Popular Culture by Carla Freccero

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Popular Culture by Carla Freccero

• Presenters
• Jennifer Santos Sarah Szeliga

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Carla Freccero
To study popular culture is to be politically
literate, to understand what issues are at stake
when political leaders and other condemn or
praise its representations.
This book is about the relationship between
CULTURAL ARTIFACTS and our social order and its
various subcultures in the US and their
cultural productions.
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Race and Class in America

• Music
• soundtracks
• rap
• rock
• pop
• Movies

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Film Soundtracks
The Bodyguard 1992

• Hollywood helping roles film
• very conservative politics around race the
  great and good white man saves the black woman
  from danger
• Single black woman with a child
• Houston is clearly the driving force in the
  musical production of the soundtrack
• gospel music - a black cultural tradition
• Consider the album cover - about launching
  Houstons acting career?

I Will Always Love You - I Have Nothing - Im
Every Woman - Run to You - Queen of the Night -
Jesus Loves Me
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Dead Man Walking 1996

• The director, Tim Robbins appropriates
  international multiculturalism into the
  soundtrack to avoid the local political issues at
  stake
• Political issues are the death penalty in the
  US and the dismissal of the Supreme Court that
  the majority of black men are given the death
  penalty
• The soundtrack features Pakistani singers and
  folk, rock and country singers
• The music of the film argues against the death
  penalty while the film confirms and consecrates
  the logic of the death penalty

Dead Man Walking, Bruce Springsteen - In Your
Mind, Johnny Cash - Woman on the Tier, Susan Vega
- Promises, Lyle Lovett - Face of Love, Nusrat
Fateh Ali Khan - Fall of Troy, Tom Waits, Long
Road , Eddie Vedder
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Rap

• Rap has come to signify the popular resistance
  of black youth in the USA
• Rap music as a form of resistance
• Rap is poetry
• Is responsible for bringing to light issues of
  racism, police violence, drug use, and sexism -
  putting it out there for public debate in a way
  that many politicians and policy makers have not
  been successful at doing
• Is politically resistive in that it emanates
  from urban black life and protest
• Ice-Ts Cop Killer
• 2 Live Crews Nasty as they Wanna Be - obscenity
  and sexism

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Rock

• Rock music is usually a male dominated
  homosocial space
• Rock is the music of the people
• In the 60s it came to stand for the
  counterculture revolution
• Masculine and white
• Interest in music is a way to be involved in
  culture

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Pop

• Pop holds a degraded space in music
• Does not feature artist musicians, the music
  is not considered original or creative it
  privileges the vocal over the musical and the
  artist is not thought to be an artist either but
  just ventriloquizing
• Pop is the domain of the feminine
• Not art, not serious, not politically resistive

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Movies
Do the Right Thing 1989

• Movie is a discourse for casual prejudice
• Prejudice for the group that is below you
• Deals with class and economic relation that
  results in tragedy
• Political Mission of the film it is a narrative
  of the resistance that develops between race
  groups and the situations that occur as a result

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Gender and Sexuality in Pop Culture

• Serial Killers
• Madonna
• The Queer Subculture

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Serial Killers
Serial Killers are a study in the psychopathic
perversion - usually a man with a sexual
dysfunction
The US has 5 of the worlds population and 75
of its serial killers

• Buffalo Bill is the serial killer in The Silence
  of the Lambs
• Dr. Lecter says that Buffalo Bill was not born,
  but made through years of child abuse
• Buffalo Bill dresses like a woman, wears makeup,
  hides his penis gay lifestyles?
• Film perpetuates the idea that if you are gay
  and a man you really want to be a woman
• Film links homosexuality, transsexuals, and
  female impersonation directly to killing

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Madonna The Postmodern Diva of Pop Culture

• She invokes a sex positive identity, desire,
  practice, and subjective agency with a view
  towards post-AIDS sensible sex practices
• In her videos she likes to place the female in
  the position of supreme control
• Justify My Love - is a fantasy about bodies and
  pleasures, shows that erotic need is not
  linked to genital sexuality, actual acts, and
  does not have to confine anyone to fixed
  identities or roles
• Like a Virgin - auto-eroticism, sensible sex
  and masturbating
• Like a Prayer - Integrates religion and sex

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• As a powerful and important white woman in this
  culture, Madonna was being represented as
  vicious, aggressive, cold, heartless, unfeminine,
  greedy, unnatural and denatured
• She has now turned to a Maternalism portrayal
• Motherly and religious to defend herself from
  some of the charges directed at her

And We All Know Who This Has Happened to Also...
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The Queer Subculture

• Represented through style clothes, practices,
  costumes, body markings, hairstyles, and ways of
  gathering in places
• Has come to be identified with the struggle to
  acquire civil rights - to be equal in the eyes
  of the law

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Technoculture

• 21st Century Tech Toys
• Technological Influence
• Alien Trilogy
• Alien - 1979
• Aliens - 1982
• Alien3 - 1992

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Tech Toys and Its Influences
We have a romance and disillusionment with
technological developments.

• Having Tech Toys is a sign of being in
• Tech is the defining mark of the late 20th
  century
• First World cultures are ridden with
  technology
• In the Age of Copy
• Students today have a whole new type of
  literacy, one that integrates a graphical
  interface which, easily lets you move through
  multiple texts and images.

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Alien Directed by Ridley Scott, 1979

• Film reads as a parable about the revenge of
  Mother Nature against mankinds audacious claim
  to conquer her through technological perfection -
  social commentary
• The ending celebrates the triumph of humanism
  over the alienness of nature, albeit after
  demonstrating technologys failure to do so
  through scientific means
• The humanism that triumphs is no longer the
  heroic technocrat but a woman
• Movie represents the oil crisis of 79 by its
  ship - it looks like an offshore oil rig
• Celebrates the second wave of the womans
  movement - feminists have taken up this movie as
  a progressive political representation
• Its the realization that the high tech land of
  the USA is ruining its resources
• The alien is seen as a revenge of nature the
  perfect killing machine that is not a machine,
  the perfect organism that can make even inorganic
  substances become part of itself
• Also a nightmare of reproduction - birth of an
  alien from the chest cavity of Cain, the weak,
  British, feminine-like character
• Ripley is portrayed as a feminine heroine

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AliensDirected by James Cameron, 1986

• This film retreats from social commentary and
  moves to the realm of the personal, the private,
  and the individual
• This is a story about a domestic quarrel between
  two women - two mothers
• Ripley has a single-minded rage agains the
  aliens and her desire to destroy them
• Ripley is private, personal and has selfish
  concern for her adopted daughter Newt
• Aliens is thus a movie about maternal jealousy
• Ripley goes after the aliens eggs and the alien
  goes after Newt
• Film invokes arguments for the colonization of
  America
• Racial politics of the film Vasquez dies
  invoking the theme of ultimate sacrifice as the
  mark of good people of color in the nation
• Alien can be seen as a welfare queen the bad
  (black) alien mother lays tons of eggs, creates
  teeming masses of baby aliens that will take over
  the world by devouring the rest of us, while the
  good white mother had just one adopted child

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Aliens3Directed by David Fincher, 1992

• Representation of the AIDS epidemic
• Reaches out to the gay spectator
• Ripley shaves her head, wears fatigues and boots
• Ripley shoots up
• Crew belongs to ACT UP a community of activists
• ACT UP elaborates the discourse of AIDS with its
  gay sympathies
• The mourning of the characters in the film speak
  to the mourning of gay men - survivors guilt
• Most people found this movie depressing - death
  was addressed as cruel, involuntary, and
  senseless AIDS

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Reviews of Popular Culture

• Freccero uses a traditional close-reading
  technique in her analysis of popular culture. By
  doing this, she shows how a methodology can weed
  out layered meanings of complex cultural
  artifacts.
• She also embraces the political aspirations of
  cultural studies, seeking a better world by
  deconstructing the past and envisioning
  alternative futures. Freccero does this by
  questioning societal assumptions about the
  relationship between nature and culture.
• Freccero sometimes essentializes and
  personalizes the alternative readings of the
  artifacts that she supports in sloppy ways.
• Oppositional Politics and Alternative Futures,
• George Beatty University of Iowa

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Reviews of Popular Culture

• Carla Freccero proposes good guiding questions
  aimed at understanding the relationship between
  rhetoric, representation, and politics.
• Frecceros questions situate out examination of
  media representations as an ideological inquiry.
• Ravers on the Web Resistance, Multidimensionality
  , and Writing (about) Youth Cultures,
• Jonathan Alexander University of Cincinnati

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Reviews of Popular Culture

• Frecceros book is an excellent overview of the
  field of cultural studies.
• Freccero adds a dynamic and often spirited
  approach to the texts she explores.
• One criticism is that the book does read at
  times as if it was transcribed directly from her
  lecture notes, and some readers may become
  frustrated because she doesnt always answer the
  questions she poses.
• Review of Popular Culture An Introduction
• Rosalind Sibielski Literature and Psychology

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Reviews of Popular Culture

• The books real strength is the way it so
  consistently keeps the rationality of cultural
  differences at the very center of its textual
  readings and analytical critiques
• Review of Popular Culture An Introduction
• Bethany Ogdon College English

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How This Book Relates to Our Class

• This book is a study of CULTURAL ARTIFACTS
• This book is a study of CULTURAL HEGEMONIES

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Cultural Artifacts
Like us, Freccero deconstructed certain artifacts
to ascertain its information infrastructures. By
doing this, she was able to read many systems
from the object and tell us what they meant and
say about our society. Freccero commented on the
social, political, and technological influence
these artifacts have made on the American society
in Popular Culture. The author mixes the
physicality and the inherent narrative structure
of each icon and gives the reader a good
understanding of its place in the world.
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Cultural Hegemonies
Freccero is adept at explaining the role of
hegemony and the link between knowledge
production and social control. The issues of
knowledge and power, multiculturalism, and how
knowledge establishes a particular moral order
are dominant themes within her work. Her
perspective is that knowledge may be power, but
popular culture is a currency. As such, it
must be understood as an important means of
transmitting knowledge, of both the other and
ourselves as the other. This knowledge
provides the possibility of managing, changing,
and even controlling relations between disparate
groups. Her point that binary oppositions
construct a logic of absolute difference that
produces the degradation of one term and the
elevation of another, clearly relates to how
structured knowledge systems operate, and how
images and meanings are manipulated to produce
certain privileged types of knowledge and common
sense.
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Our Comments...
We agree with a statement that was included on
the back jacket of the book, the beauty and
utility of Frecceros book lies in the way skips
the familiar dutiful descriptions to instead
perform the study of popular culture. Freccero
seems not to concern herself with whether or not
her opinion will be considered to be right or
wrong but with the important need to have and
share an opinion. In demonstrating the need to
study popular culture, she makes a valiant
attempt of demonstrating precisely how to just do
that. She takes an interesting array of cultural
objects (neglecting important issues such as
television and video games) and summarizes, what
she perceives to be their messages perfectly.
We also feel that her emphasis on the leftist
point of view to the exclusion of other
perspectives and her reliance on older artifacts
in need of updating are the serious flaws of this
work.
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Discussion Questions

• How do you feel about some of Frecceros
  arguments? Do you agree? What other cultural
  artifacts can you think of that would support her
  claims?
• Do you think her arguments are as valid today as
  they were 5 years ago? Has much progress been
  made?
• Can everything produced as popular media be
  considered a cultural artifact? Where is the
  limit? Is this the problem with political
  correctness?
• Why do people live and die by cultural
  hegemonies? Why are they so important to
  society, and what do they say about us as a
  people?
• Is Technoculture going to destroy us? Do you
  think we will get to a point where technology
  ruins our culture and society? Or do you think
  it will bring us closer together i.e. the
  Internet?

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Works Cited

• Alexander, J. (2003). Some Critical Backgrounds
  Retrieved October 20, 2004 from Ravers on the
  Web Resistance, Multidimensionality, and Writing
  (about) Youth Cultures Websitehttp//english.ttu.
  edu/kairos/7.3/coverweb/RaveWrite/index.htm
• Beatty, G. (2001). Oppositional Politics and
  Alternative Futures. Retrieved October 20, 2004,
  from Science Fiction Studies Web Site
  http//www.depauw.edu/sfs/birs/bir83b.htm
• Freccero, C. (1999). Popular Culture An
  Introduction. New York New York University
  Press.
• Ogdon, B. (2001). Review of Popular Culture An
  Introduction, by Carla Freccero, College English
  63, no.4 500-516.
• Sibielski, R. (2001). Review of Popular Culture
  An Introduction, by Carla Freccero, Literature
  and Psychology 47, no.3 56.