Class, Gender and Race in North American Media Studies

Jean Ait Belkhir, Race, Gender & Class Journal
Class, Gender and Race in North American Media Studies

Author(s): Gail Dines
Source: Race, Gender & Class, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Fall 1995), pp. 97-112
Published by: Jean Ait Belkhir, Race, Gender & Class Journal
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41675349
Accessed: 24-05-2016 15:23 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41675349?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Jean Ait Belkhir, Race, Gender & Class Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Race, Gender & Class
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Tue, 24 May 2016 15:23:23 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Race, Gender & Class: Vol. 3, No. 1, Fall 1995 (97- 112)
Class , Gender and Race

in North American Media Studies
Gail Dines, Sociology

Wheelock College in Boston
Writing in the late 1970s, James Carey (1977:409), criticized North

American social science in general and media studies in particular for their
unwillingness to take seriously the contemporary European Marxist scholarship that
was breathing new life into media studies in Britain. Referring particularly to the work
of Stuart Hall and the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at
Birmingham University, Carey wrote that "this work as yet has had little influence on
American social science, which remains rather blissfully unaware of European work."
Today, no sudi argument could be made, since North American media studies has, in
the last decade, undergone a major shift in paradigms away from the social scientific
funetionalist/positivist approach toward the more cultural studies approach that
examines how meaning is produced through complex interaction between the
(potentially polysémie) text and the (multi-identified/fractured) audience. One of the
most important consequences of this paradigm shift has been a foregrounding of the
role media play in either strengthening or subverting systems of gender and race
inequality. A major reason for this is that cultural studies, with its commitment to the
linking of theory with activism and social change, has attracted those scholars working
within women's studies and Afica- American studies. This is not surprising, as these
areas have, as a founding principle, the interconnectedness of theory, lived experience
and social change (Baker 1993; Hill Collins 1990).
This shift, however, is not without its critics. Cultural studies has now gained
that level of acceptance and status in the North American academy that scholars are
beginning to reassess (and in many cases critique) the direction of the field in light of
From the Editor: Gender , Race and Class in Media : A Text-Reader. Edited by Gail Dines & Jean M.
Humez. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995.. Gail Dines is an Associate Editor of Race, Gender
& Class.
98
current theory and research (see especially, Budd, Entman, and Steinman 1990;
Garnham 1995; Murdock 1995; and O'Connor 1989). This article, rather than
providing a comprehensive map of the field, is particularly concerned with looking at
how North American scholars modified the theories and methodologies developed by
the CCCS group to explore the role media play in constructing ideologies and
identities. In its journey across the ocean, cultural studies underwent many changes,
some for the better and some for the worse. For many of the critics of North American
cultural studies, the most debilitating change was what they see as the severing of its
intellectual ties to Marxism; while I will argue that there is some truth to this, I will
also suggest that these critics have ignored the enormous contributions that white
feminists and scholars of color have made to the development of theory and research
in North American cultural studies.
British Cultural Studies:

Problems of Definition and Conceptualization
One of the first tasks is to try to map out what is distinct about the cultural
studies project as conceived by Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the CCCS. This is no
easy task since cultural studies is, to quote Raymond Williams, a "baggy monster" and
it has, over the years, with the explosion in theory and method, become even more
"baggy." This point is reiterated by the editors of a recent anthology on cultural studies
who argue that cultural studies "has neither a constantly identifiable subject matter nor
theoretical positions that are characteristically its own" (Blundell, Shepherd, and
Taylor 1993:3). Now while it is apparent that academics should not play the role of
"theory police" in the development of what is still a maturing field, I would agree with
Stuart Hall when he argues that "although cultural studies as a project is open ended
... it can't be just any old thing which chooses to march under a particular banner"
(Hall 1992:278). Rather, there need to be some agreed upon criteria, however loose,
of what constitutes cultural studies since this field has a history, a set of founding
moments and most importantly, an activist agenda which involves "a practice which
always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some
difference, in which it would have some effect" (Hall 1992:286).
In a recent attempt to locate the theoretical foundations of British cultural

studies, Hall ( 1 992) foregrounds the role Marxist theory played in the formulation of
this emerging field. One of the main reasons for this is that most of the founders of
British cultural studies had at some time either identified themselves as Marxists or
did battle with Marx as a precursor to developing their own theories. Moreover,
European sociology - the discipline base of many of the scholars attracted to cultural
studies - has tended to locate itself within a wider Marxist problematic, and thus any
attempt in the late 1970s to develop an approach to the study of culture involved
"working within shouting distance of Marxism, working on Marxism, working against
Marxism, working with it, working to try to develop Marxism" (Hall 1992:279).
The link between cultural studies and Marxism, however strained and
conflictual, is a defining feature of British cultural studies and is instrumental in
providing cultural studies with a "sense of critical political involvement - in particular,
a desire to understand and change structures of dominance in industrial capitalist
societies" (Blundell, Shepard, and Taylor 1993:3). Although contemporary cultural
studies has now been termed post-Marxist (McRobbie, 1 994), and in some cases, non-
Marxist in origin (see Grossberg 1 993), I would argue that any attempt to explore the
ways in which cultural studies helped to shift the field of mass media has to
incorporate an analysis of the early theoretical debates between those theorists who
insisted on a traditional Marxist analysis and those who called for a re-reading, and in
some cases, a reformulation of those Marxist concepts which had informed the
sociological analysis of mass media in Britain.
Wrestling with Marx
While Hall and his colleagues did battle with much of Marxist theory, one
of the most conflictual and divisive of the debates focused on Marx's model of the base
and superstructure. Here Marx was concerned with formulating the relationship
between the economic forces of society and intellectual and cultural life. In a well
known passage, Marx wrote:
in the social production of their existence, men (sic) inevitably enter into
definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of
production .... The totality of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal
and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the
general process of social, political and intellectual life (Marx 1975:425).
This passage has caused (and continues to cause) enormous debate within
British cultural studies. The main point of disagreement hinges on the degree to which
the cultural sphere of human life (the superstructure) is conditioned by the economic
structure (base) rather than being seen as a relatively autonomous sphere with its own
dynamics and processes. For those scholars working in the sociology of media, this
debate had enormous implications for the research strategy adopted and the focus of
investigation. Those sociologists who tended to adopt a more traditional Marxist
position (often termed political economists), concentrated their efforts on exploring
the ownership and control of media institutions, while the critics of this position called
100
for an analysis of both the text and the ways in which audience members read and
make sense of the text. In Britain, during the mid-to-late seventies, two of the most
influential media sociologists were Graham Murdock and Peter Golding (1977 &
1979). Their work, located within political economy, helped to shape British media
studies and in turn, brought to the forefront questions of political economy which the
Birmingham school had to grapple with as it was developing its theory of culture. As
justification for their position, Murdock and Golding cite the following quotation from
Marx:
The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has
control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that
thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental
production are subject to it ... In so far, therefore, as they rule as a class and
determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they ...
among other things... regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of
their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch (Marx and Engels,
quoted in Murdock and Golding 1 977 : 1 5).
Using this passage as their starting point, Murdock and Golding argue that
a Marxist analysis of media must build on the following assumptions:
1 . Control over "the production and distribution of ideas" is concentrated in

the hands of the capitalist owners of the means of production.
2. As a result of this control their views and accounts of the world receive
instant publicity and come to dominate the thinking of subordinate groups.
3. This ideological domination plays a key role in maintaining class

inequalities.
For Hall and his colleagues, the traditional political economy was too
simplistic, reductionist and deterministic. Their major criticism of Murdock and
Golding in particular and political economy in general, was that they based their
arguments on the assumptions that the ideology of the media owners is
unproblematically transmitted through the media and that audiences unproblematically
decode the intended message and internalize the ideology embedded in the text. What
was being debated here was the degree to which the economic structure of society
determined cultural life; in contrast to the Murdock and Golding view, many scholars
were suggesting that Marx's model robbed people of their agency. Debates within left
circles, particularly those resulting from the publication of Williams's The Long
Revolution ( 1 965), and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class
(1963), had seriously called into question the notion of a dominant ideology "which
comes from outside, descends cm passive subjects, blankets their ordinary discursive
understanding of the world, and simply superimposes its own highly homogenous
perspectives on people and renders them into cultural dupes" (Hall 1989:51). The
CCS group, in their attempt to grant autonomy to the cultural sphere, argued that the
project of cultural studies was to develop an approach to culture which saw it, not as
something imposed from above, but rather as:
... inter- woven with all social practices; and those practices, in turn, as a
common form of human activity; sensuous human praxis, the activity through
which men and women make history. It is opposed to the base-superstructure
way of formulating the relationship between ideal and material forces.... It
defines 'culture' as both the means and values which arise amongst
distinctive social groups and classes, on the basis of their given historical
conditions and relationships, through which they "handle" and respond to the
conditions of existence: and as the lived traditions and practices through
which those "understandings' are expressed and in which they are embodied
(Hall 1980:63).
Thus, for Hall and his colleagues, one of the major projects was to re-
formulate the base-superstructure model while not loosing sight of the fact that cultural
and intellectual life is located within a wider capitalist structure. This involved
reclaiming (from the bourgeois construction of "culture" as something only the rich
have), working class culture as an authentic form of lived experience, by focusing on
"everyday life" and the "structures and practices within which and through which
modem society constructs and circulates meanings and values" (Brantlinger 1 990:37).
Moreover, the long-term goal was not the publication of books cm* papers, but rather
to change structures of dominance that are intrinsic to capitalism (note that capitalism
is considered the only system worth changing).
Mudi has been written about the ways in which the CCCS group developed
their theories of culture by drawing on the work of scholars such as Raymond
Williams, Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci, all of whom offered differing
reconceptualizations of the base-superstructure model. Given the complexities of these
arguments, I will just briefly touch on how each of these theorists rearticulated the
relationship between the economic and cultural spheres of life. Raymond Williams,
one of the most influential left scholars in Britain, argued that we must take a closer
look at the concept of determination because Marx "uses the notion of determination
and conditioning not in the narrow sense but in a much looser sense of setting limits,
exerting pressure and closing off options" (Williams 1 973:4). Williams arrives at this
refinement of the concept of determinism by examining the great linguistic and
theoretical complexity of the term. Here he points to the different possible meanings
102
and implications that the word 'determines' has in most European languages. The
meaning derived from theology is the one most often applied to Marx, that is
determination which "...totally predicts or prefigures, indeed totally controls a
subsequent activity." (Williams 1973:4). For Williams, however, Marx attempted to
get away from this external conception by using the term determinism to account for
social practice which did not preclude the possibility of human ideas and actions that
are not totally conditioned by economic forces.
Althusser^ concept of 'relative autonomy1 actually goes further than Williams

by asserting that at certain points in time the elements of the superstructure may not
always be entirely determined by the base but may be historically effective themselves.
Althusser arrives at this position through a reformulation of the base/superstructure
model that replaces the concept of a determining base with a concept of a social
formation composed of three levels, the economic, the political and the ideological.
Now while for Althusser the economy is determinant 'in the last instance,' the
superstructure has its own relative autonomy and specific effectivity. Moreover,
because each level is determined partially by its own history and its own internal logic,
each must be understood in its own terms.
For Althusser (1969), the dominant ideology is produced and reproduced

through the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) which include the church, the
school, the family, the media and the arts. Many critics have argued that ultimately
Althusser presents an image of capitalism as a coherent social system which lacks
conflict and struggle (see Brantlinger, 1 990), and that it was Gramsci who developed
a more complex model that allowed for resistance and rebellion. Gramsci's concept
of hegemony is among one of the most important developments in cultural studies and
continues to inform much of the work carried out today. For Gramsci (1971), in
capitalist society, ideological control should be seen not in terms of force but of
persuasion. Hegemony is a continuous struggle to dominate through consent rather
than coercion. One way that this hegemony is secured is by making the relations of
domination appear natural, fixed and unchanging, so that it becomes part of the taken
for granted assumptions that constitute "common sense." Consent however, is never
secured once and for all, but rather has continually to be re-established in a constant
struggle between contesting groups. Very importantly, within hegemonic theory,
dominant ideology is constantly up against forces of resistance.
The importance of these reformulations is that they laid the theoretical

groundwork for piying the base away from the superstructure. For British media
sociology, this meant a re-thinking of the whole field of study since media was no
longer simply a direct reflection of the base. Rather than just researching patterns of
media ownership, those scholars coming from the critical tradition now turned theii
attention to one of two areas. The first was a conceptualizaton of the text as a site o
ideological production (rather than reproduction) where meaning is produced through
a complex system of codes and conventions. The text, no longer the bearer of
transparent meaning, became the focus of much research activity with sociologists
adopting and modifying concepts developed within semiotics and literary criticism.
Semiotics as a field was attracting the interest of both Marxist and non-
Marxist European media scholars in the 1 970s since it provided an alternative method
to the quantitative, positivist orientated approach of content analysis which dominated
much of the research on media content. Insisting on the importance of the sign,
semioticians are concerned with the systems and processes of signification and
representation. This type of analysis was particularly useful for those sociologists
interested in exploring how texts are complex ideological constructs whose meaning
is polysémie.
Coupled with this, was the re-discovery of the audience as active participants
in the production of meaning rather than passive recipients of the dominant ideology.
While the earlier Uses and Gratifications theory had posited an active audience, it had
developed within a psychological framework as evidenced by its reliance on
intervening mental states and processes to explain how an individual actively selects
media (Elliot 1979). The sociological approach to active audiences, however, replaced
mental states with cultural affiliations and, by using and developing Gramsci's theory
of hegemony, researchers opened up the possibility that audience members may not
just simply accept the media's version of events but rather may make readings which
are at odds with the meanings encoded within the text. It is this latter point that has
served as a stimulus for much of the center's work on audiences and texts (Morley
1980).
Even as British cultural studies was developing a body of knowledge, it was

criticized by various scholars coming from different disciplines and political positions.
Lany Grossberg (1993:22), in his review of the field, argues that "Cultural studies has
always been a contested terrain, and the contestation takes place both within and
outside the tradition itself." In terms of the former, the major criticisms within British
cultural studies came from white feminists and scholars of color associated with the
CCCS who critiqued what they saw as an overemphasis on class to the exclusion of
gender and racial inequality (see especially The Empire Strikes Back: Race and
Racism in 70s Britain, 1982; Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women's Subordination,
1978). One of the most vocal groups from outside the tradition was the political
economists who saw an over-emphasis on the text as "jettisoning the very elements
that gives Marxist sociology its distinctive explanatory power." (Murdock and Golding
1 977 : 1 7). What is interesting about these two criticisms for this discussion is that they
speak to the two major trends within current North American cultural studies. The first
is a moving away from class as the major category of material and cultural existence
104
toward a privileging of gender and race, and secondly, a tendency in both theory and
research to ignore the economic condition of cultural production.
Importing Cultural Studies: From Class to Gender and Race
Any attempt to examine the ways in which British cultural studies affected
North American media studies has to necessarily include multiple factors such as the
marginalization of Marxism in the academy, the positivist trend in North American
sociology in general and sociology of media in particular, the success of the women's
movement and women's studies in foregrounding gender as a material and cultural
category of existence, the unflinching commitments of women's studies and Black
studies to social change, and the lack of any sustained analysis of class both in and out
of the academy.
Without doubt, no theoretical approach, school or paradigm can be

transported from one country to another and remain intact. Local scholars necessarily
bring to bear their own theoretical and methodological histories, concerns and political
approaches, and in so doing both mold and are molded by the immigrant approach.
The scholars who are most attracted to cultural studies in the U.S. tend to be located
in humanities, particularly departments of English that have a rich history of textual
analysis. This stands in sharp contrast to Britain where cultural studies tended to
attract sociologists. One of the main reasons for this difference is that sociology in this
country, unlike its British counterpart, has been dominated by positivism and would
thus seem an unlikely host to this "baggy" monster with its commitment to qualitative
analysis, critical theory and social change.
This in part explains why cultural studies has tended to be marginalized in

North American sociology of media. Unlike Britain, critical theory has never enjoyed
mainstream academic status in this sub-field (see the Journal of Communication ,
Summer 1983, for a fuller discussion on the marginalization of critical theory in media
studies) which has instead tended to be fixated on discovering the conditions under
which persuasion occurs, or attempting to find the precise psychological and social
conditions under which attitudes can be either changed or reinforced. Carey calls this
the transmission or transportation view of communication (Carey 1977:412) where
"the archetypal case of communication ... is persuasion, attitude change, behavior
modification, socialization through the transmission of information, influence or
conditioning" (ibid).
There are a number of reasons why American media research went the route
of positivist research, including the generally positivist nature of American sociology
and, importantly, the needs of the growing media and advertising industries. The
contention is that the commercially dominated media required sophisticated research
into the audience's patterns of media consumption. Thus, many of the major
researchers such as Lazarsfeld and Lasswell were employed by both the universities
and the major radio stations and television networks. The effect that this had on theory
and research techniques is discussed extensively by a number of researchers, most
notably Rowland (1 983), who argues that the major focus of research was to develop
statistical techniques which could measure audience use so that the media industry
could justify its rates to advertising clients.
The inhospitable nature of American sociology has meant that cultural

studies in this country has largely been shaped by those scholars coming from a
humanities background whose primary research interest is with the analysis of texts
and not with economic theorizing and research located within a political economy
approach. Moreover, according to both O'Connor (1986) and Brantlinger (1990),
academics in this country, unlike their European counterparts, tend to be disconnected
from political and social movements and thus much of cultural studies takes place in
the "relative absence of a left intellectual tradition" (O'Connor 1989:407). This has
tended to produce research that celebrates audience "resistance", "subversive" readings
and "polysémie" meanings while ignoring the ways in which the capitalist system
frames, limits and shapes the kind of cultural products that "make available the
repertoires of meaning through which the world, including the world of commodities,
is understood and acted on" (Murdock 1989:436). The result is very often a
sophisticated reading of the text, decontextualized fremi its conditions of production.
Political economists argue that the culturalists' underemphasis on production

and overemphasis on consumption has rendered invisible the reality of class within a
capitalist structure. While, at the level of consumption, identity can be fluid, negotiated
and in some cases re-invented, it is much harder to "play" with one's class position
within a capitalist structure. As Murdock argues.
For many recent practitioners of cultural studies .... Consumption is the arena
par excellence for the construction and display of identity. It is the realm of
freedom, flexibility and choice to set against the routines and regimentations
of work. When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. But what about
the weak, the casualties, the dispossessed (1995:93).
Moreover, this celebration of consumption completely ignores the conditions under

which these products were made. Given the increasing level of exploitation at the level
of production (particularly of Third World people in the wake of the NAFTA
agreement), it would seem especially timely to explore the relations of production
rather than just focusing on consumption.
106
There is no doubt that class has become the poor relation in North American
media studies and the political economists have brought to the forefront the problems
associated with a purely text-based analysis. However, most of the political economists
who critique cultural studies are located within the Marxist tradition, which tends to
foreground class and to neglect other systems of oppression. Thus, while they critique
American cultural studies for ignoring class, they make little or no mention of the role
that white feminists and African- American scholars have played in the development
of theory and practice in cultural studies (for an example of this type of analysis, see
Garnham 1995, and Murdock 1995). If cultural studies as a project is concerned with
the "lived experience" of subordinate groups and the way in which meaning and values
circulate through structures and practices, then North American cultural studies has
contributed greatly to our understanding of how white women and people of color can,
at different times, capitulate to, work with, or resist the dominant ideologies which are
embedded in a range of texts.
One of the major contributions of feminist media studies has been a

foregrounding of "women's texts" such as soaps, romance novels, magazines, and
sitcoms (see, for example, Ang 1982; Brown 1990; Modleski 1982; Rabine 1985;
Radway 1984). Women's genres, once relegated to the trash can of popular culture,
are now valid areas of study with many of the scholars applying the tools of literary
criticism to those texts consumed by the majority of women. This needs to be seen as
a great step forward, since prior to cultural studies many feminist scholars tended to
adopt a quantitative content analysis method consistent with the project of positivism
(see especially the collection edited by Tuchman 1978). The problem with this type
of analysis is that it provided statistics of content (such as how many times a woman
was portrayed as a housewife) without actual analysis of how the codes and convention
of the text work to produce meaning. The implicit assumption is that the frequency of
occurrence of a certain given category is more important than the context of that
occurrence in the structure of the cm-going narrative. The feminist scholars, coming
from disciplines such as literature, film theory and history, have highlighted the
importance erf qualitative research in deconstructing the text as a cultural product. This
method erf research has become the preferred method in cultural studies in general and
has added mudi to our understanding of those texts such as romance novels and soaps
which were one dismissed as trash.
The current feminist scholarship provides a more nuanced understanding of .

the complex ways in which texts produce a "feminine1* subject position and offers a
range erf pleasures to the reader. The notion that women gain pleasure from consuming
media has helped to move the analysis away from seeing women as cultural dupes
towards an understanding of how women use popular culture to negotiate the
contradictions and strains of being "feminine" in patriarchy. Feminist scholars,
however, tend to approach the concept of pleasure with caution. Tania Modleski
__
(1 982) for example, in her analysis of soap operas, argues that the soap opera speaks
to women's location in patriarchy in that it "allays real anxieties, satisfies real needs
and desire, even while it may distort them. The fantasy of community is not only a real
desire ... it is a salutary one." However, she then goes on to argue that it is not enough
to document this but rather as feminists "we have a responsibility to devise ways of
meeting these needs that are more creative, honest, and interesting than the ones mass
culture has supplied" (109). This linking of theory with social change is at the root not
only of feminism but also cultural studies as it was conceived in Britain.
Without doubt, one of the most important works in this area was Janice
Radway's Reading the Romance (1984) which revealed the range of reasons why,
women read romance novels and the need to cany out ethnographic work on audiences
rather than relying solely on the academic reading of texts. While Janice Radway was
careful to locate her analysis of resistance within a context of women's economic and
cultural lives und er patriarchal capitalism, there is a tendency in the feminist literature
to confuse resistant readings with actual social change and political activity, assuming
that resistance to the television text "spills over into direct thinking about and behavior
in politics" (Budd, Entman, and Steinmen 1 990: 1 78). This is most clearly illustrated
in the work on Madonna, which often sounds like a promotional piece for her latest
commodity. The tendency in much of the work on Madonna is to celebrates her as a
text that subverts patriarchal ideology through her refusal to be constructed as an
object of the male gaze and her constantly shifting image which defies the concept of
a stable definition of what constitutes "femininity" (see for example Schwichtenberg
1993). Although it may indeed be correct that teenage girls read Madonna as
transgressing the patriarchy, it cannot be assumed that this translates into a
renegotiation of the power teenage girls have in dating relationships, the family,
educational institutions and ultimately the economy. Indeed, Bordo suggests, in her
critique of much of the academic work on Madonna, that the celebration of Madonna
is rooted in "the effacement of the material praxis of people's lives" (1993:289).
Bordo's criticisms can also be levelled against the more recent collections on
pornography from so-called pro- sex feminists, where the text is celebrated as a
potential site of women's resistance to, or negotiation of, patriarchal sexuality (this is
especially the case in two recent edited collections, Assiter 1993; Gibson & Gibson
1993). What is almost always ignored in these discussions is an analysis of both the
politics of production and the socio-economic context of the women whose bodies are
used as raw material in this industry (women overwhelmingly drawn from the lower
socio-economic classes and from Third World countries devastated by Western
economic imperialism). What is also missing is any sustained analysis of how men
"read" these representations and appropriate the meanings to legitimize their
economic, sexual and physical domination over women's bodies.
108
Moreover, the gender analysis in feminist media studies mirrors much of the
gender analysis in women's studies in general, that is, it is primarily concerned with
white women and fails to make explicit its racial bias. Those scholars that do
problematize race, although working within a cultural studies framework, tend to be
written out of the cultural studies story, while white scholars such as John Fiske, Larry
Grossberg, Janice Radway, and Tania Modleski are given center stage as the major
thinkers in the development of the field. For example, two recent texts on cultural
studies (Barker and Beezer 1 992; Blundell, Shepard and T aylor 1 993), which attempt
to set out the history and current trends within the field, ignore the work of such
influential scholars of color as bell hooks, Jacqueline Bobo, Herman Grey, Michael
Dyson, and Korbene Mercer, all of whom explore the connection between the
symbolic and material levels of race as a social construct located in concrete practices.
The work of bell hooks (1 988, 1 992, 1 994) has been extremely influential
in providing a re-reading of many cultural texts that are often considered to have little
to do with "race." Whether deconstructing Madonna or critiquing the so called "victim
feminism", Hooks has used the powerful concepts of cultural studies to uncover how
racial politics is embedded in a range of texts and practices which render whiteness
invisible as a social construct and place of privilege. The cultural studies that hooks
practices is closely linked to the original project of the CCCS in that she uncovers and
reclaims African- American culture as against racist constructs that define African-
Americans as "culturally diasdvantaged", "uncivilized" and "violent." Moreover,
Hooks, in keeping with the founding aims of Black studies and women's studies, found
in cultural studies "a site where I could freely transgress boundaries, it was a location
that enabled students to enter passionately a pedagogical process firmly rooted in
education for critical consciousness .. .where they could unite knowledge learned in
the classrooms with life outside" (Hooks 1994:3).
This desire to use cultural studies as a tool for empowerment and social
change is characteristic of many African- American cultural studies scholars and is
reflected in their work, which never loses sight of the connections between the
economic base and the intellectual and cultural superstructure. One excellent example
of this is the article by James Ledbetter (1994:9) on "Wiggers", those "white folks who
think they're black, or wish they were." In his article, Ledbetter is looking at those
white suburban kids who are dressing "hip-hop" and buying many of the records
produced by rap artists such as "Ice Cube" and "Public Enemy". Now, one possible
reading is to celebrate the instability of identity being demonstrated by these kids
"playing" with racial identity and thus showing that race is performative and socially
constructed. Ledbetter, however, being grounded in the reality of material inequality,
sees little to celebrate when a white "cavalierly adopts the black mantle without having
to experience life-long racism, restricted economic opportunity, or any of the thousand
insults that characterize black American life" (ibid). Indeed, Ledbetter argues that if
identity politics are going to translate into real social change, then the identification
has to extend into "taking concrete steps to end America's political and cultural
apartheid," as well as "screaming out that you accept the criticism of the American
system offered by the likes of Ice Cube and Public Enemy, and you want the society
to do something more than buy and sell their records" ( 1 994: 1 1 ).
The analysis of rap forwarded by critics such as Dyson ( 1 993), Perry ( 1 995),
Rose ( 1 994) and Zook ( 1 995), makes it apparent that the text can not be understood
outside of its conditions of production and consumption. They argue that Rap, as a
conversation, art form and critique of racist America, grew out of the economic and
cultural marginalization of young African- American women and men. Moreover, Rap
is received, read, negotiated and appropriated within a desire to change this
marginalization, which suggests that culture is not merely reflective of the base. Rather
than just focusing on the misogyny and violence encoded in some rap (and many of
these scholars enter into a dialogue with the rappers regarding their use of sexism)
critics such as Dyson, who link the material with the cultural, call for an analysis of rap
which sees it as a "form of profound musical, cultural, and social creativity [which]
expresses the desire of young black people to reclaim their history, reactivate forms
of black radicalism, and contest the powers of despair and economic depression that
presently besiege the black community" ( 1 993 : 1 5).
One common thread running through African-American media cultural

studies is an analysis that locates texts within the structures and logics of North
American capitalism by looking at the ways in which ownership of media has helped
to shape the range of cultural products that are available. Guerrero (1993), in a
detailed analysis of the American film industry, is concerned with cultural production
both within and outside the main institutions of capitalism and shows how the drive
for profits limits the production of both white and black financed movies. His analysis
of those films popular with white audiences (for example, Birth of a Nation and Gone
With the Wind) make it apparent that the text is not produced or consumed outside of
the dominant ideologies of the time.
The kind of work carried out by those scholars working in women's studies
and African- American studies makes clear that it is incorrect to assume that cultural
studies has lost its critical edge. Capitalism as a system which shapes and organizes
the flow of discourses and images is often explored in these studies but only as a
starting point for a nuanced analysis of how these texts produce and reproduce
meanings in a society characterized by multiple systems of oppression. Cultural
studies in this country certainly needs to remind itself of its Marxist roots by
developing a more sophisticated analysis of class and the processes involved within
capitalist production. However, it is equally true that a cultural studies which
privileges class is severely limited in its ability to explore the role that media play in
110
legitimizing inequality in all its forms.
References
Althusser, L. 1969. For Marx. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Ang, I. 1982. Watching Dallas : Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination.
New York: Methuen
Assiter, A. 1993. Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim
Feminism. London: Pluto Press
Baker, H. 1993. Black Studies, Rap , and the Academy. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Blundell, V. et al., (eds.) 1993. Relocating Cultural Studies. London: Routledge
Bordo, S. 1993. "Material Girl": The Effacements of Postmodern Culture. In
Schwichtenberg, C. (ed.) The Madonna Connection: Representational
Politics , Subcultural Identities and Cultural Theory. Boulder, CO:
Westview.
Brown, M. 1990. Television and Women's Culture : The Politics of the Popular :
London: Sage
Budd, M., R. Entman and C. Steinman 1990. The Affirmative Character of
U.S. Cultural Studies. Critical Studies in Mass Communication , Vol. 7.
Butler, M and W. Paisley. 1979. Women and the Mass Media : Sourcebook for
Research and Action. New York: Human Sciences Press.
Carey, J. 1977. Mass Communication Research and Cultural Studies: an American
View. In J. Curran et al. (eds) Mass Communication and Society. London:
Edward Arnold.
Dyson, M. 1993. Reflecting Black: African American Cultural Criticism.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Elliot, P. 1987. "Uses and Gratifications: A Critique and a Sociological Alternative".
Leicester: University of Leicester Centre for Mass Communications
Research.
Fiske, J. 1987. Television Culture. London: Methuen.
Fiske, J. 1988. Critical Response: Meaningful Moments. Critical Studies in
Mass Communication, 5:246-251.
Fiske, J. 1989. British Cultural Studies and Television. In R. Allen (ed) Channels of
Discourse. London: Routledge.
Garnham, N. 1995. Political Economy and Cultural Studies: Reconciliation or
Divorce. Critical Studies in Mass Communication , March, 63-71
Gibson, P. C., & Gibson, R. (eds) (1989). Dirty Looks : Women , Pornography
and Power. London: British Film Institute
Gitlin, T. 1978. Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm. Theory and Society,
6:205-253.
Gail Dines
Gramsci, A 1971. Selection from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence &
Wishart.
Gray, H. 1991. Recodings: Possibilities and Limitations in Commercial Television
Representations of African-American Culture. Quarterly Review of Film and
Video 13:1 17-130
Gray, H. 1989. Television, Black Americans and the American Dream. Critical
Studies in Mass Communication 6: 376-385.
Gray, Herman. 1986. Television and the New Black Man: Black Male Images
in Prime-Time Situation Comedy. Media, Culture and Society 8:223-42.
Grossberg, L. 1993. "The Formations of Cultural Studies." In V. Blundell, J.
Shepard and I. Taylor (eds.) Relocating Cultural Studies. London:
Routledge
Guerrero, Ed. 1993. The Black Image in Protective Custody: Hollywood's
Biracial Buddy Films of the Eighties. Black American Cinema . Ed. Manthia
Diawara. New York: Routledge, 1993. 237-246
Hall, S. 1977. Culture, the Media and the ideological Effect. In Curran et al.
(eds) Mass Communication and Society. London: Edward Arnold.
Hall, S 1980a. Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms. Media, Culture and Society ,
2:47-72.
Hall, S. 1980b. Encoding/Decoding, in S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, and P.
Willis (eds) Culture , Media Language. London: Hutchinson.
Hall, S. 1982. The Rediscovery of Ideology: Return of the Repressed in Media
Studies. In Gurevitch, M. et al. (eds) Culture , Society and the Media.
London: Methuen.
Hall, S. 1992. Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies. In Grossberg et al., Hall,
S. 1980c. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge
Hill Collins, P. 1990. Black Feminist Thought : Knowledge , Consciousness and
the Politics of Empowerment. Cambridge: Unwin Hyman.
hooks, b. 1994. OutLaw Culture: Resisting Representations. NY: Routledge.
hooks, b. 1992. Black Looks. Boston: South End Press.
hooks, b. 1988. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist , Thinking Black. Boston:
South End Press.
Ledbetter, J. 1994. Imitation of Life. Vibe, Fall
Marx, K. 1975. Early Writings. London: Harmondsworth.
Marx, K and F. Engels. 1970. The German Ideology. London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
McRobbie, A. 1994. PostModernism and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge
McRobbie, A. 1980. Settling Accounts with Sub-Cultures : A Feminist Critique ,
Screen Education, 34:37-49.
Modleski, T. 1982. Loving With a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies For
Women. London: Methuen.
Morley, D. 1980. The Nationwide Audience : Structure and Decoding. London:
1 12
British Film Institute

Murdock, G. 1995. Across the Great Divide: Cultural Analysis and the Condition of
Democracy. Critical Studies in Mass Communication , March, 89-94.
Murdock, G. 1989. "Critical Inquiry and Audience Activity". Rethinking
Communication , 2:226-248.
Murdock, G. and P. Golding. 1977. "Capitalism, Communication and Class
Relations." In J. Curran, M. Gurevitch and J. Woollacott (eds) Mass
Communication and Society . London: Edward Arnold.
Murdock, G and P. Golding. 1979. "Ideology and the Mass Media: the Question of
Determination." In M. Barrett et al. (eds) Ideology and Cultural Production.
London: Croom Helm
O'Connor, A 1989. "The Problem of American Cultural Studies." Critical
Studies in Mass Communication , 6:401-409
Perry, I. 1995. It's My Thang and I'll Swing It the Way That I Feel! Sexuality
and Blade Women Rappers. In Dines and Humez, Gender, Race and Class
in Media . Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Rabine, L. 1985. Reading the Romantic Heroine . Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press
Radway, J. 1984. Reading the Romance: Women , Patriarchy and Popular
Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
Rose, T. 1994. Black Noise: Rap music and Black Culture in Contemporary
America. Hanover, NH: University of New England Press
Rowland, W. 1983. The Politics of TV Violence. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Schwichtenberg, C. (ed.) 1993. The Madonna Connection: Representational
Politics , Subcultural Identities and Cultural Theory. Boulder, CO:
Westview.
Thompson, EP.1968. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Tuchman, G. et al. (eds) 1978. Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the
Mass Media. New York: Oxford University Press.
Williams, R. 1958. Culture and Society 1 780-1 950. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Williams, R. 1965. The Long Revolution. Middlesex: Penguin.
Williams, R. 1973. Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory. New
Left Review, No. 82.
Williams, R. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zook, Kristal Brent. 1992. "Reconstructions of Nationalist Thought in Black
Music and Culture." In Rockin the Boat: Mass Movements and Mass
Culture. Ed. Reebee Garofalo. Boston: South End Press, 255-266.

Class, Gender and Race in North American Media Studies

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Class, Gender and Race in North American Media Studies

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Jean Ait Belkhir, Race, Gender & Class Journal

Class, Gender and Race in North American Media Studies

Class , Gender and Race

Gail Dines, Sociology

Writing in the late 1970s, James Carey (1977:409), criticized North

British Cultural Studies:

In a recent attempt to locate the theoretical foundations of British cultural

Wrestling with Marx

1 . Control over "the production and distribution of ideas" is concentrated in

3. This ideological domination plays a key role in maintaining class

Althusser^ concept of 'relative autonomy1 actually goes further than Williams

For Althusser (1969), the dominant ideology is produced and reproduced

The importance of these reformulations is that they laid the theoretical

Even as British cultural studies was developing a body of knowledge, it was

Importing Cultural Studies: From Class to Gender and Race

Without doubt, no theoretical approach, school or paradigm can be

This in part explains why cultural studies has tended to be marginalized in

The inhospitable nature of American sociology has meant that cultural

Political economists argue that the culturalists' underemphasis on production

Moreover, this celebration of consumption completely ignores the conditions under

One of the major contributions of feminist media studies has been a

The current feminist scholarship provides a more nuanced understanding of .

One common thread running through African-American media cultural

legitimizing inequality in all its forms.

Althusser, L. 1969. For Marx. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

British Film Institute

You might also like