Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 7 Gender and sexuality
is that it has already been appropriated by the culture industries for its own purposes
of profit maximization. However, drawing on the work of Bourdieu, Ang argues that
populism is related to the ‘popular aesthetic’, in which the moral categories of middleclass
taste are replaced by an emphasis on contingency, on pluralism, and above all, on
pleasure (see Chapter 10). Pleasure, for Ang, is the key term in a transformed feminist
cultural politics. Feminism must break with ‘the paternalism of the ideology of mass
culture . . . [in which w]omen are . . . seen as the passive victims of the deceptive messages
of soap operas . . . [their] pleasure . . . totally disregarded’ (118–19). Even when
pleasure is considered, it is there only to be condemned as an obstruction to the feminist
goal of women’s liberation. The question Ang poses is: Can pleasure through
identification with the women of ‘women’s weepies’ or the emotionally masochistic
women of soap operas, ‘have a meaning for women which is relatively independent of
their political attitudes’? (133). Her answer is yes: fantasy and fiction do not
function in place of, but beside, other dimensions of life (social practice, moral
or political consciousness). It . . . is a source of pleasure because it puts ‘reality’ in
parenthesis, because it constructs imaginary solutions for real contradictions
which in their fictional simplicity and their simple fictionality step outside the
tedious complexity of the existing social relations of dominance and subordination
(135).
Of course this does not mean that representations of women do not matter. They can
still be condemned for being reactionary in an ongoing cultural politics. But to experience
pleasure from them is a completely different issue: ‘it need not imply that we are
also bound to take up these positions and solutions in our relations to our loved ones
and friends, our work, our political ideals, and so on’ (ibid.).
Fiction and fantasy, then, function by making life in the present pleasurable, or
at least livable, but this does not by any means exclude radical political activity
or consciousness. It does not follow that feminists must not persevere in trying
to produce new fantasies and fight for a place for them. . . . It does, however,
mean that, where cultural consumption is concerned, no fixed standard exists for
gauging the ‘progressiveness’ of a fantasy. The personal may be political, but the
personal and the political do not always go hand in hand (135–6).
In an unnecessarily hostile review of Watching Dallas, Dana Polan (1988) accuses
Ang of simplifying questions of pleasure by not bringing into play psychoanalysis. He
also claims that Ang’s attack on the ideology of mass culture simply reverses the valuations
implicit and explicit in the high culture / popular culture divide. Instead of the
consumer of high culture imagining ‘high taste as a kind of free expression of a full subjectivity
always in danger of being debased by vulgar habits’, Ang is accused of presenting
‘the fan of mass culture as a free individual in danger of having his/her open
access to immediate pleasure corrupted by artificial and snobbish values imposed from
on high’ (198). Polan claims that Ang is attacking ‘an antiquarian and anachronistic