According to Stuart Hall, a foundational Cultural Studies theorist, “Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance.” This chapter concludes your exploration of gender studies by giving you some language and tools to engage cultures of power in the popular media.

After reading this chapter, watch the opening sequence of Hairspray one more time (figure 10.1) and answer these questions:

• What did you notice this time that you did not see before?
• How has your learning this week changed how you understand this clip?
• How has your learning this week changed how you will watch films and listen to music?

10.6.1 Review of Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Identify the four elements of media analysis.
2. Identify how gender, sexuality are created, reproduced and contested in media texts.
3. Explain how meaning is produced and negotiated through signs, symbols, and language.
4. Recognize controlling images.
5. Recognize the dominant and oppositional gaze in popular media.

10.6.2 Review of Key Terms

Here is a complete list of key terms in this chapter:

• Popular culture is where a society’s shared ideas about meaning and power can be challenged, negotiated and reinforced.
• Culture war is a term coined in the late 20th century to define the struggle for cultural change within popular culture.
• Narrative refers to how a story is told. Narrative elements include story– what happens, and plot – how the story unfolds.
• Genre refers to the categories used to classify stories, art, music and film.
• Discourse refers to the conversation between the content creator and the audience.
• Content refers to the words, ideas and images that are used to tell the story.
• Tropes are genre-specific narrative metaphors that reference or signify a recognizable plot.
• Mise-en-scene is a French term that means setting the stage. In filmmaking and theater, mise-en-scene refers to the composition of elements in a scene or sequence of scenes.
• Semiotics is the study of how meaning, or signification attaches to words, images or concepts, called signifiers to create units of meaning, called signs.
• Controlling Images are also socially constructed generalizations about categories of people deeply embedded in our shared culture that justify and normalize intersecting racist, heteropatriarchal, class-based domination.
• Male Gaze refers to a process of objectification, in which films use genre, narrative, discourse and content to enable the spectator to identify with the empowered perspective of the masculine protagonist and to partake of the pleasure of viewing the feminine as an objectified other.
• Minstrel Shows popular touring productions featured white actors pretending to be Black and singers who pretended to be Black while mocking and ridiculing Black people by portraying them as foolish, simple, dishonest, and lazy.