Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Notes
16. The film Human Nature presents a very funny staging of this idea. Freud (1985) uses the
volcanic irruption at Pompeii in AD 55 as a means to explain repression and how to undo its
work: ‘There is, in fact, no better analogy for repression, by which something in the mind is
at once made inaccessible and preserved, than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell a
victim and from which it could emerge once more through the work of spades’ (65).
17. In the original German, ego, super-ego and id are Ich (I), über-Ich (over-I) and es (it).
18. The manner in which Freud discusses the girl’s experience of the Oedipus complex, especially
the language he uses, seems to suggest that a real understanding of the process was not very
important to him.
19. It should also be noted that Freud (1977) believed there were two ways to navigate the
Oedipus complex: ‘positive’, which resulted in heterosexuality, and ‘negative’, which produces
homosexuality. A boy may ‘take the place of his mother and be loved by his father’ (318).
20. ‘As a witty poet remarks so rightly, the mirror would do well to reflect a little more before
returning our image to us’ (Lacan, 1989: 152).
21. For Brechtian aesthetics, see Brecht (1978).
22. Barthes’s ‘Myth today’ and Williams’s ‘The analysis of culture’ are two of the founding texts
of British cultural studies.
23. Barthes’s formulation is remarkably similar to the concept of ‘interpellation’ developed by
Louis Althusser some years later (see discussion in Chapter 4).
24. Myth works in much the same way as Foucault’s concept of power; it is productive (see later
in this chapter).
25. See hyperlink: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6108496.stm
26. If you enter Jeremy Kyle in the search engine on YouTube you will find Jon Culshaw’s wonderful
parody. Culshaw quite brilliantly captures the agression, the discourse of social class
and the smug self-satisfaction of this type of programme.
27. Mulvey’s essay has been anthologized at least ten times.
28. Based on a diagram in Dyer (1999: 376).
29. Charlotte Lamb, originally in The Guardian, 13 September 1982 (quoted in Coward, 1984: 190).
30. Janice Radway finds this figure implausible.
31. In similar fashion, it may be the case that reading Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven books as a child
– with their imperative of collective action – prepared the ground for my commitment to
socialism as an adult.
32. See Bennett (1983) and Storey (1992).
33. Antony died in December 1999. I knew him both as a teacher and as a colleague. Although
I often disagreed with him, his influence on my work (and on the work of others) has been
considerable.
34. Butler (1999) uses the term ‘heterosexual matrix’ ‘to designate that grid of cultural intelligibility
through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized. ...[This is] a hegemonic
discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere
and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine
expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined
through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality’ (194).
35. Esther Newton (1999), whose work on drag is used by Butler, makes the point that ‘children
learn sex-role identity before they learn any strictly sexual object choices. In other words,
I think that children learn they are boys or girls before they are made to understand that
boys only love girls and vice versa’ (108). Harold Beaver (1999) writes, ‘What is “natural” is
neither heterosexual nor homosexual desire but simply desire. . . . Desire is like the pull of a
gravitational field, the magnet that draws body to body’ (161).