Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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138 Chapter 7 Gender and sexuality Table 7.1 Film as object of study in film studies and cultural studies. Film studies Cultural studies Spectatorship positioning Audience readings Textual analysis Ethnographic methods Meaning as production-led Meaning as consumption-led Passive viewer Active viewer Unconscious Conscious Pessimistic Optimistic Richard Dyer’s (1999) excellent argument for the utopian sensibility of much popular entertainment, to construct an account of the utopian possibilities of Hollywood cinema for British women in the 1940s and 1950s. Dyer deploys a set of binary oppositions to reveal the relationship between the social problems experienced by audiences and the textual solutions played out in the texts of popular entertainment (Table 7.2). Table 7.2 Popular texts and utopian solutions. Social problems Textual solutions Scarcity Abundance Exhaustion Energy Dreariness Intensity Manipulation Transparency Fragmentation Community 28 For Dyer, entertainment’s utopian sensibility is a property of the text. Stacey extends his argument to include the social context in which entertainment is experienced. The letters and completed questionnaires by the women made it clear to her that the pleasures of cinema expressed by them were always more than the visual and aural pleasures of the cinema text – they included the ritual of attending a screening, the shared experience and imagined community of the audience, the comfort and comparative luxury of the cinema building. It was never a simple matter of enjoying the glamour of Hollywood. As Stacey (1994) explains, The physical space of the cinema provided a transitional space between everyday life outside the cinema and the fantasy world of the Hollywood film about to be shown. Its design and decor facilitated the processes of escapism enjoyed by these female spectators. As such, cinemas were dream palaces not only in so far as they housed the screening of Hollywood fantasies, but also because of their design and decor which provided a feminised and glamorised space suitable for the cultural consumption of Hollywood films (99).
Women at the cinema 139 Escapism is always a historically specific two-way event. Stacey’s women, therefore, were not only escaping into the luxury of the cinema and the glamour of Hollywood film, they were also escaping from the hardships and the restrictions of wartime and post-war Britain. It is this mix of Hollywood glamour, the relative luxury of the cinema interiors, experienced in a context of war and its aftermath of shortages and sacrifice, which generates ‘the multi-layered meanings of escapism’ (97). Identification is Stacey’s second category of analysis. She is aware of how it often functions in psychoanalytic criticism to point to the way in which film texts are said to position female spectators in the interests of patriarchy. According to this argument, identification is the means by which women collude and become complicit in their own oppression. However, by shifting the focus from the female spectator constructed within the film text to the actual female audience in the cinema, she claims that identification can be shown often to work quite differently. Her respondents continually draw attention to the way in which stars can generate fantasies of power, control and self-confidence, fantasies that can inform the activities of everyday life. Her third category is consumption. Again, she rejects the rather monolithic position which figures consumption as entangled in a relationship, always successful, of domination, exploitation and control. She insists instead that ‘consumption is a site of negotiated meanings, of resistance and of appropriation as well as of subjection and exploitation’ (187). Much work in film studies, she claims, has tended to be productionled, fixing its critical gaze on ‘the ways in which the film industry produces cinema spectators as consumers of both the film and the [associated] products of other industries’ (188). Such analysis is never able to pose theoretically (let alone discuss in concrete detail) how audiences actually use and make meanings from the commodities they consume. She argues that the women’s accounts reveal a more contradictory relationship between audiences and what they consume. For example, she highlights the ways in which ‘American feminine ideals are clearly remembered as transgressing restrictive British femininity and thus employed as strategies of resistance’ (198). Many of the letters and completed questionnaires reveal the extent to which Hollywood stars represented an alternative femininity, exciting and transgressive. In this way, Hollywood stars, and the commodities associated with them, could be used as a means to negotiate with, and to extend the boundaries of, what was perceived as a socially restrictive British femininity. She is careful not to argue that these women were free to construct through consumption entirely new feminine identities. Similarly, she does not deny that such forms of consumption may pander to the patriarchal gaze. The key to her position is the question of excess. The transformation of self-image brought about by the consumption of Hollywood stars and other associated commodities may produce identities and practices that are in excess of the needs of patriarchal culture. She contends that, [p]aradoxically, whilst commodity consumption for female spectators in mid to late 1950s Britain concerns producing oneself as a desirable object, it also offers an escape from what is perceived as the drudgery of domesticity and motherhood which increasingly comes to define femininity at this time. Thus, consumption
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FIFTH EDITION CULtUrAL theoryANd Po
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We work with leading authors to dev
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Contents Preface/Acknowledgements i
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Contents vii 10 The politics of the
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x Preface/Acknowledgements I have a
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Publisher’s acknowledgements We a
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2 Chapter 1 What is popular culture
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10 Chapter 1 What is popular cultur
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2 The ‘culture and civilization
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Matthew Arnold 19 is best; (iii) th
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Matthew Arnold 21 Arnold (1960) cal
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Leavisism 23 decline. What had been
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debasement of emotional life, and t
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Leavisism 27 loss. Whereas in the p
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Mass culture in America: the post-w
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disastrous that few people read cla
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previously accepted what was handed
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Photo 2.1 A day trip to Blackpool i
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3 Culturalism In this chapter I wil
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Richard Hoggart: The Uses of Litera
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Raymond Williams: ‘The analysis o
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Raymond Williams: ‘The analysis o
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E.P. Thompson: The Making of the En
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Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel: The
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The Centre for Contemporary Cultura
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4 Marxisms Classical Marxism Marxis
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Classical Marxism 61 What Engels cl
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The Frankfurt School 63 This is one
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The Frankfurt School 65 It is not d
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The Frankfurt School 67 engages in
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The Frankfurt School 69 One might g
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Althusserianism 71 level. Neverthel
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Althusserianism 73 (the ‘symptoms
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Althusserianism 75 This conflict is
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Althusserianism 77 no ideology is s
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suggests that what really matters a
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Hegemony 81 below, but a language t
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Post-Marxism and cultural studies 8
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Post-Marxism and cultural studies 8
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Page 127 and 128: 6 Structuralism and post-structural
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Page 145 and 146: Table 6.4 Film as an object of stud
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Page 151 and 152: 7 Gender and sexuality Feminisms
Page 153: Women at the cinema 137 that it is
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Page 159 and 160: Reading romance 143 Drawing on the
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Page 165 and 166: Watching Dallas 149 discussion, to
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Page 177 and 178: Queer theory 161 generate and guara
Page 179 and 180: Queer theory 163 Butler (2009) give
Page 181: Further reading 165 analysis. See e
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188 Chapter 9 Postmodernism Rodney
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190 Chapter 9 Postmodernism Baudril
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192 Chapter 9 Postmodernism Jameson
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194 Chapter 9 Postmodernism has now
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196 Chapter 9 Postmodernism the wor
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198 Chapter 9 Postmodernism the str
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200 Chapter 9 Postmodernism very ac
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202 Chapter 9 Postmodernism meaning
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204 Chapter 9 Postmodernism Photo 9
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206 Chapter 9 Postmodernism Figure
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208 Chapter 9 Postmodernism exporte
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210 Chapter 9 Postmodernism Converg
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212 Chapter 9 Postmodernism Best, S
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214 Chapter 10 The politics of the
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238 Notes 16. The film Human Nature
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240 Notes 58. See Storey (1992). 59
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242 Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean
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244 Bibliography DiMaggio, Paul (20
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246 Bibliography Haag, Ernest van d
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248 Bibliography Leavis, F.R. (1933
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250 Bibliography Ricoeur, Paul (198
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252 Bibliography White, David Manni
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254 Index base/superstructure formu
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256 Index Doctor Who (television),
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258 Index hegemony articulation, 11
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260 Index make-over and talk shows,
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262 Index pop music (continued) pos
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264 Index realism and reality (cont
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266 Index Williamson, Judith, 78 Wi
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