Cultural Studies

DION KAGAN
University of Melbourne, Australia

Cultural studies is an international intellectual movement that developed in Britain dur-

ing the 1960s and 1970s and that has radically transformed the questions posed and
assumptions made in media and communication fields. Although it tends to be con-
cerned with popular formations in modern, mediated social life, there is no single or
unified cultural studies approach. As a field of inquiry, cultural studies is characterized
by diversity, mobility, and eclecticism in its theories and methods, and the objects of
its interest are constantly shifting. Cultural studies practitioners tend to combine and
develop the strategies of a diverse set of scholarly fields including sociology, anthro-
pology, political science, and media and communication studies, but not only those. In
this sense, cultural studies is strongly constituted by its interdisciplinarity—and some-
times, proudly or problematically, its antidisciplinarity. Despite its institutionalization
in some universities, cultural studies’ resistance to codification as a discipline means it
is more accurate to describe tendencies in cultural studies rather than characterizing it
as a unified enterprise with rigid parameters.
However, in spite of this appearance of shapelessness, cultural studies emerged and
remains organized around a quite specific understanding of “culture.” Against the tra-
ditional, elitist conceptualization of “culture” as the best or most influential artistic or
literary works of a civilization (“high culture”), cultural studies reframes understand-
ings of culture to mean a whole, integrated way of life. This includes ordinary, everyday,
“low” cultural practices, like shopping in supermarkets or forms of popular, “vulgar”
consumption like watching YouTube or eating at McDonald’s. The “culture” in cultural
studies is as much the seemingly trivial rhythms of quotidian life as it is the spectacular
or unusual global event. Another approach to thinking about the meanings of “culture”
in cultural studies is to view it as akin to the understanding of culture in ethnography,
that is, a group or a community’s collective rituals and collective outlook on the world:
“collective subjectivity,” “popular consciousness,” or a holistic “way of life.”
In cultural studies, media texts and communication practices become a means to
probe the larger constellations of shared ideas, behaviors, dispositions, and relation-
ships among producers and consumers, and to thereby characterize and comprehend
the workings of the social world. In its approach to media and communications, cultural
studies tends to pose questions about how cultural forms—for example, magazines,
TV, or social media sites—and/or how the practices of consuming and producing these
forms—reading, watching TV, or posting online—relate to wider systems of power rela-
tions like ideology, class structure, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation,
gender, and generation. Objects and contexts of scrutiny in cultural studies become a

The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy.

Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Robert T. Craig (Editors-in-Chief), Jefferson D. Pooley and Eric W. Rothenbuhler (Associate Editors).
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect225
2 CU L T U R A L ST U D I E S

lens through which to pose questions about the machinations of culture more broadly:
“What do the shifting scheduling structures of broadcast television suggest about the
way in which ideas and organizations of family life and domesticity are transforming?”
Or “What do the content and stylistic presentation of photos posted on social media
sites indicate about contemporary understandings of friendship and intimate relation-
ality?” When such questions are posed, media forms and artifacts are almost always
approached within a scrupulous consideration of where and how they are produced and
consumed, and the life practices and patterns of communication and interaction that
make them meaningful in contemporary culture; in other words, their context. This rig-
orous consideration of context, or “radical contextualization,” is one of cultural studies’
distinguishing qualities. Media are only one register of a culture; but, as institutions,
artifacts, and practices of consumption inextricably implanted in existing patterns of
social, economic, and political relations, media are a rich site for investigation. Hence,
since the inception of cultural studies, its practitioners have been centrally concerned
with the roles and effects of media in social life.

Intellectual origins

The early history of cultural studies is intimately connected to developments at the Cen-
tre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), established in 1964 at the University of
Birmingham. Originally a postgraduate research unit within the university’s English
Department, the CCCS became the founding home of cultural studies amid the grow-
ing turmoil of workers’ and other social movements in the 1960s. Its first director,
Richard Hoggart, was a literary critic of the left Leavisite tradition, which, after F. R.
Leavis, was disdainful of the effects of popular culture. Hoggart was succeeded in 1968
by Jamaican-born cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall, cultural studies’ most
influential figure to date, who directed the Centre until 1979. Hall later recounted the
founding intentions of the CCCS as aimed at initiating “research in the area of contem-
porary culture and society: cultural forms, practices and institutions, their relation to
society and social change” (Hall, 1980, p. 7).
British cultural studies’ early interventions unfolded amid the decline of traditional
working-class culture after World War I. Shifts in Britain’s economy in the 1940s and
1950s, including the deskilling of labor through the introduction of Fordist approaches
to production and manufacturing, a decrease in the pay disparity between white-collar
and blue-collar workers, and large-scale immigration from the colonies, increased the
affluence of workers in urban centers. At the same time, mass production had led to a
decrease in the costs of such goods as cars, clothing, and household technologies like
washing machines and fridges, and communication technologies like telephones and
televisions were becoming everyday items. With more leisure time and an increased
ability to purchase consumer goods distributed across a much larger proportion of the
population, there was a dramatic intensification of consumption, especially mass media
consumption: radio, music, cinema, magazines, books, and especially the exponential
presence of TV in people’s everyday lives. The combination of mass production, full
employment, and higher wages meant more shopping and more consumption of mass
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media forms than ever before. Western postwar capitalism was in the midst of trans-
forming society’s traditional producers into its largest demographic of consumers.
These social and economic shifts and the broadly felt changes they wrought, espe-
cially in the lives of working-class people, became a founding interest to cultural studies
scholars. Drawing from (and moving beyond) Britain’s New Left intellectual move-
ment, organized around the influential journal New Left Review, the founding figures of
British cultural studies became concerned with thinking seriously about popular cul-
ture and about how to bring a discussion of politics into their analysis of it. The New
Left were rather suspicious of the idea that popular entertainments like sports, comedy,
jazz, and other popular music were simply a form of popular escapism. Drawing on new
types of Marxist theory, one of their objectives was to demonstrate that popular culture is
itself a site of political struggle. Culture, they argued, is not merely a reflection or an effect
of economic conditions, as the traditional Marxist view tended to position it, but rather,
as Hall described it, “constitutive of society” (quoted in Procter, 2004, p. 18). Draw-
ing on but moving beyond Karl Marx’s base–superstructure model and the critique of
commodity fetishism, cultural studies scholars hence sought to demonstrate the ways
in which cultural production and consumption are determinant players in the social
and economic climate, not merely the effects of that climate. This concept of popular
culture, and of the increasingly ubiquitous mass media forms that came to dominate
it, as something that plays a primary and formative, rather than only a secondary or
reflective, role in social and political change has remained foundational to work in cul-
tural studies ever since. The importance of the popular as an ideological battleground
and thus as a site worthy of serious scholarly consideration was expressed by Hall in his
editorial introduction to the first edition of New Left Review, where he argued that the
rigorous consideration of forms like cinema and teenage culture “are directly relevant to
the imaginative resistances of the people who have to live within capitalism—the grow-
ing points of social discontent, the projection of deeply-felt needs” (Hall, 1960, p. 1).
Subsequently, cultural studies has applied this serious approach to a virtually endless
range of mass cultural forms, including TV genres like news and current affairs, game
shows, soap operas, reality TV, and lifestyle programming; shopping spaces like super-
markets and department stores; and technologies like computers and mobile phones.
Because of this approach to mass media, British cultural studies as it developed at
the CCCS was somewhat at odds with existing empiricist approaches to the study of
communication and media that had developed in the 1940s and 1950s. The prevailing
communication studies models had grown out of the behavioral paradigms of market
research and drew on quantitative frameworks like cybernetics and information theory.
Cultural studies began to pose more complex questions that could not be answered
by existing empirical methods alone. Whereas studies of mass communication had
previously grasped media influence as a direct, stimulus–response mechanism (the
“transmission” model), and had been focused on media effects, audience attitudes, and
behavioral change, emergent work at the CCCS developed more critical approaches to
media as a set of embedded cultural practices. Of course, cultural studies borrows qual-
itative communication studies’ methods, such as ethnographies of media audiences,
but its core interest in qualitative research has been to facilitate the expression of voices
beyond the researcher’s own rather than to demonstrate an empirical truth.
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The assertion that popular culture is a site of political struggle extended Marxist
approaches to social class and consumption and provided a rationale for the serious
contemplation of mass culture as the site in which power is both negotiated and
resisted. Scholars at the CCCS essentially argued that Marxists and historians had
neglected mass media at their own peril (Bennett, 1983). Cultural studies sought to
reimagine mass media as a web of complex practices and processes of meaning-making,
meaning-distribution, and receiver interpretation situated across the multiple spaces
and arrangements of social life. Because the influence of the media is always indirect,
subtle, and complex, this new approach opened up the potential for imagining agency
among media consumers, emphasizing the active, critical capacities of all people.
This is one of cultural studies’ most significant interventions. From a cultural studies
perspective, mass media are not simply a capitalist tool used to fool or exploit the
working class (“false consciousness”), engender passivity and conformity among them,
and keep them trapped within existing living conditions. This was the perspective
on mass media that had emerged from the influential Frankfurt School, which
inaugurated critical Marxist studies of mass culture, but with an understanding of it
as homogeneous and standardized—a “culture industry,” as Adorno and Horkheimer
(1944/2002) famously described it, that was manipulated by those in power and that
positioned consumers as “dupes.” Against this perspective, cultural studies began to
stress the polysemy of media signs and the role of individuals in the production of their
own cultures and meanings. Rather than being unified, mass culture is considered a site
of potential resistance to and negotiation of power. Readers, watchers, and consumers
are active agents who produce meanings and other effects as they consume.
A clear example of this approach to consumers and audiences was David Morley’s
The “Nationwide” Audience (1980), which drew on ethnographic interviews to contest
the image of a large audience as a “mass.” Other projects looked to working-class and
subcultural uses of consumer goods to articulate cultures of resistance to the main-
stream. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson edited Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcul-
tures in Postwar Britain (1976), a groundbreaking collection of work from a number of
CCCS scholars who looked at the production of identity and extended kinship networks
among both working-class and middle-class young people, including their appropria-
tion of consumer goods, like clothing. The book contains analyses of the Teddy Boys, the
Mod subculture, skinheads, reggae, and rasta, and in several case studies it investigates
how group identity is produced through practices and enunciations of style. Similarly
inspired work, like Ien Ang’s Watching Dallas (1982), looked to women’s pleasurable
consumption of soap opera and other popular but derided cultural forms, and British
working-class audiences’ consumption of television dramas like Coronation Street and
later EastEnders. In the 1990s, as capitalism and global media markets increasingly
conquered the world (a process associated with the forces of globalization), a cultural
studies now influenced by postcolonial critiques of Western cultural imperialism and
orientalism (historical imaginings of “the orient” produced to help the West domi-
nate the East) began to consider local and transnational forms of resistance to and
negotiation of Western hegemonies, by studying the particular ways in which certain
communities resignified or “glocalized” global brands, products, and media artifacts in
their consumption of them. In all of these cases, cultural studies has been interested in
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the production, contestation, and negotiation of meaning as a site of consumption as

well as of production.
The taking seriously of mass culture and the shift beyond the elitism of dominant
literary approaches to culture were key inspirations in early cultural studies, emerging
from major works that in fact preceded the CCCS: Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957),
Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), and
Marxist historian E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963).
Collectively, these precursor texts questioned and broadened the 19th- and early 20th-
century elitist school of “culture” as existing in a separate, rarefied realm, away from
“real life,” the masses, and the realities of the contemporary, everyday world. Cultural
studies instead sought to address “common culture,” asserting that we think about cul-
ture as “a whole way of life.” As Williams (1961) wrote in The Long Revolution, “culture is
a description of a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values not
only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour” (p. 57). While
acknowledging that hierarchies of prestige exist in cultural production—say, between
European art-house cinema and Hollywood blockbusters—cultural studies tends now
to view these hierarchies not as fixed, essential systems. Rather than celebrating or
reproducing those hierarchies, it is more interested in how hierarchical models of cul-
ture indicate how power and influence are distributed among groups of people in soci-
ety. In other words, cultural studies reframes the idea of “culture” from something that
refers to rarefied or aesthetic realms like opera, literature, and ballet into something
that also includes mass media culture and everyday forms and practices, like televi-
sion, sports, shopping, eating, cooking, cleaning, grooming, sex, and other intimate,
everyday, and domestic relations. These ordinary cultural formations are considered
worthy of close analysis for what they might reveal about the organization of social
life; distinctions between high, low, and mass culture are themselves worth considering
because they reiterate prevailing social, economic, and political power bases along axes
including “taste” and class.
Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy is considered the first work of this kind and is a useful
example of key practices and principles in this early, “classical” phase of cultural stud-
ies. The Uses of Literacy was not only an account of changes in working-class culture
brought about by massification but also an early attempt to contemplate the political
function of popular culture in order to critique it. Hoggart examined film, pulp fiction,
popular magazines and newspapers, advertising, and tabloid newspapers—the manu-
facturing of a homogeneous culture industry imposed from above by mass media forms
like Hollywood cinema—to form an argument about the effect these mass media forms
had on local class-based and regional cultures, especially the close-knit working-class
cultures of urban Britain.
The Uses of Literacy models at least five approaches that exemplify cultural studies’
orientations to knowledge and its understanding of culture as a “whole way of life.”
First, rather than a striving toward scientific objectivity, Hoggart’s account is framed
via a subjective lens, with the transformations to working-class life in postwar Britain
described through reference to his own biography. A personal, organic relationship
between the researcher’s lived experience and his or her critical intervention became
a distinctive (although by no means mandatory) feature of work in cultural studies.
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Acknowledging the researcher and her political sympathies initiated a distinct break
from the positivist social sciences. Second and relatedly, cultural studies has tended
toward a self-consciously political approach to research. Hoggart, for example, made no
secret of his feelings about the decline of working-class culture amid the forces of cap-
italist massification and was resolutely aligned with the British New Left. He lamented
the breakup of an urban culture “of the people,” in place of which a homogeneous and
homogenizing mass culture tended to colonize local communities and deprive them of
their distinctive local character. Like major works to come in the field and work still
conducted under the aegis of cultural studies, Hoggart understood his book as a politi-
cal intervention and as part of a broader dialogue about politics. Such self-consciously
political research aimed at a transformation of the status quo has been called “engaged
cultural studies.”
Third, in its application of the tools conventionally reserved for the close analysis of
literature to an examination of everyday life practices, media consumption, and enter-
tainment, The Uses of Literacy demonstrated how the approaches of the textual disci-
plines could be used to study the social. This includes the practices of everyday life,
like shopping, eating, sport, media consumption, online participation, entertainment,
leisure, and travel; all cultural sites and practices from which people derive capital,
pleasure, meaning, and identity. The application of interpretive reading practices to
the study of things other than written language texts was something of a revolution-
ary method, and another feature that distinguishes cultural studies from traditional
sociology: In cultural studies, everything from folk dancing to urban planning poli-
cies to pornography becomes a potentially illuminating part of society, and can thus be
considered and analyzed as a “text.” Fourth, Hoggart’s interest in the mass culture of
postwar Britain was a prototypical example of cultural studies’ interest in the popular
as a means to investigate the terrain around which people live, experience, and struggle
politically in the world, and around which they form common lexicons of communica-
tion and meaning.
Fifth, and finally, Hoggart’s specific attention to the consumption of mass cultural
media objects by Britain’s working class initiated cultural studies’ dedication to radical
contextualization: the presumption that any object of investigation—playing video
games, watching football, posting on Facebook—cannot be analyzed in isolation from
its specific location within other material and symbolic contexts of social reality. The
conflicting meanings and significances of, for example, a media artifact cannot be sep-
arated from the contexts in which it is produced, distributed, and consumed, the spaces
of its articulation or “construction” (Grossberg, 1993). Watching television, for example,
is not a discrete process but something always conducted within a constellation of other
life practices, habits, and orientations, including work, neighborhood, nationality,
gender, sexuality, family life, and so on. For Hoggart, the changes in postwar cultures
of literacy and media consumption affected and were affected by these elements in
an individual’s “whole way of life.” For cultural studies, any artifacts or practices,
including media and communications, have no existence outside of the social relations
of production and reception in which they are produced, distributed, and consumed.
When it comes to media products and media consumption, this last attribute is par-
ticularly important, and increasingly so in the globalized context of media production
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and consumption—and “prosumption,” or production by consumers. Different angles

on media artifacts will produce different findings about their meaning and effects. One
particularly influential framework for conducting this research was offered by Paul du
Gay and his coauthors in their book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walk-
man (du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay, & Negus, 1997). Du Gay et al. argued that media
artifacts must be examined from different locations in order to achieve a holistic anal-
ysis. Their influential “circuit of culture” model suggested that five aspects must be
considered as part of the rigorous analysis of any cultural text or artifact: representation,
identity, production, consumption, and regulation. The circuit of culture model chal-
lenges the idea that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people
attribute to them, and provides a framework on which a radically contextualized anal-
ysis of media can be conducted.

Culture, class, and engaged cultural studies

Cultural studies has from the outset been invested in movements, groups, practices,
representations, and organizations of culture that resist, transgress, or reorganize the
dominant culture. Movements against class inequality in the 1960s, including the devel-
opment of the New Left, wrought an acute sense of the systematic inequalities and
oppressions of class society in Britain. This influenced early work in the Birmingham
School that was invested in the potential of working-class cultures to resist dominant,
hegemonic cultures. In its political commitments and its sense of itself as a scholarly
project “from below,” cultural studies was in many senses the scholarly counterpart to
the British New Left of this period, alongside the politico-cultural and academic net-
works that produced the History Workshop Journal, a journal invested in history from
below, social history, and the history of the everyday. It responded to and cultivated a
burgeoning cultural politics that went beyond institutional politics, and that nurtured
and was nurtured by a “politics of the ordinary” in workers’ organizations, second-wave
women’s liberation movements, movements for racial equality, and gay liberation poli-
tics, among other social movements.
The classical period of cultural studies from the early 1960s to the early 1980s was an
avowedly anticapitalist project. New intersections between radical literary studies and
Marxist criticism recognized the importance of historical and paraliterary questions
such as who patronizes, pays, or supports the work of a given artist or cultural producer,
who publishes and distributes their work, who has the literacy and resources to access
that work, and so on. These questions, which accompany or even precede a scrutiny of
meaning production within the text itself, were applied by cultural studies scholars to
mass media.
The relationship of Marxist ideas to cultural studies has a complex and dynamic his-
tory that has seen shifts and adjustments to both Marxist thinking and cultural studies
perspectives in something of a productive dialectic between the two. Cultural studies
was particularly influenced by new configurations of Marxism, including the ideas of
Louis Althusser on ideology and institutional structure, and especially Antonio Gram-
sci’s model of ideological hegemony. In fact, hegemony has been one of the central ideas
8 CU L T U R A L ST U D I E S

in the cultural studies repertoire. Developing Marxist ideas about the way in which
cultural forms and representations reproduce ideologies that support the interests of
the powerful, influential, or ruling economic, gender, race, or social groups, Gramsci’s
theory argued that groups assert or maintain dominance by inducing the consent of
the majority of subordinate groups to a given organization of sociopolitical life and a
given set of ideological or “commonsense” ideas about how best to live it. In addition to
dominance and force, the stability of societies is maintained, Gramsci argued, through
intellectual and moral leadership or “hegemony.” Gramsci used the metaphor of trench
warfare to explain this concept: Rather than simply dominated by one group, ideology
is in fact a contest, with different sides struggling to gain ground over a period of time.
Hegemony is lost, gained, negotiated, and won against other, competing cultural forces
and interests. For cultural studies, the contest over ideological hegemony occurs across
the gamut of human experience, in the universe of the popular and the everyday and
not just in the realms traditionally understood as “political.”
And where there is hegemony, there is counterhegemony or resistance. British cul-
tural studies began to situate the analysis of culture in models of hierarchical and antag-
onistic sets of social relationships of class, gender, race, location, sexuality, and so on,
to show not only the ways that cultural artifacts reflect and reproduce social and cul-
tural traditions of domination, but how they resist and contest these. This is partly why
Gramsci’s formulation became one of the most influential ideas for cultural studies: It
helps to highlight ruling or dominant (hegemonic) cultural and social forces as well
as (counterhegemonic) forces of resistance and contestation. For cultural studies of the
media, all media texts and processes comprise the potential for activating and resist-
ing ideological hegemonies. Television, the Internet, film, music, telecommunications,
advertising, fashion, and lifestyle imagery have been particularly fruitful sites of analy-
sis, as they offer models for ethical, lawful, and ideal living, proper and improper social
conduct, hierarchies of ethnic and racialized embodiment, normative gender roles, and
aspirational styles and dispositions for life that either resist or affirm (or simultaneously
resist and affirm!) cultural hegemonies.
Again, the self-creation of the style, dress, fashion codes, behaviors, and organiza-
tions of subcultures are a useful case in point. Dick Hebdige, for example, in Subculture:
The Meaning of Style (1979), showed how the British Mods of the 1960s cultivated self-
presentation, fashion, and style as a means to turn cultural consumption into a symbolic
struggle with the larger social system. Hebdige drew on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s struc-
turalist concept of bricolage, first used to describe how “primitive societies” organize the
available materials of the culture surrounding them in improvisational ways, to create
new meanings and rituals. Mods and other subcultures, Hebdige proposed, operated
in similar ways to distinguish themselves from the standard on offer in mainstream
identities.
Later studies in the Birmingham tradition on working-class cultures and youth
subcultures adopted ethnographic fieldwork as part of emerging cultural studies
methods. Culture in these investigations strongly resembles the concept of habitus
developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. For Bourdieu, culture refers to
people’s material resources as well as the codes and frames that they use in building
and expressing their worldview, their attitudes to life and social status. In Distinction
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(1984), a work that has had a tremendous influence in cultural studies, Bourdieu used
statistical data to identify social groupings that differ from each other in terms of
their distinctive lifestyle: taste in food, clothing, music, furniture, leisure activities,
and hobbies. The relationship between these lifestyle tastes and preferences indicate
what Bourdieu calls a “habitus,” which is characteristic of different social classes
and strata. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which stresses the learned, embodied,
and taken-for-granted aspects of cultural behaviors, usefully suggests relationships
between material practices and symbolic meanings in the practice of everyday life that
can be seen to organize people’s symbolic and material existence. People’s perceptions,
attitudes, tastes, interactions with domestic and public spaces, their general lifestyles
are all shaped by their habitus. Bourdieu’s more organic approach to the situated and
material elements of class distinction developed and diverged from Marxist ideas about
superstructure.
Bourdieu’s culturalist model of class has been influential in cultural studies for think-
ing about the organization and comprehension of groups of people beyond class, where
the idea of habitus has been a propulsive concept for theories of gender, sexuality, race,
ethnicity, nationality, and so on. His cultural class theory is an attempt to analyze the
postindustrial society of the present day, illustrating the way in which work in cultural
studies responds dynamically to the shifting conditions and circumstances of life in
contemporary culture.
During the 1970s and 1980s, British cultural studies continued to pioneer studies
of minority, marginal, or overlooked cultures. It increasingly became an intellectual
space in which to theorize the promotion of sexism, racism, and homophobia, among
other forms of oppression, and to identify ways in which resistance and struggle against
domination and injustice are practiced. “By looking at how the contemporary world has
been made to be what it is,” Larry Grossberg (2010) explains, cultural studies “attempts
to make visible ways in which it can be something else” (p. 1). A critique of cultural
formations that promote and reproduce conditions of oppression and marginalization,
and the positive affirmation of representations and practices with dispositions toward
a more egalitarian and just social order, are part of the agenda of “engaged cultural
studies.”
The Marxist emphasis on class and subculture was contested by feminists in the
late 1970s, with the Women’s Studies Group at the CCCS publishing Women Take
Issue (1978). Feminist interventions in cultural studies were “decisive” and “ruptural,”
famously asserting that the personal is political and radically expanding the notion
of power beyond its uses to describe the public domain. Feminism inaugurated an
emphasis on placing questions of gender and sexuality at the center of discussions of
culture, a project later expanded on in contributions to cultural studies from gay and
lesbian studies, and subsequently in queer and trans theories. Feminist interventions
also reasserted and radicalized the place of biography and autobiography in cultural
studies, and “re-opened” the consideration of the then “closed frontier between social
theory and the theory of the unconscious” in its interest in psychoanalysis (Stuart Hall,
quoted in During, 2001, p. 104). These reawakenings have enabled cultural studies
to grapple with topics including kinship, emotions, affect, and memory. Feminism’s
productive interventions in cultural studies have expanded the field dramatically and
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continue to do so in work on the techno-scientific, the queer, the materialist feminist,

the postfeminist, the gender performative, and the posthuman dimensions of culture,
as well as the biological and medical disciplining of humans, or what Foucault called
“biopolitics.” Influential works for feminist cultural studies have included Donna
Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity, Angela
McRobbie’s work on commodity feminism, and poststructuralist feminism’s critiques
of biological essentialism, to mention just a few. Critiques of essentialism in particular
opened a space in cultural studies for the interventions of queer theory, and the
serious consideration of sexuality as an organizing lens through which to understand
and critique culture, in addition to the critical prism of gender. Feminist cultural
studies has brought much to the project, particularly its interest in deconstruction,
Foucauldian analyses of power, and the reclamation and revision of Freudian ideas
of the unconscious, desire, pleasure, and identity. As feminist interventions have
radicalized cultural studies, so too has cultural studies radicalized and extended
feminisms—beyond second-wave Marxist/socialist models and toward the consid-
eration of race, sexuality, language, nationality, ethnicity, and the body, expanding
the intellectual horizons of feminist critique beyond the interests of Anglo-American
bourgeois feminism.
With the assertion that ordinary and everyday culture was worthy of investigation,
cultural studies worked to validate the study of a range of subjects traditionally
deemed inappropriate for serious scholarly consideration. Raymond Williams encap-
sulated this with his slogan “culture is ordinary” (1958/1993), an idea that still unites
strands of cultural studies today. The value cultural studies places on the ordinary,
the popular, the trivial, the marginal, and the otherwise “not worthy of study” has
enabled it to champion the serious examination of previously marginalized concepts
such as race, sexuality, gender, age, class, body shape, and ability—categories whose
consideration across the humanities and social sciences is now commonplace if not de
rigueur.
At times, new developments and interests in cultural studies have been accused
of bringing about a depoliticization of the enterprise. When, for example, cultural
studies began to take off as a discipline in the United States, attracting funding and
attention, Hall called for a reaffirmation of the discipline’s political commitments,
using the example of AIDS and of AIDS cultural criticism to argue for the field’s
“deadly seriousness” (quoted in During, 2001, p. 97). The focus on the subjective and
appropriative side of audience reactions to and uses of mass culture has been more
distinct in the United States, where cultural studies emerged from more pragmatic,
liberal-pluralist traditions. In later iterations of subcultural studies and its offshoots,
like fan studies, some cultural studies scholars have been accused of a depoliticized
research practice, exploiting the discipline to study their favorite soap operas and
rock bands. Nonetheless, many projects are still politically engaged, and today this
socially oriented and socially motivated cultural studies considers environmental
damage, refugee issues, Islamophobia, new sexisms and racisms, movements of people
and migration, neoliberalism, homophobia, and animals rights, among other areas
linked to minorities, minority cultures, marginalization, social movements, and social
change.
 CU L T U R A L ST U D I E S 11

Cultural studies practitioners have thus tended to view their work as part of an eman-
cipatory project, as a form of intellectual resistance that works not only to erode the
traditional disciplinary institutions of research and higher education, but also to expose,
question, and challenge relations of power in society and the inherited or presumed
value of certain life practices, objects, and artifacts. The major work of cultural studies
was and is still to a large extent considered a project of political intervention. It empha-
sizes that the practices and symbols of everyday life must not be treated in isolation from
questions of power and politics, and that individuals enjoy disparate levels of access to
education, economic and cultural capital, and material resources like healthcare; it has
tended to focus its work on those who have the least access.

The polysemic is political: Meaning in representation,

artifacts, and practices

Throughout its history, cultural studies has been concerned with the understanding and
mediation of social life through meaning-production and interpretation. Drawing from
and supplementing work in linguistics, semiotics, sociolinguistics, and literary struc-
turalism, it has placed a strong emphasis on the symbolic codes of textual expression
and interpretation. In the traditions of semiotics, particularly the theory of language
offered by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, cultural studies has sought to question
the supposedly straightforward relationship between the linguistic signifiers and their
references in the real material world “outside” of language. Classical cultural studies
combined this work with influential emerging ideas in the critique of media and visual
culture, particularly Roland Barthes’ structuralist analyses of the codes and mytholo-
gies embedded in popular culture, Guy Debord’s work on the “intense accumulation of
spectacles” in media culture, and Marshall McLuhan’s work on the “tribal,” immersive,
aesthetic experience of media culture. The Birmingham tradition combined these new,
post-Frankfurt School approaches to studying the media with neo-Marxist approaches
to consider the reception of newspapers, radio, film, and other mass media among
audiences.
Cultural studies, however, has been heavily influenced by poststructuralist thought,
which adjusts structuralist linguistics and semiotics, approaches that view culture as
an ordered system or structure of coded meanings produced and reproduced through
social interaction. Though patterns of meaning are a crucial starting point for analysis
in cultural studies, there is something of a tension between the structuralist idea that
the meanings of a text can be traced back to fundamental and underlying character-
istics of the social structure, and the cultural studies emphasis on the production of
specific meanings generated in specific social and cultural situations by particular, his-
torically located social beings (Boyd-Barrett & Newbold, 1995, p. 330). A key aspect of
the theories and methods offered by cultural studies is the view that “meaning” is not an
inherent quality of certain objects, symbols, or beings; it is not a stamp with which we
can label certain objects. Reality is socially constructed through meanings, interpreta-
tions, and rules of interpretation (codes) on the basis of which people orient themselves
in the world and in everyday life.
12 CU L T U R A L ST U D I E S

Hall’s influential essay “Encoding/Decoding” (1973) was a key moment in the consol-
idation of cultural studies’ interest in the ways that different audiences understood and
interpreted—generated—rather than discovered meanings. His essay challenged earlier
empirical models in several ways: It suggested that meanings are not fixed or stable and
cannot therefore be controlled or fixed by the “sender”; the message is never completely
transparent; the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning. Within cultural stud-
ies it is emphasized not that meanings structure people, but that people use and apply
meaning systems, cultural distinctions, models, schemes, and interpretive repertoires
in their efforts to make sense of the world and to act within it. Perhaps most influen-
tially, Hall concluded the “Encoding/Decoding” essay by sketching three ways in which
audiences may “decode” media, hence providing a theoretical model for the ways in
which audiences interpret culture. These three ways are: the dominant-hegemonic posi-
tion, in which the reader interprets the text in line with both the dominant social order
and the dominant meanings encoded in the text by its producers; the negotiated posi-
tion, in which the reader/receiver adopts a contradictory or paradoxical position of both
adopting and opposing the dominant ideological or textual codes; and the oppositional
reading, in which the reader is able to self-consciously recognize the dominant cultural
code and oppose it.
Two further concepts have been central to cultural studies’ ability to consider how
groups with little power develop their own attachments, meanings, and uses of culture.
Polysemy, another term derived from semiotics, describes the way in which particu-
lar signifiers always have multiple meanings, because meaning is an effect of difference
within a larger system. Though meanings are often delimited by a range of other fac-
tors, the polysemy of mass culture has been an enabling idea for practitioners interested
in the way in which cultural production can “belong” to different users and audiences
in different ways. The concept of negotiation (or, sometimes, hybridization and repro-
duction) develops this idea of how particular individuals or communities can actively
create new meanings from signs and cultural products. The idea of resistant or negoti-
ated meanings began to flourish particularly in early cultural studies of television.
The polysemic nature of meaning systems is also accounted for in Michel Foucault’s
concept of discourse, which became popular in cultural studies as a means to think about
the relationship between power, knowledge, and language, and to think historically and
genealogically about cultural formations. Cultural studies was increasingly influenced
by the forms of thought associated with French theorists, in particular Bourdieu, Michel
de Certeau, and Foucault from the 1970s, which brought the concepts of discourse,
fields, and imaginaries into cultural studies. “Discourse” seeks to unravel the juxtapo-
sition between reality and conceptions of reality: It refers both to meaning systems and
to practices of entire institutions and organizations. French theory has contributed a
range of productive concepts to cultural studies, particularly for the analysis of everyday
life. Foucault’s approach to power as a productive rather than an exclusively repressive,
coercive force brought cultural studies a set of new grammars for analyzing resistance to
and negotiation of culturally dominant forms, including “transgressive” undermining
or “festive” overturning of routines and hierarchies through passive resistance, ironi-
cal mimicry, symbolic inversion, orgiastic letting go, even daydreaming (During, 2001,
p. 10).
 CU L T U R A L ST U D I E S 13

Contemporary cultural studies

From the 1980s onwards, British cultural studies became increasingly concerned
with critiques of Thatcherism, New Right politics, and those systems reproducing a
social imaginary generated by market-oriented media. The critique of Thatcherism
gave way to a more capacious investigation of the material and symbolic intersections
of economics and politics in what has become known as neoliberalism, a political,
economic, and cultural category that has come to dominate the imagination of cultural
studies scholars, as it has evolved to become the dominant global economic and
political paradigm. The internationalizing of cultural studies is linked to this critique
of New Right politics, globalization, and neoliberalism, particularly because these
categories helped cultural studies expand its analysis from British working-class
culture to other axes beyond class, including racism, sexism, and the culture industry,
which have possessed a wider appeal. Present-day cultural studies is an international
movement with wide-ranging traditions in different places; Britain no longer serves as
its intellectual home, and cultural studies has been exported to other, predominantly
English-speaking locations, including the United States, Canada, and Australia.
The field’s critique of culture, power, and meaning in representation and practices
has provided the basis for a variety of other interests that have moved into the cul-
tural studies agenda, including geographies of meaning in the spaces of cities, nations,
and imagined relationships between nations and cultures, like the East and the West.
A turn to the impact of cultural and media imperialism and globalization in the 1990s
drew heavily on assessments of contemporary media and culture using the idea of post-
modernity. While remaining interested in class and subculture, cultural studies has
turned its critical gaze to numerous other areas, including technology, the body, sex and
sexuality, the flows of globalization, time and history, utopia and dystopia, modernity
and the present, colonialism and postcolonialism, terrorism, religion, affect, and emo-
tions. The environment, new structures of belonging, militarism and violence, changing
practices of knowledge production and consumption in the brave new world of ubiq-
uitous digital technologies, Web 2.0, mobile media, and social media have also claimed
the field’s attention.
In recent years, certain practitioners of cultural studies have called for the codifi-
cation of the discipline as a means of revealing a new kind of identity for it. Cultural
studies’ traditional broadness of methods and of theoretical models has both positive
and negative implications: While it enables cultural studies to respond dynamically and
flexibly to the shifting concerns, technologies, political movements, and structural orga-
nizations of contemporary global cultures on the one hand—what Toby Miller calls a
“nimble, hybrid” approach’ (2015, p. 7)—on the other, it means that cultural studies
always struggles to define itself, and, sometimes, to assert its validity and singularity
in an increasingly interdisciplinary university and humanities research context, which
is itself partly the result of the influence and interventions of cultural studies over the
past half-century. In a sense, cultural studies has fallen victim to the success of its own
interventions. Some practitioners are now striving toward what they view as more intel-
lectual and methodological codification in cultural studies, and a more defined set of
procedures and objects for its analysis. In some of the places it is practiced, the “fiercely
14 CU L T U R A L ST U D I E S

undisciplined” field of cultural studies, as Graeme Turner (2012) has described it, is
working to establish firmer institutional roots to ensure the long-term viability of its
projects.

SEE ALSO: Bourdieu, Pierre; Critical Theory; Culture; Foucault, Michel; Gramsci,
́
Antonio; Levi-Strauss, Claude; Marxism; Political Economy; Poststructuralism;
Semiotics; Structuralism

References and further readings

Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (1944/2002). Dialectic of enlightenment. Trans. E. Jephcott.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bennett, T. (1983). Marxist cultural politics: In search of “the popular”. Australian Journal of
Cultural Studies, 1, 2–28.
Boyd-Barrett, O., & Newbold, C. (1995). Approaches to media: A reader. London, UK: Edward
Arnold.
du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackay, H., & Negus, K. (1997). Doing cultural studies: The story of
the Sony Walkman. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University.
During, S. (Ed.). (2001). The cultural studies reader (2nd ed.). London, UK: Routledge.
Frow, J., & Morris, M. (1993). Introduction. In M. Morris & J. Frow (Eds.), Australian cultural
studies: A reader (pp. vii–xxxii). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. Ed. and trans. Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-
Smith. London, UK: Lawrence & Wishart.
Grossberg, L. (1993). Can cultural studies find true happiness in communication? Journal of
Communication, 43(4), 89–97.
Grossberg, L. (2010). Cultural studies in the future tense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hall, S. (1960). Introducing New Left Review. New Left Review, 1(1), 1–3.
Hall, S. (1971). Introduction. Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1, 5–7.
Hall, S. (Ed.). (1980). Culture, media, language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79.
London, UK: Unwin Hyman in association with CCCS.
Meenakshi, G. D., & Kellner, D. M. (Eds.). (2001). Media and cultural studies: Keyworks. Oxford,
UK: Blackwell.
Miller, T. (Ed.). (2015). Introduction: Globally popular culture. In T. Miller (Ed.), The Routledge
companion to global popular culture (pp. 1–10). New York, NY: Routledge.
Procter, J. (2004). Stuart Hall. Routledge critical thinkers. London, UK: Routledge.
Smith, R. (2011). The renewal of cultural studies. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Turner, G. (1990). British cultural studies: An introduction. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.
Turner, G. (2012). What’s become of cultural studies? London, UK: Sage.
Williams, R. (1958/1993). Culture is ordinary. In A. Gray and J. McGuigan (Eds.), Studies in
culture: An introductory reader (pp. 5–14). London, UK: Edward Arnold.
Williams, R. (1961). The long revolution. London, UK: Chatto & Windus.

Dion Kagan is an early-career researcher from Melbourne, Australia, who has lectured
in screen and cultural studies and gender studies at the University of Melbourne and
in critical sexuality studies at the Australian Research Centre in Sex Health and Soci-
ety (ARCSHS), La Trobe University. His research is interested in the representation of
 CU L T U R A L ST U D I E S 15

sexualities across film, literature, TV, and Internet culture, with a focus on shifting cul-
tures of male homosexuality and HIV/AIDS. His book Positive Images: Gay Men and
HIV/AIDS in the Culture of “Post-Crisis” is forthcoming.