Famst 70 study guide - Prof. Siegel PDF

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Prof. Siegel...

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Essentialism vs. anti-essentialism and the question of identity ● Essentialism = something has an intrinsic essence ○ For example: ‘Female’ exists whether or not other categories exist; there is an intrinsic “essence” to it ○ Determines psychological, sociological social structures ● Anti essentialist/constructionist = everything is defined relationally ○ With the same example: ‘Female’ only can exist because it is defined against ‘male,’ for example ○ Incomplete without an ‘other’ to define against Discursive Practices of Blackness: Assimilationist (invisibility) vs. pluralist (separate but equal) vs. multiculturalist (diversity) ● Herman Gray article ● 3 discursive practices & contemporary TV representations of blackness ● Assimilationist: invisible, “colorblindness,” erasing racial differences ○ Ex: Nat King Cole ■ Downplaying black identity to fit into white society → erase blackness ■ Nat King Cole viewed as appealing because he was not threatening, forceful, or belligerent ■ White dominance ■ Any issues exist on an individual level, not a structural/historical level (ex: this one person is racist and is bad, but that does not represent anything besides an individual problem) ■ Black characters accepted if they step back from black culture ■ Whiteness goes “unnamed”/taken for granted: the only thing signified is “blackness” ■ Assumed: white middle class ■ Whites not responsible for perpetuating white hegemony ○ Ex: Julia TV show ■ Depict “assimilable black people” ■ Attributes that comfort white sensibilities ■ Not truly depicting black people and their experiences ■ Images are one dimensional ■ One underlying idea is that TV should be escapism; people do not want to see the problems they see on the news also on the programs they watch to get away from these problems; want to be amused ● Pluralist: “separate but equal,” difference is there but in a separate sphere; not interacting in an integrated world ○ Ex: Sitcom of a Black Family, largely removed from actuality/truth and/or white society (Family Matters, Fresh Prince of Bel air, Amos n Andy) ■ Black world and white world → no interaction, do their own thing ■ Not politicized in any way ■ Benign difference (to each their own)

Limited difference within blackness → one monolithic black culture One key discursive model that groups = the family ● “Happy ending” ● Family as social network: remains intact and therefore the larger issues are not so bad! ● Lets white audience off the hook ■ Ex: liken slavery to white immigration (to equate/relate the two cultures) Multiculturalism/Diversity: hope, complex representation, individual identities, intermingling of cultures and identities ■ Not just one dimensional ■ Acknowledge differences within the black community ■ Show intermingling ■ Recognize and critique the experience of otherness → acknowledge subordination, social issues, oppression, racism, etc. ■ Ex: East Side West Side sitcom ● Undercut the myth of American progress ● Cancelled after one season ■ Cosby Show ■ Frank’s Place ■ ■

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Bell Hooks doesn't like the idea that the solution being offered for problems is violence, reclaiming of love, redemption through self understanding Bell Hooks believes this isn't a good solution because the structures are still in place repositioning of black female images does not truly change conventional sexist constructions of black female identity narrative of hurt and betrayal ends with caring images of family which are not adequate ways to reconcile and heal trauma

Roseanne as unruly woman ● Challenged conventional codes of femininity, social class, dominant and stereotypical betrayals of family in fantasy ● Excess in body shape, voice, speech loudness, obnoxious, intentional, joker about family structure, unruly, disobedient, powerful, uncontrolled, undisciplined, going against the grain, roughness of character, female desire, calls attention to ugliness ● ●

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Rowe article Plays with and challenges conventions of femininity (body shape, voice, speech, joking about family structure, uncontrolled, against the grain) ○ Emphasis on Roseanne’s desire which is not typical Questions specific social restraints of the sitcom ‘genre’ Qualities of excess, fatness, looseness, which are typically frowned upon (violate conventions of femininity) Femininity intended to be how little room women take up: Roseanne does not adhere to

this In the episode “Sweet Dreams” she challenges ideologies of “true womanhood” and “the perfect wife and mother” by being a fat woman who is also sexual, a sloppy housewife who’s a good mother, a “loose” woman who is also tidy, who hates matrimony but loves her husband, who hates the ideology of “true womanhood” yet considers herself a domestic goddess. In this episode Roseanne’s dream is linked with female desire and the episode clearly defines the unruly woman as opposed to the self-sacrificing wife and mother. Modern Family and the limits of television liberalism ● Doty article ● Modern Family: express liberal sexual politics as well as expose its representational limits ○ Cameron and Mitchell similar to their heterosexual counterparts (monogamous, live together, start a family, one “stay at home” one “working” (mom/dad typically), even if they diverged from this convention they readhered (recuperation) ○ When people wanted to see them kiss → explained as “Mitchell having an aversion to PDA ○ Video w/ Steve Levitan (creator) talking about how people like gay but also no one doesn’t like NOT gay (Emmy segment about straight-ifying Cam and Mitchell in the show, put out to be funny/joking) ● Showing liberalism only goes so far Active audience ● Hall article ● As consumers of media, we have opportunities to make media and interrupt the hegemonic flow ● Dominant media flow of sounds and images to which we are all subjective ● We can resist and make our own messages ● An audience is not mindless when consuming media ● We interact with the text, we are not passive ● Things will be understood in a certain context/light because of someone’s background/social position ● Against the hypodermic needle model ● Ex = polysemy

Polysemy ● Hall article (Encoding/Decoding) ● Does not mean anything goes → text is structured/organized ● Any text polysemic → how one comes to the text informs meaning ● Interactive between text and reader (active audience) ● Hall does NOT mean that texts are so polysemic it is a free for all; there is a certain structure in our culture so some meaning can come out of it

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○ All meanings determined to an extent However, we do interact with the text and bring something to it Multiple meanings dependent on the “system of meaning” it is filtered through Dependent on the ideological position of the audience member and what type of reading practice they adopt

Hypodermic-needle theory of media effects ● How the message is sent, direct contact with human to produce effects, media is a drug and takes possession of people ● Metaphor: direct contact to produce effect; drug taking possession of you ○ Text → person; direct line in ○ Excludes our ability to think critically ■ No agency in this model ○ Context removed ○ Suggests passive audiences; able to be highly influenced by direct messages in media ○ Developed by Harold Lasswell after studying the effects of Nazi Propaganda ● Concept that we are powerless to messages in the media, and that they highly influence public opinion and public actions ● There is no counter-flow or interpretation of content Intentional Fallacy ● The idea that the meaning of the text = the intention of the author ● The fallacy of basing an assessment of a work on the author's intention rather than on one's response to the actual work ● In actuality, the author’s intention might not be super relevant: what matters is how it is received and interacted with and the implications it has once it is consumed Encoding/decoding ● Hall ● Process of communication as operation of multiple codes working in tandem to create a chain of discourse, not a loop of message going sender→ receiver (this model does not account for systems of meaning that interact with the message) ● Encoding creates the initial message through production the means of production (media is produced by technical infrastructure and operations of broadcast) ● Decoding refers to the interactions with this message → circulation, repetition, active participation ● For anything to have an effect, must be recognized as meaningful and decoded ● Degree to which the decoder is able to relate to the encoded message is determined by the “relations of equivalence” (degree to which audience and author relate to and are able to understand each other) ○ Determined by factors of class, race, education, upbringing, etc ● “Misunderstandings” of media text = lack of equivalence between an author and their

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audience Framework of Knowledge → Encoding (Meaning Structure 1) → Program as “meaningful discourse” → Decoding (Meaning Structure 2) → Framework of Knowledge

Dominant Hegemonic reading vs. negotiated reading vs. oppositional reading ● Hall article again ● Dominant Hegemonic: most readers most of the time identify with the hegemonic version, receive/understand text as the dominant/preferred reading ○ Dominant ideological assumptions consistent w/ reading practices ○ Text taken unquestioningly, as “natural state of affairs” ■ Taken unproblematically, buys into ideologies of the text ○ Often times not directly recognized because it resembles the dominant structures of meaning and power within the society ○ Often a sort of “professional code” or code of production for how this is expressed by media authors ● Negotiated: haggle with the text; put it in dialogue to decode dominant message ○ Generally goes w/ dominant ideology but reads in a way that reflects social categories ■ Age, sex, class, race, etc ○ Largely buy in, but something of my position/identity just doesn’t work ○ Recognizes the legitimacy of hegemonic structures, but operates around exceptions to the rule ■ Often based around localized or personal understandings ■ Ex: Lower wages for people that aren’t me ○ This kind of reading is unstable, still negotiated by dominant hegemonic but just less so ● Oppositional ○ Reading practices/how we read = shaped by social positions and experiences ○ Always subject to those identity categories and social position ○ Meaning-making: reader’s positions in constant negotiation w/ meanings inscribed ○ Opens things up Culture Jamming and counterhegemony ● Dery article ● Counterhegemony: forces in society that resist or work against dominant meanings and ideologies ○ Subvert/undercut order ○ Unsettle structure/social symbolic order ● Culture jamming: form of counterhegemony, mode of resistance to the norms and conventions of mass culture, exposes and opposes medias underlying structure and ideological message ○ Attempts to show our unthinking assumptions as subjects of media culture

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“Jamming” = radio broadcast origins, borrowed term, ■ Jam or interrupt signal → dominant culture Not complete revolution; insert a pause ■ Create space between media and audience ■ Temporal: pause to give time to reflect Ex: Adbusters, bought 30 second slot of black screen/dead air during a major broadcast ■ Culture jamming in its purest form: no content; separates you through space and time from media ■ Reminds that you are sitting in front of a TV → cause confusion → make us think and question Agenda is structural: no particular meaning besides getting us to reflect on the structure Term coined by Negativland Objectives: ■ Criticize media ■ Get media to talk back to itself, or to talk back to the media ■ NEVER used for product promotion (but advertisers have co-opted) ■ Demystify media images ■ Raise awareness

Negativland and the U2 Controversy ● Documentary screening: Sonic Outlaws; also in RIP! A Remix Manifesto ● Negativland = college band ● Coined term “culture jamming” ● There was a lawsuit because they named their album “U2” with Negativland on the cover really small, and had a U2 fighter plane on the sleeve ○ They used the argument it was clearly named U2 about the plane, but U2 sued them ○ The album contained samples of Casey Kasem w/ musical backing (song "The Letter U And The Numeral 2") ○ Parodies of U2 songs ● Example of culture jamming: to subvert the messages of more traditional media outlets ● They argued fair use but U2 was mad because they were worried people would buy their album thinking it was a U2 album ● “U2's label Island Records quickly sued Negativland, claiming that placing the word "U2" on the cover violated trademark law, as did the song itself. Island Records also contended that the single was an attempt to deliberately confuse U2 fans, awaiting the impending release of Achtung Baby, into purchasing what they believed was a new U2 album called Negativland.” (from Wikipedia) Read/write culture vs. Read only culture ● Lawrence Lessig, two types of culture ○ Read only: celebrates author, centralized, hierarchical, no back talk

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Read write: flat, oral history, celebrate amateur, enables lateral borrowings (therefore not hierarchical), enables talking back ■ Creating and recreating culture (borrowing, appropriation, reinvention) Always existed simultaneously Copyright laws today overwhelmingly on the side of read only ○ Celebrate author and their importance; entitled to profit from his or her (original) work ○ Encourage authorial creativity, privilege, monopoly right ○ Limited use and no back talk → protect the original work

Remix and Fair Use ● Remix = the concept that culture is always borrowing, appropriating, building on the past ○ RIP! A Remix Manifesto defines the 4 tenents of the “Manifesto” as: ■ Culture always builds on the past ■ The past always tries to control the future ■ Our future is becoming less free ■ To build free societies you must limit the control of the past ○ Exploring creativity vs. copyright; remixing and the re-use of existing culture to create new culture ○ The nature of remix culture (Lawrence Lessig) is that all new culture is in some way a remix of old culture ● Fair Use = exemption from copyright laws (assuming it is not already in the public domain) ○ Satire, education ○ The purpose and character of the use; the nature of the copyright ○ The effect of use on the potential market for/of the value of the copyrighted work ■ Ex: U2 sueing Negativland because they were concerned U2 fans would buy Negativland album; detract from U2 profits ○ Courts often look favorably if they can find transformation from the original to the contested work ○ Not black and white: no inherent protection ○ Generally satire and comedy win in court if contested ○ Ex: Dumb Starbucks as Fair Use? ■ Using the word “dumb” = parody ■ Shut down not for copyright but for health ■ However they could have (possibly) had a case against them because they may have taken business away from Starbucks Fandom as affective empowerment ● Grossberg ● Fandom can be understood as a kind of empowerment ○ Identity empowerment ○ Group bonding/building ○ Affect → posture against/towards the world ● Affective community as positive good

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Labor; affective investment Identity relations Mattering map: our investments in fandom put map over the world: determine what does/doesn’t matter ■ Define different forms ■ Matter as markers of identities ■ Affect constructs and hierarchizes difference ■ Creates a sense of importance ■ Creating and materializing certain things that have meaning ■ Creates matter and codes meaning → identity ■ Excessive mattering that makes meaning Matter of communal activity not pathology (we have a tendency to pathologize fans) Socially constructed domain of cultural effects ■ Allow meaning to be made ■ Guide what we feel

Fan as obsessed loner vs fan as frenzied member of crowd ● Jenson article ● Obsessed loner ○ Psychological compensation for what they are lacking ○ In place of social interaction ○ Feminized ■ Feminine as all-consuming ■ “Nurturing destruction” ○ Disconnect from society, reality ● Frenzied fan ○ Masses vulnerable to persuasion ○ Faceless crowd ○ Jenson sets it up as male/masculine ○ Ex: Sports fans ● Jenson critiques the critiques of fans ○ We pathologize them ○ It allows us to make other fans extreme and minimize self ○ Defines “our” normalcy ● Ex: Misery ○ “Pathological fan” ○ Alone, secluded = obsessed loner ○ Social dysfunction ○ Steps outside norms (ex: pig) ○ Alienates her and reinforces “us” ○ Marked difference vs. normalcy ● Decline of community ● Power of mass media

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We’ve become more isolated

Globalization as hybridization ● Appadurai article ○ Cultural Globalization ■ Media flows of information, signs, symbols, meanings, images; reactions to those flows ■ Hybridization: ● Interplay between local and global ● Exchange not imposition ● Complex process of adaptation, selective appropriation/uptake, inter-weaving, incorporation ● The hermeneutic process: importance of interpretation and role of active reader ○ Globalization/homogenization model forgets encoding-decoding, the hermeneutic process, active reader ○ We don’t just take the media uncritically: multiple flows (NOT hypodermic needle) ■ Not only preferred/dominant readings; oppositional and negotiated too ○ Unpredictability when cultures encounter each other ○ Ex: Afghan Star: selective appropriation of American TV → how that gets worked out in Afghani society; interweave w/ local cultures ■ Illustrates the complexities of Western cultures in non-Western cultures/context and its reuptake Cultural Imperialism ● Appadurai ● Globalization often denotes homogenization ○ “Imperialism,” imposition of ideals; force, coercion, violence ○ Colonization @ level of culture ○ But culture offers a more subtle approach than outright violence ○ Western nations control mass media = control symbolic and cultural world ○ Many countries have quotas/regulations on media culture → only certain amounts of American media allowed (to prevent saturation) ○ Denotes a one-way flow from powerful countries → less powerful countries ■ Similar idea to “hypodermic needle” model in which there is no reciprocal or counter-flow ○ Local cultures losing historical/valuable at the expense of imported media ○ Ex: Kids being taught English through pop culture (hip hop, rap) → Western spread through media ● Tomlinson: ○ media imperialism associated w/ economic dominance ○ Imposition of media at the center of culture ○ Mediated nature of contemporary western culture and what is imposed on other

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cultures Mediation of cultural experience not just set of media images ■ Relation between text and audience He gives example of TV show Dallas as commonly thought of as embodying cultural imperialism ■ He refutes this ■ Assumption that American TV has an impact no matter what ■ Many refuse ideology and mass culture, label as elitist/paternalist, and consume it without guilt

Mediascape and global cultural flows ● Appadurai ● World as map of different topographies: scapes or flows ○ Ethnoscope: landscape of people ○ Technoscope: of technology ○ Financescape: of money, investment ○ Mediascape: images/stories/ideas ○ Ideoscape: politics ● Mediascapes = distribution, electronic capabilities to disseminate & images of the world created by these media ○ Images involve variations → mode, audiences, interests of those who control ○ Provide images, narratives, and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout world ○ World of commodities and news/politics mixed ● Cultural flows: cultural exchange, trades ○ Flows go every way, almost always hybridized ○ Problem w/ this model is that it assumed cultures were ever impervious ■ Not new model; it has existed for a while ■ Intensification and acceleration of long withstanding processes ● Interactions have become so normalized so we can talk about globalization differently than before, largely bc of media and info technologies ○ With how media is spread today (fast moving), flows...