Once a person has been trained to apply a feminist critical lens, it is relatively easy to find examples of the ways that pop culture and the media in the United States maintain the status quo. One needs look no further than in the poses adopted by men and women within advertisements and compare them against the associations with culturally normative views about masculinity and femininity. Even in the age of boisterously “post-feminist” neoliberalism, women and femininity are marked by weakness and vulnerability, while men and masculinity are marked by strength and domination. People of color are curiously absent from the vast majority of popular culture – and then, when they are presented, it is often in a diminutive, tokenizing, or downright stereotypical manner that reflects the centering of whiteness within a systematically racist society. Yet, this post seeks to move beyond simply analyzing pop culture and instead speculate about why pop culture analysis bears such popularity within feminist dialogues and discourses. Although there are no overt answers because the voices engaged in critical analysis of media are diverse and come from a broad spectrum of intentions and positionalities, this post will offer some of the problematic aspects to pop culture and media analysis that exists without anti-oppression activism and follow-through.
Feminist discourse has thoroughly demonstrated the complicity of pop culture and media in simultaneously producing and reproducing hegemonic norms about gender, race, class, et al. An intersectional, problematizing lens can easily be applied to popular media. Rebecca Brasfield’s Rereading Sex and the City: Exposing the Hegemonic Feminist Narrative demonstrates the means by which certain master narratives can be complicated beyond single axis statements about empowerment and disenfranchisement. In Media Magic: Making Class Invisible, Gregory Mantsios dissects the ways that media is responsible for the centering of wealth and the wealthy as well as the erasure and symbolic annihilation of poverty and the poor. Isabel Molina Guzmán and Angharad N. Valdivia examine the Latinadad and the specificites of Latina representation and exotic sexualization within US media in Brain, Brow, and Booty: Latina Iconicity in US Popular Culture. These are but a few examples of the broader field of feminist works that analyze pop culture. Entire magazines (like Bitch Magazine), a vast ocean of blogs (about just about every facet of popular media, from books to movies to television to video games) and countless books (like Feminism and Pop Culture) have been dedicated towards this end. It occupies a substantial amount of time and energy within feminist academic spaces, and is given significant attention beginning with introductory classes and continuing well through post-graduate work.
Why?
It feels necessary and prudent to examine why it is that media and pop culture are so obsessively analyzed. While there is undeniable value to demonstrating its underpinnings and preventing an entirely uncontested presence of pop culture discourses, there is a great deal more to feminist movement(s) and critical analyses of culture. Perhaps is it because popular media either presents easy (consider a series like Two and a Half Men) or provocative (see also, the reaction to any criticism of Disney movies) targets that simultaneously attract and maintain the public’s attention more easily than, for example, discussions about how BRCA-1 “genetics” tests successfully direct public anxieties about breast cancer against individual bodies rather than economic and industrial interests. Perhaps it is because they possess a lower barrier to entry than do certain other feminist discourses – knowledge of the problematic elements behind BRCA-1 screenings requires a certain degree of feminist scientific study as well as a willingness to indict capitalist interests, for example. Yet, it is simply untrue that all feminist work is impossible for most people to engage with, and countless works have been published with that particular barrier specifically in mind. Perhaps for some, it is attractive because it can be a form of feminist engagement that doesn’t involve any particular sacrifice or activist effort, and while this can bring people to the cause on a superficial level, it bears a particular danger of trapping discourse at that point of analysis. There is limited utility to stating, for example, that the (amount of/lack of) clothing displayed in magazine advertisements and covers featuring women is sexist. To truly challenge this, one must first look at how white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy, channeled through commercial interests and market forces, has systematically constructed a femininity that is vulnerable to this form of (mis)representation, and then actively work against the formation and reformation of gender.
While there is certainly no need to completely demolish the field (because as stated, there is value to it), it is troubling that it remains over-represented within the broader spectrum of feminist discourses. Its ubiquity may, on some level, simply be explained by the ubiquity of popular media within our lives. It also cannot be overlooked as a basic form of recruitment to feminism – by highlighting and naming elements of media that people might find problematic but not be able to articulate, people have another approach vector. Yet, is vital that it remains merely a stepping point rather than an obsession. Unveiling the sexism, racism, and homophobia in Sex and the City might be interesting to a broad(er) audience, but without an overt pathway with which to engage in anti-oppression activism, it is of little use to feminist movement(s).