Chapter 8 – Gender and sexuality

Before you read

Warm-up

Watch the opening theme of Dallas, an ultra-popular American TV show lasting for eleven seasons from 1978-1991 [link]. How do you think it may engage in gender and sexuality issues; how do you think it may reflect on change or stagnation of gender roles?

Preliminary questions

The previous chapters establish that culture is political – connected to the economy, social class and issues related to production and consumption. Culture has also been discussed so far in relation to signs systems, language, discourse and the visual. In this chapter, gender and sexuality enter the frame. Beginning with the connections between gender, culture, politics and feminism, Chapter 8 of Cultural Theory and Popular Culture discusses film (see also Chapter 5 of this website), soap operas, reading and adverts. We consider how post-feminist theory informs an understanding of some of these.  Masculinities and queer theory are also addressed.

Some issues that are worth thinking about as you read these discussions and related Reader extracts are:

• To what extent does sexuality or gender relate to the production and consumption of cultural texts?
• Is it possible to ignore feminist responses to cultural theory and popular culture?
• Is feminism just for women?
• Is queer sexuality really just about lesbian and gay texts and practices?
• Do we read and consume texts solely on the basis of gender or sexuality?

After you read: Important ideas

The concept of gender unravels a variety of cultural moments and movements that have defined and reflected upon a number of social changes. The cultural trajectories of those changes have been outlined in Chapter 8 in relation to ideas, theorists, and cultural texts. With quizzes 8.1 and 8.2 follow those trajectories and revise their routes.

Quiz 8.1

Which is correct? (Choose between true or false)

1. 

Gender is an irrelevant category of analysis in the study of popular culture.

True

False

None

2. 

Radical feminists argue that women's oppression is tied to differences among women.

True

False

None

3. 

Radical feminists argue that women's oppression is linked to patriarchy.

True

False

None

4. 

Marxist feminists insist that the final source of oppression is cultural.

True

False

None

5. 

Marxist feminists insist that the final source of oppression is capitalism.

True

False

None

6. 

Liberal feminism tends to see oppression in relation to law, education and institutions that tend to favour men over women.

True

False

None

7. 

Dual systems feminism suggests that women's oppression is linked to a mixture of both capitalism and patriarchy.

True

False

None

8. 

Feminism is never concerned with struggles over meaning or culture.

True

False

None

9. 

Feminist Cultural Studies has often been viewed as particularist, whereas studies of male cultural consumption is seen in universalist and ungendered terms.

True

False

None

10. 

There is not one but many Feminisms.

True

False

None

11. 

The popularity of romance reading has no relation to changes in cultural production.

True

False

None

12. 

The examination of romance reading is not really a serious area of investigation in cultural studies.

True

False

None

13. 

Radway's research is not ethnographic.

True

False

None

14. 

The titles of romance fiction are irrelevant to consumers' selection and consumption patterns.

True

False

None

15. 

Women interviewed by Radway read very little in the way of romantic fiction.

True

False

None

16. 

Women who read romance are passive and tolerant readers.

True

False

None

17. 

Romance reading is an activity connected to social, cultural and domestic contexts of women's lives.

True

False

None

18. 

Romance reading has no connection with women's perceptions of men.

True

False

None

19. 

Romance readers constitute active communities of women who are self-critical about their own lives as well as the lives of men.

True

False

None

20. 

Whether a romance is good or bad is determined by the kind of relationship that the reader can establish with the heroine.

True

False

None

21. 

A central myth connected to romance reading is to do with the nurturing male.

True

False

None

22. 

The act of reading is as important as the romantic text itself.

True

False

None

23. 

Men are unperturbed by women who read romance stories.

True

False

None

24. 

Romance reading is valued because the experience itself is different from ordinary existence.

True

False

None

25. 

Women do not know how to read men.

True

False

None

26. 

Reading is never simply a linear task but a process that remains dynamic and open to change.

True

False

None

27. 

Butler questions the privilege accorded to heterosexual relations in cultural texts.

True

False

None

28. 

For Butler, the notions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are natural facts of gender.

True

False

None

29. 

Butler argues that the biology of sex is not itself a natural or neutral foundation on which culture can write masculinity and femininity.

True

False

None

30. 

Biology is always neutral in its narratives and accounts of gender.

True

False

None

31. 

One's sexuality is naturalised and therefore is also natural.

True

False

None

32. 

‘Woman’ is always the cultural construction of the female body, and ‘man’ is always the cultural construction of the male body.

True

False

None

33. 

Gender might seem to be the essential expression of biological sex, but it is also a cultural performance.

True

False

None

34. 

One gender performance is no more real or natural than another performance of gender.

True

False

None

35. 

Butler, as well as Creekmur and Doty, believe that heterosexuality is compulsory.

True

False

None

36. 

Drag and cross-dressing can often reveal the degree to which gender is often about imitation, repetition and parody.

True

False

None

37. 

Queer theorists believe that gender is innately contained in and on the body.

True

False

None

38. 

Queerness is as much about sexuality and gender as it is about how texts are consumed, and sometimes very queerly by straight-identifying subjects.

True

False

None

Time’s up

Quiz 8.2

Match the answer to the statements (choose one)

1. 

Who claims that feminists must be even more insistent about conducting research on men and masculinity at a time when a growing number of men are beginning to conduct apparently comparable research?

Medved and Quayle

Margaret Thatcher

Canaan and Griffiths

None

2. 

Who believes that it is time to speak about masculinity, what it is and how it works?

Jacques Derrida

Anthony Easthope

Sean Nixon

None

3. 

Whose work on new man masculinity explores the regime of representation, focusing on advertising on TV, magazines and menswear shops?

Sean Nixon

David Beckham

Gok Wan

None

4. 

"Who said: For a man to think about masculinity is to become less masculine oneself … The real man thinks about practical matters rather than abstract ones and certainly does not brood upon himself or the nature of his sexuality?"

Terry Eagleton

Edward ‘Bear’ Grylls

Peter Schwenger

None

5. 

Whose are these words: Men do not live out the masculine myth imposed by the stories and images of the dominant culture. But neither can they live outside the myth since it pervades the culture?

Anthony Easthope

Peter Capaldi

Jacques Lacan

None

6. 

"Who argues that men and women are political categories, not natural facts? "

Monique Witting

Janice Radway

Laura Mulvey

None

7. 

Who wrote: One is not born female, one becomes female?

Joke Hermes

Judith Butler

Janice Radway

None

8. 

Who said: You make me feel like a natural woman?

Judith Butler

Aretha Franklin

Tina Turner

None

9. 

Who claims that the identity we designate 'homosexual' arose in tandem with capitalist consumer culture?

Burston and Richardson

Creekmur and Doty

Marx and Engels

None

10. 

Who points out that gender reality is created through sustained social performances?

Judith Butler

Janice Winship

Janice Radway

None

11. 

Who highlights that ‘queer’ marks a flexible space for the expression of all aspects of non-straight cultural production and reception.

Alexander Doty

Alexander McQueen

Paul Burston

None

12. 

Post-feminism is a

complex issue

simple issue

ambivalent issue

None

13. 

Janice Winship argues that post-feminism refers to the way that the boundaries between feminists and non-feminists are

sharp and clear-cut

fuzzy

overlapping

None

14. 

A cultural commentator concerned that much of contemporary popular culture undermines the feminist gains of the 1970s and 1980s was_____?

Angela McRobbie

Angela Merkel

Angelina Jolie

None

15. 

In post-feminist popular culture, Feminism is featured as

outdated, uncool and irrelevant to contemporary life

highly relevant and pertinent

ambiguous and ambivalent

None

16. 

In place of the Feminist movement, Post-feminism focuses on

radical politics

an individual woman

specific groups of women

None

17. 

Who argues that we are witnessing a process of re-traditionalization rather than one of de-traditionalization?

Vicky Ball

Anthony Giddens

Post-feminists

None

18. 

The incorporation of feminism into post-feminism popular culture is a classic example of the processes of

hegemony

liberation

individuation

None

19. 

Intersectionality is a marker of complexity based on _____ of social division

multiple axes

social foundation

global tradition

None

20. 

Intersectionality can be referred to as a _________.

regressive model

concurrent model

traditional model

None

Time’s up

Important names

Chapter 8 relies on important gender-issues related theorists. See who they were with regard to their prominent ideas and their work.

Judith Butler

Monique Wittig

Janice Radway

Rosalind Coward

Angela McRobbie

Tania Modleski

Complementary materials

Watch BBC’s movie Consuming Passion (2008) which celebrates the 100^th nniversary of Mills and Boon, the popular romance publishing phenomenon (link to part 1; the rest of the movie is available for online streaming). Think how it resonates with the problems of gender and sexuality described in Chapter 8.

Further considerations

Based on what you have learned from Chapter 8, rethink the meaning of the following words – how do they reflect on the understanding of sexuality in the cultural context:

FEMINISM, POST-FEMINISM, GENDER, INTERSECTIONALITY, QEERNESS, FEMININITY, MASCULINITY.