simplistic and driven by profits rather than skill or quality. Often these judgements are linked to the commercialization of culture and the creation of a culture industry. Popular culture is seen as the epitome of commercialization, a mass culture, which only arose with capitalism and is produced by big businesses for the purpose of profit. Popular culture is considered to be of intrinsically low artistic quality because the pursuit of profits necessitates meeting the lowest common denominator. In contrast, high culture is associated with a bygone golden age free of commercialization, where art thrived for art’s sake. Contemporary high culture is seen as true art relatively untouched by profit logic. The juxtaposition of high and popular culture is flawed in various ways. Firstly, this categorization is elitist and fails to recognize that the standards by which the quality of culture are measured are not universal or neutral but themselves a product of culture (Eagleton 2000). Secondly, in contemporary Western culture the economic system of capitalism shapes the production of all forms of culture and art – there is no space totally free of commerce.

The media are central to popular culture in many ways. The media are symbolic institutions because their products signify. Media texts construct meanings through the use of language and images. Whether we think of a pop song, a television drama or a newspaper column, all these texts construct certain meanings; for example, conveying a particular message or creating a narrative. Much of what we think of as popular culture is media culture: television, computer games, pop music, film, and so on. The mass media, notably radio, film, television and newspapers, have been central to making culture available to the masses, hence the association of popular culture with mass culture (Strinati 2004). This second edition is concerned with both mass media and digital media. Digital media are all the platforms powered by digital technology – including social media, apps, games, blogs and micro-blogs, wikis and so on – which are accessible through multiple devices and where content flows across platforms and devices (Lindgren 2017). The smart phone has emerged as the key device through which users access digital media. In contrast to the mass media, digital media blur the lines between producers and consumers and allow users much more flexibility. The advent of digital media has intensified the connection between media and popular culture. New and additional forms of popular culture have been created, for example new websites and blogs, digital games, or interactions through social media. Moreover, already existing forms of mass culture are now also accessible through an increasing number of new media formats. For example, music can be streamed through the internet, books can digitally read via electronic reading tablets such as Kindle, newspapers have online websites, which allow you to read current editions and sift through archives of past editions. Television streaming services, such as Netflix or Amazon Prime, make a large amount of historical and contemporary television productions instantly available. Thus, popular culture is increasingly mediated. There are of course aspects of popular culture that are not media culture. Everyday practices that have cultural meanings, whether we call them cultural texts or lived experience, are not necessarily linked to the media. Celebrating a wedding or getting a tattoo done are cultural practices but not media practices. However, these examples illustrate that while popular culture and the media are not identical, they are increasingly intertwined. No wedding is complete without an enormous number of photographs and often a video recording too. Individuals’ ideas and tastes regarding tattoos are to some extent shaped by media coverage of tattoos.

In this book we use the term ‘popular culture’ to refer to a range of cultural texts that signify meaning through words, images or practices. Reflecting the mediatization of contemporary culture, all the case studies we use, from newspapers to digital games and pop music, are media culture. There have been long-standing debates around the political positioning and ideological effects of popular culture. Some commentators, such as John Fiske (1989a) or Paul Willis (1990), see it as potentially radical and subversive because it gives power to the masses and consumers and undermines elites. However, others, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1993), have identified popular culture as necessarily conservative, working in the interests of those in power and helping to maintain the status quo by pacifying the masses and justifying capitalism. Following Gramsci’s work, Stuart Hall (1982) and others have conceptualized popular culture as a site of political contestation where sets of ideas, such as ideologies and discourses, are struggled over. In the process, dominant ideologies and powerful interests can be challenged and resisted, adapted and reproduced. This conceptualization marks popular culture as fundamentally political and allows us to analyse particular aspects in terms of their resistance to or reproduction of dominant gender norms and ideologies. This is particularly important when studying a phenomenon like gender, which is a deeply political, contentious and complex subject.

Production, Discourses and Consumption

Production

Production is a fundamental, but often overlooked, element of the sphere of popular culture. Theorists have dedicated a good deal of research into looking at how culture is represented and consumed, and a large portion of this research has analysed cultural representation and consumption from a gender perspective. However, apart from the occasional ethnographies of cultural industries (e.g. Nixon 2003; Powdermaker 1951) that emerge every now and then, it is only in the last couple of decades that a substantial body of work on cultural production has begun to flourish. A lot of this work began with the arrival of new cultural and media industries connected with digital media. Technological and cultural shifts led to new forms of working and new avenues of cultural production. Initially, in terms of gender, there was some optimism that these new industries might be welcoming to women. However, as we discuss later in this book, there are still significant issues of gender and power affecting who stakes a claim in the frontline of cultural production.

In the context of this book we are using the notion of cultural production in terms of the process of making media and culture. We look at the groups and individuals who make popular cultural texts such as films, computer games and adverts, for example. Often these people have job titles that explicitly refer to their production roles – such as film producers or record producers. A theatre director might say ‘I’m working on a production of …’

Arguably, the production of culture is very different from other forms of production. Culture is not made on a production line (although Adorno argues that there is a ‘production line’ ethos to how cultural products are made in capitalist societies). Generally, it is widely held that cultural and artistic production is connected with the realms of the symbolic, identity and aesthetics.

In this book we are interested in taking a close look at who produces popular culture in terms of gender. We examine the extent to which the production of popular culture is male-dominated and whether this is becoming less so as time (and attitudes to gender equality) progresses. Closely linked to issues of production are issues of ownership and control. Who owns the newspapers, the film companies, the commercial television channels and the internet? Do the apparatuses of media and cultural production continue to be owned and controlled mainly by white, middle-class, cis-gendered men and what might the repercussions of this be?

Representation and Discourses

Representation as a process of communication means to depict or describe something or someone (Webb 2009). In the media, language (both written and spoken) and images are the key symbolic systems through which representations are made. In the process of representation, language and images stand in for something or someone and thereby render it present (Webb 2009). Representation is so important because it is an active process of creating meanings: for example, the words we choose to describe a group of people or the images we use to depict an event; that is, the ways in which we represent them, shape the meanings of these people and events (Hall 1997a). When the G20 summit took place in London to produce an international agreement on how to solve the current financial crisis, it attracted large and diverse groups of protesters campaigning for the installation of a new world order, rather than ‘more of the same’. The media variously described these protesters as ‘anarchists’, ‘anti-capitalists’ or ‘climate-change campaigners’, and they showed images of peaceful street marches as well as the violent destruction of a branch of Royal Bank of Scotland. The choice of words and images obviously shapes the meanings of the protests as peaceful or violent, as legitimate or illegitimate, as grounded in good reasons (e.g. ‘climate-change campaigners’) or simply a desire to cause chaos and destruction (e.g. ‘anarchists’). This is a discursive battle over meaning. Discourses are sanctioned systems of representations (Hall 1997a): that is to say those sets of representations that are widely accepted after winning the discursive contest and underwritten by powerful structures.

Meaning is produced through representation across different cultural sites; the media are of particular importance in late modernity, but others include art, customs and habits (Hall 1997b). In contrast to art, the media maintain that their material accurately represents reality, showing and telling things as they really are to their audiences (Webb 2009). Among the media, non-fiction media such as newspapers and news sites, television news, investigative programmes or documentaries have a claim to truthfulness and objectivity. This arguably gives them particular persuasive and ideological power. Media represent through images and language. Language is the most fundamental and privileged system of representation, but visual representations also possess distinct strengths, such as the ability to communicate instantaneously (Hall 1997b).

Gender is one of the key social structures in contemporary culture and marked by power struggles and inequalities. Gender hierar...