Gender and Popular Culture
Gender
and
Popular Culture
polity
Copyright © Katie Milestone and Anneke Meyer 2012
The right of Katie Milestone and Anneke Meyer to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2012 by Polity Press
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Contents
Acknowledgements
1 | Introduction |
Part I: Production, Gender And Popular Culture
2 | Gender and Cultural Work: Post-War to the Late 1970s |
3 | Gender and Cultural Work: Punk and Beyond |
Part II: Representation, Gender And Popular Culture
4 | Representing Women |
5 | Representing Men |
Part III: Consumption, Gender And Popular Culture
6 | Consuming Popular Culture: The Role of Gender |
7 | Gender, Popular Culture and Space/Place |
8 | Conclusion: Prisoners of Gender? |
References
Index
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge colleagues (past and present) from the Department of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University, for their encouragement and support. Immense gratitude in particular to those involved in work on popular culture and/or gender for providing a stimulating, welcoming and good-humoured academic environment.
From Katie to Mike, Esme, Freddie and Miles – thanks for putting up with my sporadic withdrawal from family life whilst writing this book and for your love and support. Thanks also to my mum, sisters and in-laws for the same. Thanks to former colleagues from the Manchester Institute for Popular Culture for motivation and good times. I’d like to dedicate my contribution to this book to my late father, Chris Milestone.
From Annie – a big thank you to all my family and friends for all the support and good times together. A few people deserve a special mention. Tony for getting me through the ups and downs of life and always remaining positive – I couldn’t have done it on my own. Hannah for simply being the best friend anyone could wish for. Meine Mutter Carmen, auf die ich mich immer verlassen kann.
We would like to thank Andrea Drugan from Polity for her great patience and support in this project and to the reviewers for their helpful comments. Thanks also to Lauren Mulholland for dealing with the nitty gritty and to Justin Dyer for his excellent copy-editing.
1
Introduction
Gender and popular culture are connected in inextricable, pervasive and complex ways. Popular culture is an amorphous concept which encompasses an enormous range of cultural texts and practices, from cinema films to newspaper articles, from designing computer games to playing music. Much of popular culture is media culture; popular culture includes mass media such as radio, the press, film and television, as well as new media such as the internet or email. In this book we concern ourselves with the ways in which gender, i.e. masculinity and femininity, connects to popular culture. We do not aim to provide a general overview of the field of gender in popular culture, recounting and reviewing all the existing academic literature; this would be virtually impossible in the space of one book and only produce simplistic generalizations. Instead, we aim to offer in-depth and analytical insights into how gender relates to the three cultural processes of production, consumption and representation by analysing and illustrating each process through exemplary case studies. Some of these studies constitute primary research conducted by the authors, while others are drawn from wider academic literature.
We aim to show how gender is produced, represented and consumed in popular culture, and how the three processes interact to construct what we commonly identify as gender identities. We do this by looking at a range of literature, case studies and examples drawn from modern Western culture. The first part of the book is devoted to the process of production. In this part we look at who produces popular culture, including visible producers such as artists and performers and less visible, behind-the-scenes ones such as producers and managers. We also investigate patterns of gender regarding employment and careers, and examine how this links to genres and types of popular culture, and attempt to explain them by looking at a range of factors such as gender discourses, individual aspiration and economic structures.
The second part of the book focuses on the process of representation. Popular-cultural products, or texts, are symbolic because they carry meanings. These meanings are produced through linguistic and visual representations. We concern ourselves with the ways in which women and men are represented in popular culture, drawing out similarities and differences, and examine how normative notions of femininity and masculinity are constructed and sustained. Moreover, we investigate the implications of representations and gender norms in terms of status, power relations and gender (in)equality.
The third part of the book deals with the process of consumption. Consumption is a gendered practice. There are, for example, differences between men’s and women’s consumption patterns and different subject positions set up for men and women in popular-cultural texts. We investigate the reasons behind these gendered patterns, looking at a range of factors from space to gender norms. Moreover, we examine how popular culture can be used by individuals to construct gender identities by performing masculinity and femininity. The book is clearly structured into these three parts and each part consists of two distinct chapters. For the remainder of this first chapter we outline in detail the key concepts which are used throughout the book.
Popular Culture and the Media
Popular culture is a contested concept. It is vague and diffuse and can therefore be filled with many different meanings. In order to investigate these meanings, we will start by looking at the more general concept of culture.
Raymond Williams (1983) put forward three meanings of the word ‘culture’, arguing that it can refer to (a) intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, (b) a particular way of life of a group or historical period, or (c) texts and practices which produce meanings. The concept of popular culture is of course different from that of culture. Williams’ first definition refers to culture with a capital C, i.e. those aspects of culture commonly called high culture, for example literature or opera. We usually do not associate popular culture with this definition. According to John Storey (1993), the notion of popular culture mobilizes Williams’ second and third meanings. On the one hand, popular culture refers to the cultural practices or lived culture that people engage in, for example going on holiday or religious festivals. And on the other hand, popular culture also refers to cultural texts which are symbolic and whose main function is the production of meaning, for example a newspaper article, a television programme or a pop song. The word ‘text’ has a wider meaning in the discipline of cultural studies than it has in everyday life: it refers not only to written or spoken words but to any aspect of culture whose predominant purpose it is to signify, i.e. to produce meanings. The terminology reveals the linguistic-humanist roots of the discipline of cultural studies and its concern with textual analysis. In contemporary culture most meanings are produced through language and images, which are our most pervasive communicative systems; but the word ‘text’ also includes deeply symbolic practices such as getting married or having some tattoos done. At this point it becomes obvious that Williams’ second and third meanings of culture intersect and overlap – cultural practices are both lived culture and cultural texts. This is inevitable; most cultural practices are habitual, in the sense of being part of a way of life, and symbolic, in the sense of signifying certain meanings. Indeed these two aspects are often inextricably linked. In this book we use the term ‘cultural text’ in its wider, academic sense to include culture which signifies through language, images and (lived) practices. So we concern ourselves, for example, with newspaper articles, television images and the practices of people who work in the industries that produce popular culture. At its simplest, popular culture consists of a wide range of cultural texts.
The concept of popular culture has a quantitative dimension (Storey 1993). The word ‘popular’ suggests that it is liked and/or practised by many people. And indeed many aspects of culture which we would commonly class as popular culture are widely appreciated and consumed, such as pop music or television. However, the connections are not always straightforward. There are certain aspects of culture which we would commonly class as ‘high’ culture but which are still popular in the sense of being liked or practised by many people. We could think here of certain performers of classical music such as Pavarotti. Conversely, certain aspects of popular culture, for example niche television channels, may not have wide audiences at all. Popular and high culture also often mix, for example when classical literature is turned into television serials which are watched by millions of viewers. Is this high or popular culture? While popular culture has a quantitative dimension, this alone is not necessary or sufficient to define it. The other factor to emerge as important here is that popular culture in all its definitions is compared, explicitly or implicitly, to some ‘other’ culture. Most commonly this other culture is so-called ‘high’ culture, which is usually taken to include serious and classical forms of culture such as works of old literature, paintings, poetry or classical music. The juxtaposition of popular and high culture is a normative one in that high culture is seen as superior (Strinati 2004). High culture is deemed intrinsically worthy, serious, quality art, while popular culture is judged superficial, simplistic and driven by profits rather than skill or quality. Often these judgements are linked to the commercialization of culture and the creation of a culture industry. Popular culture is seen as the epitome of commercialization, a mass culture which only arose with capitalism and is produced by big businesses for the purpose of profit. Popular culture is considered to be of intrinsically low artistic quality because the pursuit of profits necessitates meeting the lowest common denominator. In contrast, high culture is associated with a bygone golden age free of commercialization, where art thrived for art’s sake. Contemporary high culture is seen as true art relatively untouched by profit logic. The juxtaposition of high and popular culture is flawed in various ways. Firstly, this categorization is elitist and fails to recognize that the standards by which the quality of culture is measured are not universal or neutral but themselves a product of culture (Eagleton 2000). Secondly, in contemporary Western culture the economic system of capitalism shapes the production of all forms of culture and art – there is no space totally free of commerce.
The media are central to popular culture in many ways. The media are symbolic institutions because their products signify. Media texts construct meanings through the use of language and images. Whether we think of a pop song, a television drama or a newspaper column, all these texts construct certain meanings, for example conveying a particular message or creating a narrative. Much of what we think of as popular culture is media culture: television, computer games, pop music, film, and so on. The mass media, notably radio, film, television and newspapers, have been central to making culture available to the masses, hence the association of popular culture with mass culture (Strinati 2004). Much of this book is concerned with the mass media, but we also discuss new media. The term ‘new media’ refers to media such as the internet, email, digital radio and television, podcasts and video podcasts, blogs, wikis and websites, MP3 players and iPods, to name but a few. The new media can be defined as information and communication technologies (ICTs) which have evolved since the mid-1990s and deliver content to audiences (Breen 2007). In contrast to the mass media, new media blur the lines between producers and consumers and allow users much more flexibility. The advent of the new media has intensified the connection between media and popular culture. New and additional forms of popular culture have been created, for example websites, interaction through social networking sites or the growth of niche television channels. Moreover, already existing forms of mass culture are now also accessible through an increasing number of new media formats. For example, music can be downloaded through the internet, books are available in electronic versions, newspapers have online websites which allow you to read current editions and sift through archives of past editions. Popular culture is increasingly mediated. There are of course aspects of popular culture which are not media culture. Everyday practices which have cultural meanings, whether we call them cultural texts or lived experience, are not necessarily linked to the media. Celebrating a wedding or getting a tattoo done are cultural practices but not media practices. However, these examples illustrate that while popular culture and the media are not identical, they are increasingly intertwined. No wedding is complete without an enormous number of photographs and often a video recording too. Individuals’ ideas and tastes regarding tattoos are to some extent shaped by media coverage of tattoos.
In this book we use the term ‘popular culture’ to refer to a range of cultural texts which signify meaning through words, images or practices. Reflecting the mediatization of contemporary culture, all the case studies we use, from newspapers to video games and pop music, are media culture. There have been long-standing debates around the political positioning and ideological effects of popular culture. Some commentators, such as John Fiske (1989a) or Paul Willis (1990), see it as potentially radical and subversive because it gives power to the masses and consumers and undermines elites. However, others, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1993), have identified popular culture as necessarily conservative, working in the interests of those in power and helping to maintain the status quo by pacifying the masses and justifying capitalism. Following Gramsci’s work, Stuart Hall (1982) and others have conceptualized popular culture as a site of political contestation where sets of ideas, such as ideologies and discourses, are struggled over. In the process, dominant ideologies and powerful interests can be challenged and resisted, adapted and reproduced. This conceptualization marks popular culture as fundamentally political and allows us to analyse particular aspects in terms of their resistance to or reproduction of dominant gender norms and ideologies. This is particularly important when studying a phenomenon like gender, which is a deeply political, contentious and complex subject.
Production, Representation and Consumption
Production
Production is a fundamental, but often overlooked, element of the sphere of popular culture. Theorists have dedicated a good deal of research into looking at how culture is represented and consumed, and a large portion of this research has analysed cultural representation and consumption from a gender perspective. However, apart from the occasional ethnographies of cultural industries (e.g. Nixon 2003; Powdermaker 1951) which emerge every now and then, it is only in the last decade that a substantial body of work on cultural production has started to flourish. A lot of this work began with the arrival of new cultural and media industries connected with new media. Technological and cultural shifts led to new forms of working and new avenues of cultural production. Initially, in terms of gender, there was some optimism that these new industries might be welcoming to women. However, as we discuss later in this book, there are still significant issues of gender and power affecting who stakes a claim in the frontline of cultural production.
In the context of this book we are using the notion of cultural production in terms of the process of making media and culture. We look at the groups and individuals who make popular-cultural texts such as films, computer games and adverts, for example. Often these people have job titles that explicitly refer to their production roles – such as film producers or record producers. A theatre director might say ‘I’m working on a production of…’.
Arguably the production of culture is very different to other forms of production. Culture is not made on a production line (although Adorno argues that there is a ‘production line’ ethos to cultural products in capitalist societies). Generally it is widely held that cultural and artistic production is connected with the realms of the symbolic, identity and aesthetics.
In this book we are interested in taking a close look at who produces popular culture in terms of gender. We examine the extent to which the production of popular culture is male-dominated and whether this is becoming less so as time (and attitudes to gender equality) progresses.
Closely linked to issues of production are issues of ownership and control. Who owns the newspapers, the film companies, the commercial television channels and the internet? Do the apparatuses of media and cultural production continue to be owned and controlled by men?
Representation
Representation as a process of communication means to depict or describe something or someone (Webb 2009). In the media, language (both written and spoken) and images are the key symbolic systems through which representations are made. In the process of representation, language and images stand in for something or someone and thereby render it present (Webb 2009). Representation is so important because it is an active process of creating meanings: for example, the words we choose to describe a group of people or the images we use to depict an event, i.e. the ways in which we represent them, shape the meanings of these people and events (Hall 1997a). At the time of writing this book, the G20 summit took place in London to produce an international agreement on how to solve the current financial crisis. This summit attracted large and diverse groups of protesters campaigning for the installation of a new world order, rather than ‘more of the same’. The media variously described these protesters as ‘anarchists’, ‘anti-capitalists’ or ‘climate-change campaigners’, and they showed images of peaceful street marches as well as the violent destruction of a branch of Royal Bank of Scotland. The choice of words and images obviously shapes the meanings of the protests as peaceful or violent, as legitimate or illegitimate, as grounded in good reasons (e.g. ‘climate-change campaigners’) or simply a desire to cause chaos and destruction (e.g. ‘anarchists’).
Meaning is produced through representation across different cultural sites; the media are of particular importance in late modernity, but others include art, customs and habits (Hall 1997b). In contrast to art, the mass media maintain that their material accurately represents reality, showing and telling things as they really are to their audiences (Webb 2009). Among the mass media, factual media such as newspapers or factual genres such as television news, investigative programmes or documentaries have a claim to truthfulness and objectivity. This arguably gives them particular persuasive and ideological power. Both print and broadcast media represent through images and language. Language is the most fundamental and privileged system of representation, but visual representations also possess distinct strengths, such as the ability to communicate instantaneously (Hall 1997b).
Gender is one of the key social structures in contemporary culture and marked by power struggles and inequalities. Gender hierarchies and inequalities are maintained, among other factors, by meanings and belief systems, and these are in turn generated through representation. Representations are constructed through language, images and social practices, and possess a material as well as symbolic dimension. In this book our analyses tend to focus on the symbolic aspect of representation but continually make links to other areas of gender(ed) practice such as the law or social policy.
Consumption
In the discipline of sociology the term ‘consumption’ refers to the process of purchasing and using (up) a commodity. Commodities are products which can be sold and bought in the marketplace, and popular culture produces a wide range of them. But there is a difference between, say, commodities such as a washing machine and a film. The difference is that the latter is a symbolic text containing meanings. The mass media and popular culture are therefore producers of commodities and their meanings; they generate certain meaningful representations and messages and communicate them to an audience. Hence, consumers are also audiences who consume these meanings as they listen, view or read the media. In this instance consumption is not limited to using (up) a product but involves consumers in the active role of making sense of what they listen to, view or read. This is why in the discipline of cultural studies, consumption is understood as a process of making sense of cultural texts.
Much academic theorizing and research on consumption has revolved around the notion of media audiences. Different theoretical models have been developed which conceptualize how audiences respond to meanings produced by the media. While early, simplistic models such as the direct-effects theory suggest that audiences simply believe whatever the media tell them, soaking up meanings like a sponge, the more sophisticated theories, such as Stuart Hall’s (1980) encoding/decoding model, allow audiences some degree of activity and intelligence, suggesting that individuals can reject or negotiate media messages as well as take them on board. However, in all theories, audiences remain rather passive; ultimately they can only respond and react to the media who set the terms of engagement in the first place. This encouraged the ethnographic turn in academia: that is, the empirical investigation of how actual media audiences use and interact with the media. Ethnographic studies have showed that media consumption is a much more complex process than commonly thought. Social context, for example who we are with, greatly impacts on how we consume and what we make of media representations. There are also different modes of consumption, varying from deep engagement to casual dipping in and out.
Understanding consumption has become even more difficult in the age of the new media. In case of the mass media, it is relatively straightforward to identify the communicators of meaning (the media) and the receivers of meaning (the consumers). The flow of communication is one-way: consumers cannot communicate back to producers in any meaningful fashion. In contrast, new media communication is no longer one-way and the lines between producers and consumers have become blurred. For instance, individuals can leave comments, feedback and reviews on large websites, such as online retailer Amazon, or in the comments facilities which exist on many newspapers’ websites. They can also set up their own blogs and wikis or create personal profiles on networking sites, such as Facebook or Myspace, to produce their own contents. The technological properties of new media allow for genuine dialogue, interaction and debate with others and for individuals to consume and produce meaning in the media. This change towards the active, multiply involved person is reflected in the change of terminology. In the case of new media, academics no longer talk about ‘consumers’ or ‘audiences’ but ‘users’. The term ‘user-generated content’ has emerged to describe new media content which is produced by ordinary users as opposed to big corporations or institutions.
In this book we want to look at the role which gender plays in connection with consumption. Examining mass media and new media, we address the ways in which gender may shape consumer choices as well as responses to media representations. Moreover, we will look at theories on the production of gender identity to see how individuals can use the media to construct masculine and feminine selves.
Feminism, Post-Feminism and Patriarchy
Second-wave feminist theories and research emerged from the 1960s onwards. Feminists noted that gender inequalities continued to exist in all spheres of life, whether education, the labour market or crime, and committed themselves to both explaining and combating these inequalities. In this sense, feminism has always been a movement as well as a theoretical perspective, including activists and academics who aim to understand and change the social world. Feminist academics also noted that sociological theorizing and research had been conducted from a very male-centred perspective which either ignored or marginalized women’s situations and experiences. This they set out to change.
There are numerous strands within feminism, including radical feminism, liberal feminism, Marxist or socialist feminism, black feminism and postmodern or poststructuralist feminism. All strands agree that gender inequality and oppression of women are real problems which need to be remedied, but they differ in their explanations and solutions to these patterns. One key concept developed by feminists is patriarchy. Patriarchy literally means the rule of the father and refers to an overarching system of male dominance. This system oppresses and exploits women, works in men’s interests and legitimizes male domination. Dominance can take the form of individual control: sexual violence, for example, can be seen not just as a criminal act but as an instance of a man asserting his power and dominance over a woman. This is a form of private patriarchy. But there is also a system of public patriarchy which refers to dominance being realized in impersonal ways through certain institutions or structures (Walby 1990). For example, rape conviction rates in the UK currently stand at a very low 6 per cent, and many other European countries, ranging from Germany to Greece, display similar rates (Lovett and Kelly 2009). The UK figure means that out of 100 reported rapes, 6 cases end in a conviction and 94 cases are either dropped by the police or Crown Prosecution Service or end in acquittal at trial. Research estimates that the rate of false allegations for rape is around 2 per cent, the same percentage as for all other crimes (Benedict 1992). This means that most rapists are not punished; rapists have little to fear from the law, while victims have little chance of getting justice. The criminal justice system fails to deal adequately with rape. This is an example of an institution exercising patriarchal control. The law allows men to rape women with few consequences, which keeps women in a state of fear and often leads to self-restrictions in order to protect themselves (Daly and Chasteen 1997).
Sylvia Walby (1990) argues that in advanced capitalist democracies of Europe and North America, public patriarchy is largely indirect. Women are not directly excluded from the public sphere; they do have formal access to important institutions such as the labour market, politics or education and they are not legally prohibited from doing things which men do. There is formal equality. Instead, in a system of public patriarchy women are controlled indirectly and collectively. This control works through six key structures: household production, the organization of paid work, the state (including the law), male violence, heterosexuality and cultural institutions. Popular culture, including the media, plays a crucial role in contributing to the maintenance of patriarchy by perpetuating gender ideologies.
Post-feminism is critical of second-wave feminism and challenges many of its fundamental propositions. It is based on a belief that gender equality has largely been achieved in developed nations. Post-feminists point to equal opportunities for men and women and suggest that women face little discrimination today. In one scenario this means feminism has become redundant because it has won its major battles. In a second scenario, feminism is blamed for women’s less-than-perfect situation. It is claimed that feminism holds women back by continually framing them as victims of largely non-existing gender inequalities. Feminism is blamed for making women unhappy, driving them to pursue careers and lifestyles they do not actually want in order to ‘win’ the battle of gender equality. The conservative media in particular have adopted these aspects of post-feminism for their own agenda. In the UK, the newspaper market is highly partisan and divided into liberal newspapers, such as the Guardian or the Independent, and conservative ones, such as the Daily Mail, the Daily Express or the Daily Telegraph. These conservative voices, which vastly exceed the liberal newspaper voices in terms of number of publication titles and amount of copies sold, suggest that what women really want is to be stay-at-home mothers and wives and blame feminism for ‘de-valuing’ these roles. From the conservative perspective, the problems of contemporary women, for example the exhaustion of working mothers, prove their point. The problem is not that men are not equally sharing the burdens of housework and childrearing, but that feminists have told women they can ‘have it all’. Hence feminism is blamed for causing a range of social problems which are the product of gender inequality. This movement and line of argumentation are what Susan Faludi (1991) terms a backlash reaction against feminism.
Gender: Social Construction and Performance
Early feminists coined the concept of gender in order to emphasize that maleness and femaleness are not simply about physical biology or ‘nature’ but also social constructs. While ‘sex’ refers to biological, bodily differences between men and women, ‘gender’ refers to the socially constructed categories of masculine and feminine and the socially imposed attributes and behaviours which are assigned to these categories. The fact that certain attributes and behaviours are linked to men or women is not ‘natural’ but a matter of convention. For instance, there is no ‘natural’ reason why women are associated with housework – men are equally capable of it. Which characteristics and practices are seen as typically and appropriately feminine and masculine is a matter of social construction.
Social constructionism is opposed to essentialist understandings of gender. Essentialism stipulates that men and women are inherently different beings who belong to separate categories. All category members, for example all women, are seen to share a set of essential characteristics, or an essence, which defines them and sets them apart from other categories and their members, for example men. In contrast, social constructionism suggests that phenomena, objects, events and identities are the product of society rather than nature. Social (inter)actions and structures shape the world we live in and the meanings which it has for us. Differences between men and women, masculinity and femininity exist but they are the outcome of social processes. The socially constructed nature of femininity and masculinity is clearly illustrated in the changes of meaning which we find across different cultures and different historical periods. For example, in Northern American and European countries, work used to be seen as unfeminine a century ago, yet today the majority of women are in some form of paid work. If gender was ‘natural’, then it would be universal, i.e. identical and unchangeable, across cultures and time.
Initially the concept of gender was radical because it demonstrated that being a man or woman was not simply a natural state but to a large extent a product of society. Simone de Beauvoir (1972), writing originally in 1949, suggested that we are not born but become men and women, which means that gender is not something that we are but something that we do. This idea was picked up and developed by several writers, including Erving Goffman (1959) and, much later, Judith Butler (1990). They theorized that gender is a performance or performative construct. That means gender is not a fixed, inherent identity but the product of a sequence of practices and characteristics which have over time become labelled as masculine or feminine. These practices, which individuals forever repeat, congeal or solidify into what is then recognized as a gender. There are, however, some major differences between Goffman’s and Butler’s thinking around gender.
For Goffman (1959), masculinity and femininity are gender roles which individual men and women perform. They are actors who perform their gender act by constantly engaging in practices which are deemed typical and appropriate for men or women. For example, women perform femininity by wearing skirts and dresses, sitting with their legs crossed and doing housework and childcare, while men perform masculinity by wearing suits and trousers, sitting with their legs wide apart and pursuing careers outside the home. Goffman calls these performances gender displays: that is, conventionalized portrayals of culture’s idealization of femininity and masculinity. Symbolic interactionsts, like Goffman, have pointed out that rules become most evident when they are broken. This certainly applies to gender and illustrates the theory of performance. Women who do not perform femininity correctly but engage in practices that are deemed masculine, for example playing football, having short hair or wearing no make-up, are often labelled ‘tomboys’, ‘butch’ or ‘lesbians’. They are denied femininity. Similarly, transgender individuals who undergo sex changes have to learn the rules of how to be and pass as feminine or masculine, for example how to sit, dress or interact with the opposite sex (West and Zimmerman 1987). Both examples help us recognize that gender is a performance which entails adhering to a great number of behavioural rules. One of the problems with Goffman’s idea of gender as a role being performed by individuals is that it makes gender appear as a conscious, optional identity which we only perform when we decide to do so, at certain points in time. This, according to Candace West and Don Zimmerman (1987), underestimates the extent to which social structures require us to do gender continually. They emphasize that doing gender is an ongoing, routine, everyday activity which is deeply embedded in the social and largely requires no thought.
Some of these criticisms are addressed in Butler’s theory of performativity. In contrast to Goffman, Butler (1990) talks about performative constructs rather than performance. Individuals habitually do gender through a series of practices or performances, but, as a post-structuralist, Butler does not believe that there is a performer behind the performance. Performance pre-exists the performer in the sense that culture has already determined which acts and characteristics count as masculine or feminine. Our individual actions are not conscious but simply habitual, repetitive re-enactments which congeal into gender. Gender is a category that appears natural and permanent, and, as such, independent of individual action, because it is constantly repeated. Or, to put it differently, gender identity is the effect, the outcome of performativity rather than its cause. Differences between women and men that we may find in our culture, i.e. notions of masculinity and femininity, do not exist because of essential differences that cause men and women to behave in different ways, but are the result of the structural category of gender which produces the scripts of femininity and masculinity that men and women continually re-enact. The performative nature of gender is not something we usually notice because the performativity of femininity and masculinity is so routine and naturalized that it remains invisible. Drag, however, lifts the curtain and makes visible the performative nature of gender. Here, men present themselves as women by copying femininity, for example using make-up, wearing feminine clothes such as skirts and high heels and adopting feminine demeanours and gestures. They emphasize the performative and playful nature of this by not trying to eradicate their masculinity and by exaggerating femininity through excessive make-up or ridiculously high heels. For Butler, drag is subversive because it reveals to us that all gender is a perfomative construct and as such not linked in any necessary way to sex: men can do femininity, women can do masculinity.
The distinction between sex and gender was made by second-wave feminists. In some sense it was radical, for the first time putting forward the idea that there is a social dimension to being a man or woman. But in other ways the distinction was conservative and limiting. It reinforced the notion that there are only two sexes or genders, men and women, who are binary opposites. Moreover, it identified two dimensions of being a man or woman, one social and one physical. The physical or ‘natural’ side, i.e. sex, was seen as purely biological and not in any way socially constructed. And many conservative or essentialist thinkers held that gender was determined by sex: that is, that it was simply the social or cultural expression of ‘natural’ physiological realities.
Subsequently, many feminists, including Butler, have taken issue with the sex–gender distinction. Butler deconstructs this dichotomy of sex and gender and the relationship between the two. The common assumption is that sex and gender are inevitably related, as respective biological and social components. But Butler suggests that the two concepts are not at all related but radically independent or contingent. You do not have to be a biological female to display feminine behaviour. Gender dissonances, such as intersex people, show that gender is a fictive production. It is not determined by sex, not a fixed thing we possess, but something people do. Moreover, for Butler, as for many other feminists, nothing, not even the body, is purely ‘natural’ or outside the social. Sex may have a biological dimension but it is also socially shaped. Bodies are always deeply gendered and never purely ‘natural’. For example, women’s and men’s bodies are more similar than they are different – but what society focuses on and deems important are the differences. Or, to use another example, while genital differences are used to categorize humans into men and women, who appear as entirely different species, no one suggests that blue-eyed and brown-eyed individuals are different types of persons. The body as such has no inherent meanings, but it gains its meanings from us. In that sense it is just as socially constructed as gender. However, as far as public discourse and ‘common sense’ goes, these ideas have not penetrated very widely or deeply; in the 1960s Garfinkel (cited in West and Zimmerman 1987) commented that in everyday life we still live in a world of only two sexes. We were very much reminded of this by the furore surrounding the South African athlete Caster Semenya at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Caster was accused of not ‘really’ being a woman because of a lack of obviously visual markers of femininity as well as her outstanding sporting performance which left competitors far behind. Caster had to subject herself to lengthy ‘gender-testing’ and was cleared to compete again in 2010. No details of this testing were released, yet this only fuelled speculation that she suffered from an intersex condition and may need ‘treatment’ before being allowed to return to athletics. This controversy shows not only that contemporary culture continues to enforce gender and sex binaries, but also that these binaries are not as stable as they might at first appear. Butler suggests that the categories of sex and gender are powerful but unstable, which is why they have to be continuously reaffirmed through repetitive performative acts. The controversy surrounding the Semenya case very much supports her point.
Ideology
Ideologies are sets of ideas or systematic frameworks of social understanding (Macdonald 2003). The term ‘ideology’ often has negative connotations: for example, ideologies are assumed to be interested or even false and they are associated with manipulation and indoctrination. This is because of the strong Marxist influence on common understandings of ideology. Marxist conceptions of ideology revolve around the two key elements of dominance and distortion.
For Marx, ideology was always dominant ideology. Ideologies are sets of ideas which are dominant in three ways (Macdonald 2003). Firstly, they are produced by the dominant groups in society. Marx was primarily concerned with social class and envisaged the ruling class as the dominant group, but we could also relate his theory to other dominant groups such as men or white people. Secondly, ideologies work in the interest of the dominant social group, yet they pretend to be neutral, which is why Marxists often say that ideology hides behind itself. Thirdly, ideologies are the dominant ways of thinking in society: all social groups, including the subordinate groups, believe in dominant ideologies, because they are imposed on them by those in power (Abercrombie et al. 1980). Hence, power is material, almost an ‘object’ which can be possessed. It is concentrated in the hands of a few people at the top who directly control the powerless masses at the bottom of society. Power takes the form of imposing rules on what individuals are required to do and believe.
For Marx, ideologies are marked not only by dominance but also by distortion. Ideologies are sets of ideas which are false; they misrepresent reality and distort the truth. As a consequence, ideologies deceive people about the way things really are, they conceal the truth and pull the wool over people’s eyes. In Marxist terms, ideology induces ‘false consciousness’ among the people. For Marx, the key truth which ideology hides is the truth about capitalism. Capitalism is a fundamentally exploitative system which benefits a few people at the top and capitalist societies are marked by inequality and the passing on of privilege. One good example of Marxist conceptions of ideology is the American Dream. This suggests that anyone can be whoever they want to be, can rise from poor circumstances to become famous, successful and rich. For Marx, the ideology of the American Dream conceals the fact that capitalist societies are marked by a fundamental inequality in life chances which makes it difficult for those who are structurally disadvantaged by their social class, gender or ethnicity to rise to the top (Abercrombie et al. 1980).
For Marxists, the media, and popular culture more generally, are key ideological forces. The media are owned and controlled by the dominant social groups who hold leading positions in government and big corporate businesses. As institutions concerned with the production of symbolic material, the media necessarily generate meanings and messages through which we as consumers understand the world. The meanings and messages which the media produce encapsulate the dominant view of the world, even though the media may at times recognize, if not endorse, some alternative ideas. The dominant ideology is actively disseminated and imposed through the media as well as other institutions, such as politics, the education system or the Church. Althusser, a neo-Marxist, called these institutions Ideological State Apparatuses. The nature of ideology’s dominance is such that it is widely reinforced across society. The ideologies which the media promote serve the interests of the dominant group, which owns the media. This group uses its economic power to cement its position and power through ideological means. The dominant ideologies disseminated by the media conceal and misrepresent reality; they hide inequalities inherent in capitalism and thereby legitimize existing patterns of domination as fair and right. For example, rags-to-riches stories so popular with Hollywood cinema (e.g. The Pursuit of Happyness, 2006) promote the ideology of the American Dream, suggesting that everyone in capitalist societies is free and equal and that those who rule and succeed do so thanks to their efforts and talents, not to structural advantages such as connections or personal wealth (Abercrombie et al. 1990).
Influential as Marx’s ideas have been, there have also been major critiques. One of the key problems identified is that ‘dominance’ is too fixed a notion for understanding how power and ideology work. It suggests that power, both economic and ideological, is concentrated in the hands of a few, the ruling elite, and that once established it cannot be changed. A certain number of ideologies are dominant within a given culture, circulated by the dominant group and imposed on and accepted by all people. These ideologies simply continue forever as there are no alternative ideologies to challenge or replace them. This is a very fixed and static picture which we do not necessarily recognize in contemporary society or media. While some ideologies seem widely accepted, others are less so, and there is certainly always scope for resistance, challenge and change. The media are not one monolithic whole, and different elements of the media may well support opposing ideologies. For example, in the US, news channel Fox has become notorious for its openly conservative bias, while other outlets such as the New York Times are at the more liberal end of the spectrum. For these reasons, it is more helpful to adopt a Gramscian notion of ideology and talk about hegemonic rather than dominant ideologies.