Slides from Week 3

1. POP CULTURE
IN EVERYDAY
LIFE
WEEK 3

2. SIGN SIGNIFIED

3. DISCOURSE:
our way of personally
understanding things is
informed by a huge host
of things: our gender,
national ID, ethnicity, age,
our family, etc.

4. DISCOURSE:
Meanings are
limited and fixed by
prevailing social
relations.

5. SIGN SIGNIFIED
VEGAN PARENTS
VEGETARIAN PARENTS
RELIGIOUS BELIEFS SURROUNDING MEAT
AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENT ENFORCING VEGANISM
DISCOURSE:

6. RACE & ETHNICITY
SOCIOLOGY 101 (the study of the development,
structure, and functioning of human society; predates
and informs cultural studies):
•RACE is defined as ‘socially-constructed divisions of
people based on certain physical characteristics’ It is
not biology. Your biology does not dictate your
behaviour or any other emotional or intellectual facet
of your being.
•Differs from ETHNICITY which is a ‘shared cultural
heritage’.

7. ‘Socially-constructed’ =
• Majority VS Minority status
• Minority status often accompanied by a legacy of
mistreatment (education, housing, poverty, colonialism)
RACISM becomes a denial of this.
RACISM BECOMES A DENIAL OR
EVASION OF THIS MISTREATMENT

8. SO HOW IS THIS HAPPENING?
HOW IS RACE SOCIALLY
CONSTRUCTED?
IDEOLOGY IS A GOOD
PLACE TO START

9. IDEOLOGY
• Beliefs and Values
• Stuart Hall (1985) defines an ideology as a
framework “of thinking and calculation about the
world - the ‘ideas’ which people use to figure out
how the social world works, what their place is in it
and what they ought to do.” Works in COMMON
SENSE.
• It’s sneaky.
• Ideology brings a clear political dimension to the
study of popular culture but…

10. IDEOLOGY
Popular culture is ultimately political. “That is,
[it] offer[s] competing ideological significations
of the way the world is or should be. Popular
culture is thus, as Hall (2009a) claims, a site
where ‘collective social understandings are
created’: a terrain on which ‘the politics of
signification’ are played out in attempts to win
people to particular ways of seeing the world
(122-23).”
(Source: Your reading for this week)

11. IDEOLOGY
• Popular culture can make certain things
seem natural, normal, or inevitable, what we
call normalisation.
• Pop culture can suggest that being a part of
the white majority (in a country) is the
benchmark for normal and desirable.
• This effectively makes everyone else the
‘other’ people. There’s exclusion here. It’s
divisive. It can be subtle.
• It often relates to who gets to produce
popular culture.

15. Ideology, Popular Culture and Race
•‘Orientalism' a book by Edward Said, a Palestinian
Professor of English, History and Comparative
Literature
•He was active as an intellectual and writer during
the 1970s, 80s and 90s
•His concept of Orientalism was highly controversial
but also very influential, shaping various disciplines
including history, anthropology and cultural and
media studies

16. Ideology, Popular Culture and Race
Professor Sut Jhally (from this week’s video):
• “Orientalism tries to answer the question of why when we
think of the Middle-East for example we have a preconceived
notion of what kind of people live there - what they believe,
how they act - even though we may never have been there or
even met anyone from there”
• “More generally, Orientalism asks: how do we come to
understand people, strangers, who look different from us by
virtue of the colour of their skin”

17. Ideology, Popular Culture and Race
“The central argument of Orientalism is that the way we acquire
this knowledge is not innocent or objective but the end result of a
process that reflects certain interests. That is, it is highly
motivated”
“Specifically, Said argues that the way the West - Europe and the
US - looks at the countries and peoples of the middle-east is
through a lens that distorts the actual reality of those places and
those people. He calls that lens through which we view that part of
the world Orientalism, a framework that we use to understand the
unfamiliar and the strange, to make the peoples of the middle-east
appear different and threatening”

18. Ideology, Popular Culture and Race
• Orientalism creates ideological fictions
• Authors, artists, thinkers and commentators from the West
invent, or believe in, certain stories, myths and images about
people from Asia and the Middle-East
• These stories, myths and images create distinctions between the
West and the East
• These distinctions reflect the interests of the West to maintain
power and control over the Orient