Theories In Pop Culture Flashcards
A theory that holds ‘culture’ as its central foundation
Culturalism
Culturalism is an approach aiming to eliminate ______
dualisms
can be defined as a belief system that emphasizes the importance of culture in shaping human experience and behavior.
Culturalism
According to culturalism,_______ is not simply a set of static customs or practices but an active force that shapes individual and collective identities and social, political, and economic outcomes.
culture
_________ holds that culture is not an objective reality that can be measured or quantified but rather a subjective experience shaped by social, historical, and political factors.
Culturalism
is not something people inherit or acquire passively; rather, it is something that people actively create and recreate through everyday practices and interactions.
Culture
For________, culture expresses meanings and values (structure of feeling) and through cultural analysis, it is possible to clarify them
Raymond Williams
_______is a method for understanding what a culture is expressing by analyzing its cultural expressions and therefore reconstructing and interpreting a particular way of life.
Cultural analysis
3 levels of culture acc to Raymond Williams
Lived culture
Period culture
Culture of selective tradition
: Experienced by people in their day to-day life in a specific place and at a particular time / Access through the documentary record of the culture.
Lived culture
: It is the recorded culture that includes products and daily facts from a culture.
Period culture
: It is the one that connects the previous types of culture.
Many factors such as the interests and values of the dominant class influenced the selection of the texts chosen for understanding the lived culture.
Culture of the selective tradition
perceived an inextricable link between individuals and their culture, which maintained that individuals were determined by, and unable to leave, their own culture, and could only realize themselves within it
Culturalism
This ‘________’ assumes that culture determines the individual through and through;
that cultures are endlessly diverse but internally_______;
that culture shapes the world view of the individual so he is unable to understand other cultures;
that it makes universal human rights_______;
the presumption of universal human rights would suppress individual cultures, and that culture in this sense forms the basis for the common life of different people, their so-called “__________”.
culturalism
homogeneous
impossible
multiculturalism
is a social, economic, and political philosophy that analyses the impact of the ruling class on the laborers, leading to the uneven distribution of wealth and privileges in society.
Marxism
stimulates the workers to protest the injustice.
Marxism
Marxism
The theory was formulated by (2) in their work, ‘_______’.
Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels
The Communist Manifesto
is one of the most significant theories and a philosophy that has contributed much to the modern world.
Helped the working class to question the injustice enforced upon them through their wages, lifestyle, and oppression.
Marxism
It is considered as the beginning of progress and evolution.
Marxism
_______believed that instilling his ideology in the minds of people like him, would one day make the world, an ^ideal classless society.*
Marx
Marxism
Brings social and economic revolution due to the exploitation of the working class in the______ system.
capitalist
_________, where the labor community (Proletariat) worked their lives off only for the ruling class (Bourgeoisie) to profit from them.
Capitalism
This is the stage where Mark and Engels compile a ‘Communist manifesto’ from their plight as workers for the_______
Capitalism
British Factory owners
______was held by a minority (the elite or bourgeoisie) who had access to capital and could use their money and power to generate more wealth
Power
*The majority of the population (the mass or proletariat) had only their_____ (strength and time) to help them make a living
labor
*_______ meant that the elite were the only ones who had access to the means of production
Industrialization
Marxism
Without the ability to produce for themselves, the masses were dependent on the____ for survival
elite
*To maximize profits, the elite needed to get as much labor from the masses for as little_____ as possible
cost
Marxism
*The elite needed the masses to accept their position as powerless workers
Marxism
______discovered that mass media influence society greatly and molds the mass culture.
Marx
Mass media is controlled by the____
ruling class
*Ideas that are not in favor of the majority class are been imposed on them.
*Private ownership of media does not allow the press to function freely.
Marxist theory
*The state should have total control of the media.
*Media should not be affected by any social, political, or economic forces.
*Media should only be used to educate the masses.
Marxist theory
*Marx wanted the media to work for the benefit of the poor who were the majority.
*The inefficiency of the state official should be highlighted by the media
Marxist theory
_________ says that we cannot trust the media, because they are run by the people in power, and therefore maintain the status quo, rather than being agents for change.
Marxist media theory
Swiss linguist,_________ believed_____ derived meaning through their “differences” and “groupings, since “we do not communicate through isolated signs” signs gained their meaning from their relationships with other signs in the language system.
Ferdinand de Saussure
signs
is a way of approaching texts and practices that are derived from the theoretical work of Ferdinand de Saussure.
Structuralism
Based on this claim, Saussure suggests that______ is not the result of an essential correspondence between signifiers and signified; it is rather the result of differences and relationships.
meaning
Saussure’s is a_____ theory of language.
relational theory
Meaning is produced not through a one-to-one relation to things in the world, but by establishing______.
differences
Structuralists argue that______
organizes and constructs our sense of reality – different _____ in effect produce different mappings of the real.
language
_______ refers to the system of language, the rules, and the conventions that organize it.
Langue
This is language as a social institution, and as______ (1967) points out, ‘it is essentially a collective contract which one must accept in its entirety if one wishes to communicate
Roland Barthes
refers to the individual utterance, the individual use of language.
Parole
Saussure compares language to the game of____.
Here we can distinguish between the rules of the game and an actual game of chess.
Without the body of rules, there could be no actual game, but it is only in an actual game that these rules are made manifest.
Therefore, there is langue and parole, structure, and performance.
It is the homogeneity of the structure that makes the heterogeneity of the performance possible.
chess
Two theoretical approaches to linguistics (Saussure):
Diachronic
Synchronic
, which studies the historical development of a given language
Diachronic approach
______, which studies a given language in one moment in time
Synchronic approach
Saussure argues that to find a science of linguistics it is necessary to adopt a_______ approach.
Structuralists have taken the_____ approach to the study of texts or practices.
They argue that in order to really understand a text or practice it is necessary to focus exclusively on its structural properties.
synchronic
Approach to media analysis which borrows its principles from linguistics (the study of language).
Structuralism
considers the relationships (structures) between signs to be more important than what a sign may mean on its own
Structuralism
In order, to understand culture and how the world works, you should analyze the______ that determine our experiences and behavior.
It is also important to look at the relationships and connections between the different _______ to fully appreciate their influence on our lives.
structures
Structuralism
By analyzing the connections between media texts, we can develop general conclusions about the wider cultural context. This approach to studying the world is called_______.
structuralism
A political movement concerned with women’s oppression and the ways and means to empower women
Femininism
______(1989) describes it as ‘finding a voice
Hooks
Feminism
As________ (1982) points out, ‘Cultural politics are crucially important to feminism because they
involve struggles over meaning
Michèle Barrett
(2009) makes much the same point,
‘Feminists approaching popular culture proceed from a variety of theoretical positions that carry with them a deeper social analysis and political agenda’.
Lana Rakow
Four Types of Feminism
Radical
Marxist
Liberal
Dual-systems theory
______ argue that women’s oppression is the result of the system of patriarchy, a system of domination in which men as a group have power over women as a group
Radical feminists
analysis of the ultimate source of oppression is capitalism. The domination of women by men is seen because of capital’s domination over labor.
Marxist feminist
________differs from both Marxist and radical feminists in that it does not posit a system – patriarchy or capitalism – determining the oppression of women.
Liberal feminism
_______, it tends to see the problem in terms of male prejudice against women, embodied in law or expressed in the exclusion of women from specific areas of life.
Liberal feminism
represents the coming together of Marxist and radical feminist analysis in the belief that women’s oppression is the result of a complex articulation of both patriarchy and capitalism.
Dual-systems theory
is a complex issue.
It can be used to describe a type of feminism, a theoretical position within feminism, and a tendency in contemporary popular culture
Post-feminism
__________(2004) is much less optimistic about the ‘success’ of feminism.
What has really happened, she argues, is that much contemporary popular culture actively undermines the feminist gains of the 1970s and 1980s.
However, this should not be understood as a straightforward ‘backlash’ against feminism. Rather it is undermining feminism’s works by acknowledging feminism while at the same time suggesting that it is no longer necessary in a world where women have the freedom to shape their own individual life courses.
Angela McRobbie
In post-feminist popular culture, feminism features as history: (3)
aged, uncool, and redundant.
The acknowledgment of feminism, therefore, is only to demonstrate that it is no longer relevant.
In place of the feminist movement, we are given instead the successful individual woman, embodying both the redundancy of feminism and the necessity of individual effort.
This dual action of acknowledgment and dismissal is found in many aspects of_________.
post-feminist popular culture
To really understand the post-feminist popular culture it needs to be situated in relation to________ and to_______ discourses of choice and individualism (‘the market has the answer to every problem).
de-traditionalization
neoliberal
The first suggests that women are now freed from traditional feminine identities, and thus enabled to self-reflexively invent new roles,
while the second claims that the free market, with its imperative of consumer choice, is the best mechanism to fully enable new female identity constructions.
De-traditionalization
Neoliberal
As Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (1995) explain,
‘provides a discipline for exploring the relationships between lesbians, gay men and the culture which surrounds and (for the large part) continues to seek to exclude us
Queer theory
by shifting the focus away from the question of what it means to be lesbian or gay within the culture, and onto the various performances of heterosexuality created by the culture, _______ seeks to locate Queerness in places that had previously been thought of as strictly for the straights’.
Queer Theory
part of the project of_____ is to attack the very “naturalness” of gender and, by extension, the fiction supporting compulsory heterosexuality.
Queer
It is a way of thinking that dismantles traditional assumptions about gender and sexual identities, challenges traditional academic approaches, and fights against social inequality
Queer theory
is the perspective that questions the perception that cisgender (a term used to describe a person whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth) and heterosexual identities are in any sense ‘standard
Queer theory
_______ is a culture, which offers no position of ‘critical distance’;
it is a culture in which claims of ‘incorporation’ or ‘co-optation’ make no sense, as there is no longer a critical space from which to be incorporated or co-opted.
Postmodernism
The thorough (2) of everyday life is what marks postmodernism off from previous socio-cultural moments.
‘culturalization’ or ‘aestheticization’
________is a realm we may enter in order to be refreshed and renewed in order to be able to continue with the ordinary affairs of everyday life.
The promises made with the emergence of capitalism out of feudalism, of a society to be based on equality, justice, and progress, were increasingly relegated from the world of the everyday to the realm of ‘______’ culture.
Affirmative culture
Postmodern Society
● Highly pluralistic and diverse
● Circulation of images, myriad films, videos, and websites
● Everything: is constantly in flux (Bauman, 2007)
● Celebrates diversity: in multiculturalism, the plurality
of religions, lifestyles, identities, and discourses
Postmodernism Challenges
● Religion
● (Non) sense of Absolute ‘Truth’
● Plurality of worldviews,
● Metanarratives; religion, science; only sensible to those who believe in it
● Lack of certainty; ambiguity
● Absurdity
● Illusions and delusions
● Deconstruction
● Multiple ontologies rather than universal meaning