Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture / Edition 1

by Henry Jenkins III

Overview

Hop on Pop showcases the work of a new generation of scholars-from fields such as media studies, literature, cinema, and cultural studies-whose writing has been informed by their ongoing involvement with popular culture and who draw insight from their lived experiences as critics, fans, and consumers. Proceeding from their deep political commitment to a new kind of populist grassroots politics, these writers challenge old modes of studying the everyday. As they rework traditional scholarly language, they search for new ways to write about our complex and compelling engagements with the politics and pleasures of popular culture and sketch a new and lively vocabulary for the field of cultural studies.
The essays cover a wide and colorful array of subjects including pro wrestling, the computer games Myst and Doom, soap operas, baseball card collecting, the Tour de France, karaoke, lesbian desire in the Wizard of Oz, Internet fandom for the series Babylon 5, and the stress-management industry. Broader themes examined include the origins of popular culture, the aesthetics and politics of performance, and the social and cultural processes by which objects and practices are deemed tasteful or tasteless. The commitment that binds the contributors is to an emergent perspective in cultural studies, one that engages with popular culture as the culture that "sticks to the skin," that becomes so much a part of us that it becomes increasingly difficult to examine it from a distance. By refusing to deny or rationalize their own often contradictory identifications with popular culture, the contributors ensure that the volume as a whole reflects the immediacy and vibrancy of its objects of study.
Hop on Pop will appeal to those engaged in the study of popular culture, American studies, cultural studies, cinema and visual studies, as well as to the general educated reader.

Contributors. John Bloom, Gerry Bloustein, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Diane Brooks, Peter Chvany, Elana Crane, Alexander Doty, Rob Drew, Stephen Duncombe, Nick Evans, Eric Freedman, Joy Fuqua, Tony Grajeda, Katherine Green, John Hartley, Heather Hendershot, Henry Jenkins, Eithne Johnson, Louis Kaplan, Maria Koundoura, Sharon Mazer, Anna McCarthy, Tara McPherson, Angela Ndalianis, Edward O'Neill, Catherine Palmer, Roberta Pearson, Elayne Rapping, Eric Schaefer, Jane Shattuc, Greg Smith, Ellen Strain, Matthew Tinkhom, William Uricchio, Amy Villarego, Robyn Warhol, Charles Weigl, Alan Wexelblat, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822327370
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	01/23/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	760
Product dimensions:	6.96(w) x 10.08(h) x 1.58(d)

About the Author

Henry Jenkins is Anne Fetter Friedlaender Professor of Humanities and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of editor of several books including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and The Children's Culture Reader.

Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California and author of Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South.

Jane Shattuc is Associate Professor of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College. She is author of The Talking Cure: Television Talk Shows and Women and Television, Tabloids, Tears: Fassbinder and Popular Culture.

Read an Excerpt

Hop on pop

The politics and pleasures of popular culture

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By Henry Jenkins

Duke University Press

ISBN: 0-8223-2737-6

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Chapter One

Daytime Utopias: If You Lived in Pine Valley, You'd Be Home

Elayne Rapping

For only in art has bourgeois society tolerated its own ideals and taken them seriously as a general demand. What counts as utopia, phantasy, and rebellion in the world of fact is allowed in art. There affirmative culture has displayed the forgotten truths over which "realism" triumphs in daily life.

-HERBERT MARCUSE, NEGATIONS

A work of art opens a void where ... the world is made aware of its guilt.

-MICHEL FOUCAULT, MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION

It's Sunday night and my daughter, Alison, is calling: "I hate that they have to kill off Eve," she moans, "although I don't blame her for wanting out of her contract-the show is definitely going downhill. And at least they're using her death to make a point about experimental drugs. ACT-UP should be happy about that, if any of them are watching. Probably not. Even the rec.arts.tv.soaps. cbs crowd on the Internet seem to hate her, which I really don't get. She's the only interesting woman left on the show. What do you think?"

We are having our usual weekly check-in call about Guiding Light, the soap opera of choice among Pittsburgh women in the 1960s and 1970s, when she was growing up, and the one to which we have both remained loyal for almost threedecades, through good times and bad. Neither of us lives in Pittsburgh now, but when we watch and discuss our soap opera, we still share a common community and a set of friends and neighbors about whom we care deeply, even as we laugh at their often ridiculously implausible lives.

But what's this about AIDS, you are no doubt wondering. Dr. Eve Guthrie, after all, as you may know if you are a fan yourself, has died of a rare disease with no links whatever to any activity connected with sex or drugs or even blood transfusions. She has, it seems, picked up this virus while working as selflessly as Mother Teresa (and with as little political sophistication), as a doctor in a war-torn fictional nation. Nothing political or kinky about that.

Nonetheless, as Alison and I both understand, having followed and discussed the murky, contradictory, often subtextual, politics of daytime soaps for so long, there is something progressive, in the most utopian sense of that word, about the conclusion of Eve's story line. In a frenzy of what some would call "denial" about her fatal illness, Eve has made contact by way of the Internet with a colleague doing research on this disease and has been secretly medicating herself with an untested drug. Her fiance, Ed, himself a physician of the more conservative and typical variety, is adamantly opposed. But lo and behold, the cyber-researcher Eve has hooked up with an old med school pal of Ed's, a woman no less, for whom he has the utmost respect. And this brilliant woman convinces him, in a series of inspiring speeches of the kind Alison and I love to savor, of Eve's courage, her intuitive scientific acumen, and her right to choose her own treatment. Eve even improves for a while on the treatment, but it is too little too late, and she finally succumbs, as the contract of the actress who plays the role demands (and as we who follow the cyber-chat gossip have long known she would), amidst sobbing friends, flashback clips of better days, and a eulogy in which it is predicted that her final act of medical courage will lead to an early cure for the disease. In soapville, this is credible.

The path that led my daughter and me to the soaps is worth tracing briefly, for it was as contradictory and unlikely as many soap story lines. In the 1960s, when Alison was very young, I was a full-time graduate student increasingly caught up in New Left and feminist politics. In those days, hard as it is to remember this now, we of the democratic Left believed that revolution was around the corner; that a post-scarcity world of equality, beauty, pleasure, and material plenty for all was on the horizon. In my socialist-feminist consciousness-raising/study group, we devoured new feminist tracts that corrected for the masculinist biases and blind spots of traditional Left theory. And in our women's caucuses, we developed strategies that challenged traditional Marxist ideology and process, with their artificial splits between public and private, work and play, labor and sexual repression. In our feminist revisions, women would not only be integrated into the public sphere of work and power; the public sphere itself would be transformed, as values such as compassion, nurturance, mutual support, and respect, long marginalized as relevant only to private, family life, were incorporated into public life.

Those were heady days. Also exhausting ones. I would drag myself home each afternoon, after classes and before the evening round of meetings, to find my grandmotherly baby-sitter faithfully watching Guiding Light while my two infants napped. And since she would not budge until her "story" was over, and I was too tired to budge myself, we would watch together as she filled me in on what I had missed. The habit stuck. In fact, Guiding Light became a daily delight to which I looked forward as a respite from my increasingly hectic life. More than that, although at first I chalked it up to exhausted delirium, the soap seemed, at odd moments, to offer a vision of social and emotional happiness that echoed the social visions my friends and I were constructing in our position papers and organizing projects. "What does a woman want?" asked Sigmund Freud, of penis envy fame (Juliet Mitchell had not yet rehabilitated him for feminism), and I couldn't help but think that, in all the male-run world, only the Guiding Light writers seemed to have a clue.

These were very different times in the academic and critical communities. Women's studies, as an academic program, was just being developed, a result of the growing movement of university-based women's liberation unions. But efforts to bring the study of mass media and popular culture into universities, at least in this country, were not yet spoken of. These were the days, in any event, when feminist media analysis was almost exclusively of the "negative"-and-"positive"-image variety. And the gender images that feminists were analyzing in popular culture were rarely considered positive.

Nonetheless, say what they might about "mass culture" and its evils, the Frankfurt School theorists I was then studying could not dissuade me from my instinctive sense that much of what I was trying to teach my kids about what life was supposed to be like in the brave new world I envisioned could most easily be explained with soap examples. In the rest of their world-their school rooms, their friends' homes, the cartoons and sitcoms they watched-women's lives were marginalized and demeaned. But in Springfield, the fictional midwestern town in which Guiding Light is set, and in Pine Valley, the somewhat smaller fictional community in which All My Children, our other, occasionally watched, show was set, I glimpsed, entangled amid the absurdities and contradictions of the form, a feminized world in which women and their traditional concerns were central, in which women played key roles in every arena, in which, when women "spoke truth to power," even back in the 1960s, power stood up and paid attention.

The idea that bourgeois culture incorporates utopian visions and values, moments during which we are liberated from the constraints of realism and can glimpse, in the distance, a vision of that better world in which our often unarticulated heart's desires are fulfilled, is not of course new. Media scholars have been aware of this at least since Jameson's seminal essay on "Reification and Utopia." Nor is it news that popular culture, often taken so much less seriously than high art forms, has been the most powerful site of imaginative utopian protest. For as Jameson has written elsewhere, it is in times like ours, when "our own particular environment-the total system of capitalism and the consumer society-feels so massively in place and its reification so overwhelming and impenetrable that the serious artist is no longer free to tinker with it," that popular forms that are less "serious," less "massively in place," assume "the vocation of giving us alternate versions of a world that has elsewhere seemed to resist even imagined change.

While Jameson does not specifically mention soap opera, feminist media theorists have written extensively and insightfully about the utopian element in daytime soaps. Feminists have discovered in soaps a representation of "a world in which the divine functions"; a world which "exhorts the [real] world to live up to [women's] impassioned expectations of it," as Louise Spence nicely puts it. And John Fiske, taking a somewhat different perspective, has described soap opera as a genre in which "feminine culture constantly struggles to establish and extend itself within and against a dominant patriarchy ... to whittle away at patriarchy's power to subject women and ... establish a masculine-free zone from which a direct challenge may be mounted." Other feminist theorists have pointed to any number of specific soap conventions and teased out their utopian implications. It is often noted, for example, that through the incorporation of multiple subjectivities and points of view and the use of multiple, open-ended narrative lines, readers are potentially empowered to question dominant patriarchal assumptions about family and gender norms and to resist hegemonic readings.

But most of this work has focused on the way soaps represent and negotiate the traditionally feminine sphere of private life: the home, family and gender relationships, marriage and maternity. My own pleasure in soaps, and my sense of their usefulness as a tool for raising feminist daughters and sons, came from something much less often mentioned: their implicitly utopian social and political vision. Raymond Williams has written that "community is the keyword of the entire utopian enterprise." And it was their sense of community, a feminized community closer to my feminist visions of the future than to classic literary utopias, that drew me to soaps.

"The personal is political," we used to say back in the late 1960s. And what we meant by that (and it is a sign of the times that this statement is so often misunderstood, even by feminists, today) was that it was political institutions that were responsible for personal suffering, and political institutions, the public spaces from which women had so long been excluded, that would need to be changed in order for women to be free and happy. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, themselves socialist-feminist activists, eloquently articulated the vision and the demands of that utopian worldview. "There are no answers left but the most radical ones," they wrote in the 1970s:

We cannot assimilate into a masculinist society without doing violence to our own nature, which is of course human nature. But neither can we retreat into domestic isolation, clinging to an archaic feminine ideal. Nor can we deny that the dilemma is a social one.... The Woman Question in the end is not a question of women. It is not we who are the problem and it is not our needs which are the mystery. From our perspective (denied by centuries of masculinist "science" and analysis) the Woman Question becomes the question of how shall we all-women and children and men-organize our lives together.

The answer to this question seemed vitally important to me as I was raising my children. And despite the derision of most people I knew ("Do you actually watch this stuff," I was asked repeatedly when I first "came out" in print, back in 1973, in a column about soaps and women viewers in a New Left newspaper), the political imaginary of soap opera, in which courtrooms, hospitals, and offices seemed miraculously to bend themselves to women's desires, suggested some answers.

For those not intimately familiar with the always implausible, often incredible, world of soap opera convention, a bit of background on Guiding Light's Springfield community may be in order. The series, which has been on the air since the beginning of television, and before that, as a radio series, focuses primarily on the lives of eight complexly intertwined families who have lived in Springfield forever; they eternally intermarry, engage in personal, business, and political battles with each other, and they see each other, when they aren't feuding, through the constant barrage of mental and physical illnesses, natural disasters, onslaughts by master criminals of the financial as well as physical variety, and via the more mundane events like adultery, unwanted pregnancies, financial setbacks, and addictions that afflict them all, usually in multiple doses and in intensely dramatic ways. They are the Bauers, the Marlers, the Reardons, the Coopers, the Lewises, the Thorpes, the Spauldings, and the Chamberlains.

The show is distinctive in its special emphasis on class differences within a context of community harmony. This explains, in large part, its special appeal in Pittsburgh, where, until recently, the steel industry and organized labor colored the culture of the city. Where many of the newer shows elide issues of class, GL's Reardon and Cooper families are distinctively and proudly of working-class backgrounds. They are proprietors, respectively, of a boardinghouse and a diner, both located on "5th Street" where street life, it is hinted, is a bit rough-and-tumble and folks look out for each other. This sense of working-class community life, while perhaps foreign to audiences in other parts of the country, did indeed ring true in Pittsburgh, where ethnic communities, populated with large networks of extended families, remained for generations in the areas in which the steel mills had provided them work, at least until the demise of the steel industry in the 1980s.

Despite this working-class presence, it is, not surprisingly in a commercial TV text, the Bauers and Marlers, middle-class professionals all, who provide the backbone and set the constant, stabilizing moral tone of the community. Dr. Ed Bauer, grieving fiance of Dr. Eve Guthrie, is, in fact, the chief of staff at the hospital where so many characters work and spend time healing from physical and mental trauma. And Ross Marler, his best friend, is the all-purpose, ever humane and democratic attorney for the "good" characters and causes. Then there are the Lewises, the Thorpes, and the Chamberlains and Spauldings, who represent big money and high finance. But here too class difference is marked with moral distinction. The Chamberlains and Spauldings are "old money." But where the Chamberlains have class, breeding, and humane policies based on a kind of noblesse oblige, the Spauldings are ruthless, competitive, and cutthroat, among themselves and against all others. The Lewises, by contrast, are Texas oil upstarts of the "good old boy" variety, fairly new to Springfield and closer in style and sympathy to the down home 5th Street crowd. And the Thorpes, represented by the rakishly evil Roger Thorpe, represent an upstart business class, driven by envy of and ire at the respect and love that the nicer and/or more established and self-confident families effortlessly attract.

At any given time there are any number of other characters who arrive in town and remain as semi-permanent or permament residents, usually by marrying into and/or working with one of the clans, until, most often, they wear out their welcome in some way and disappear. Within the permanent families, as regular viewers soon discover and adjust to, characters often change personalities and natures with Jekyll-and-Hyde alacrity. The love of a good 5th Street woman, for example, will temporarily transform a Spaulding into a humane, class-conscious saint. And by the same token, good characters will often stray from the homegrown morals of their Reardon, Cooper, or Bauer roots when lured, romantically or materially, by members of more ruthless families.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

I. Introduction 1

The Culture That Sticks to Your Skin: A Manifesto for a New Cultural Studies / Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc 3

Defining Popular Culture / Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc 26

II. Self 43

Daytime Utopias: If You Lived in Pine Valley, You'd Be Home / Elayne Rapping 47

Cardboard Patriarchy: Adult Baseball Card Collecting and the Nostalgia for a Presexual Past / John Bloom 66

Virgins for Jesus: The Gender Politics of Therapeutic Christian Fundamentalist Media / Heather Hendershot 88

"Do We Look Like Ferengi Capitalists to You?" Star Trek's Klingons as Emergent Virtual American Ethnics / Peter A. Chvany 105

The Empress's New Clothing? Public Intellectualism and Popular Culture / Jane Shattuc 122

"My Beautiful Wickedness": The Wizard of Oz as Lesbian Fantasy / Alexander Doty 138

III. Maker 159

"Ceci N'est Pas une Jeune Fille": Videocams, Representation, and "Othering" in the Worlds of Teenage Girls / Gerry Bloustien 162

"No Matter How Small": The Democratic Imagination of Dr. Seuss / Henry Jenkins 187

An Auteur in the Age of the Internet: JMS, Babylon 5, and the Net / Alan Wexelblat 209

"I'm a Loser Baby": Zines and the Creation of Underground Identity / Stephen Duncombe 227

IV. Performance 251

"Anyone Can Do It": Forging a Participatory Culture in Karaoke Bars / Robert Drew 254

Watching Wrestling / Writing Performance / Sharon Mazer 270

Mae West's Maids: Race, "Authenticity," and the Discourse of Camp / Pamela Robertson Wojcik 287

"They Dig Her Message": Opera, Television, and the Black Diva / Dianne Brooks 300

How to Become a Camp Icon in Five Easy Lessons: Fetishism —- and Tallulah Bankhead's Phallus / Edward O'Neill 316

V. Taste 339

"It Will Get a Terrific Laugh": On the Problematic Pleasures and Politics of Holocaust Humor / Louis Kaplan 343

The Sound of Disaffection / Tony Grajeda 357

Corruption, Criminality, and the Nickelodeon / Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio 376

"Racial Cross-Dressing" in the Jazz Age: Cultural Therapy and Its Discontents in Cabaret Nightlife / Nicholas M. Evans 388

The Invisible Burlesque Body of La Guardia's New York / Anna McCarthy 415

Quarantined! A Case Study of Boston's Combat Zone / Eric Schaefer and Eithne Johnson 430

VI. Change 455

On Thrifting / Matthew Tinkcom, Joy Van Fuqua, and Amy Villarejo 459

Shopping Sense: Fanny Fern and Jennie June on Consumer Culture in the Nineteenth Century / Elana Crane 472

Navigating Myst-y Landscapes: Killer Applications and Hybrid Criticism / Greg M. Smith 487

The Rules of the Game: Evil Dead II . . . Meet Thy Doom / Angela Ndalianis 503

Seeing in Black and White: Gender and Racial Visibility from Gone with the Wind to Scarlett / Tara McPherson 517

VII. Home 535

"The Last Truly British People You Will Ever Know": Skinheads, Pakis, and Morrissey / Nabeel Zuberi 539

Finding One's Way Home: I Dream of Jeannie and Diasporic Identity / Maria Koundoura 556

As Canadian as Possible . . . : Anglo-Canadian Popular Culture and the American Other / Aniko Bodroghkozy 566

Wheels of Fortune: Nation, Culture, and the Tour de France / Catherine Palmer 589

Narrativizing Cyper-Travel: CD-ROM Travel Games and the Art of Historical Recovery / Ellen Strain 605

Hotting, Twocking, and Indigenous Shipping: A Vehicular Theory of Knowledge in Cultural Studies / John Hartley 622

VIII. Emotion 647

"Ain't I de One Everybody Come to See?!" Popular Memories of Uncle Tom's Cabin / Robyn R. Warhol 650

Stress Management Ideology and the Other Spaces of Women's Power / Kathleen Green 670

"Have You Seen This Child?" From Milk Carton to Mise-en-Abime / Eric Freedman 689

Introducing Horror / Charles E. Weigl 700

About the Contributors 721

Name Index 733

What People are Saying About This

Brenda Laurel

Borrowing McLuhan's metaphor, Henry Jenkins is a fish who discovered water-and has developed powerful new ways of studying it. Now he and co-editors Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc have collected a diverse array of intriguing insights into popular culture-not with disdain or post-modern mumble, but with real interest and even respect. Hop on Pop looks at pop culture as the water we swim in, as a muscular change agent, as the mirror held up to human nature. One fish, two fish, red fish, new fish-oh what we can learn by studying the media world we swim in.
— Brenda Laurel, author of Utopian Entrepreneur

Editorial Reviews

"A lively travelogue of the 'lively arts, ' Hop on Pop cheerfully transcends political, personal, and professional boundaries to offer a sprawling rainbow map of popular culture and exposes those old boundaries for the sneetch-like spooks they truly are."--Scott McCloud, cartoonist and author of Understanding Comics

"Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc have collected a diverse array of intriguing insights into popular culture--not with disdain or postmodern mumble, but with real interest and even respect. Hop on Pop looks at pop culture as the water we swim in, as a muscular change agent, as the mirror held up to human nature."--Brenda Laurel, author of Utopian Entrepreneur

From the Publisher