EDU5704 Reading 1.2

EDU5704 Popular Culture as Curriculum and Pedagogy

Reading 1.2: McRobbie, A. (1994). Postmodernism and popular culture. Routledge, London: UK

The course material (p. 23) highlights McRobbie defining agency, and that through agency people in this postmodern age are active decision makers when it comes to media consumption:

Social agency is deployed in the activation of all meanings. Audiences or viewers, lookers or users are not simple-minded multitudes. As the media extends its sphere of influence, so also does it come under the critical surveillance and usage of its subjects. 

(Incidentally as a parent I don’t lament the introduction of Bratz dolls – as do the course notes – but rather celebrate them as a preferable alternative to Barbie dolls.)

As a novice sociology journeyman, I initially struggled to find the relevance or personal reality of McRobbie’s linking of postmodernism to feminism, to produce what she refers to as feminist postmodernism. Perhaps it is my ‘youngling’ status in the –ologies and the naivety that arises from it, or a certain alleged chromosomal deficit, or even simply that the reading is now dated in terms of the evolution of postmodernism as a movement – if, in fact, it exists as such. I appreciated, at least, that McRobbie defined her ‘angle’ (‘bias’ being too strong a word for this professionally stated perspective) up-front and then spoke to it, rather than disguising it as a different beast. She queries the impacts on feminism when confronted with “difference and fragmentation, [when it] finds itself under attack from women who want to state their difference” (p. 6) and whether post-feminism has a place in sociology. To my inexperienced and uninvolved eye, the framing of these questions and the response to them – which easily exchanges feminism with the state of being a modern woman – suggests an alternate agenda. The confusion for me as a male observer is that the majority of women I interact with in professional and social settings seem to have a diminishing investment or engagement with feminism in its classical definition, and the majority argue confidently that they feel empowered and enabled in today’s society, possibly to a ‘higher level’ than the men around them as a result of genuine change, or less commonly through – a phrase I particularly despise – ‘positive discrimination’. Perhaps this is merely a reflection of my particular circumstance, or that I am unqualified to make such an observation.

To risk contention and oversimplification, McRobbie’s article seems to question whether modernism is more empowering – and therefore of greater value – to a hardcore feminist agenda than is postmodernism, as in a postmodernist society ‘modern women’ are empowered to the degree that – at least to them – modernist feminism has ‘done the job’ and is now of less societal value. She describes “the experience of young women for whom feminism, as we know, is not necessarily the political space they choose, even if they feel and express a desire to achieve equality” (p. 9); however, with at least a casual reading, she seems threatened by the ‘young women’ who feel they have achieved equality.

McRobbie states the need for “what emerges from between feminism and femininity, and we have to attend to the inventiveness of women as they create new social categories, some of which cause grave concern on the part of the social order” (emphasis added, p. 8). I, for one, greatly celebrate that which emerges between feminism and femininity, in the same manner in which I aspire to be a strong, masculine man with great respect for all people without regard to their ‘emancipation status’. I’m also deeply curious about apparent feminist concern surrounding the impact of femininity on social order.

As part of my academic discovery I continue to explore the following questions on equality and modernity, given McRobbie’s argument that “modernity … provided the spaces for a discourse of freedom, emancipation and equality to emerge” (p. 6).

Question 1: In the discourse of freedom, emancipation and equality, does indifference necessarily infer an acceptance of slavery and bondage? What about indifference by a member of a minority group?

Question 2: As a middle-aged white Caucasian male, can I understand what it means to be of a minority group that is or has historically been enslaved, marginalised, or otherwise disenfranchised?

Within her introduction I struggled to identify whether feminism is the point, or whether a discourse on feminism was simply an example as the vehicle for a broader exploration of postmodernism – and while I am still uncertain on this distinction, the distinction itself quickly became less relevant as I worked through the reading.

McRobbie describes postmodernism as art and culture that is “stripped of its old hidden elitist difficulty” (p. 2) and a culture that “refuse[s] to take itself seriously” (p. 3) but which is not “a forgetfulness or abandonment of politics, [but rather can] force us to reconsider the foundations of our modern thought” (p. 3). I find great tension in this study of postmodernism in its own inability to define itself, offering instead an almost Zen-like mystical response of “it’s what you choose it to be, as long as your definition is in reaction to modernism”, or more commonly, a carefully unspoken yet clearly implied response that to seek a clear definition is to have somehow childishly missed the point, to have become by default that dreaded thing that is a semiologist. As a scientist I am sceptical of a field that is itself elitist, and faux-mystical in its elitism, but perhaps I shall still “find the light”.

I am curious about McRobbie’s focus on Sontag’s work on gay men and their creation of culture, and that culture subsequently becoming ‘main-stream’ (for all the offence that such a distinction between ‘gay’ and ‘main-stream’ would cause my homosexual friends). A later exploration in the reading focuses on pastiche as an art form, and I believe that ‘camp’ culture (as used by McRobbie, p. 4, and Sontag, 1967) is far more pastiche than it is original. I am inevitably driven to wonder if the author is exhibiting the same need for legitimacy and validation for gay culture as postmodernism seems to crave for its own existence. McRobbie’s statement that “to lament the decline of full wholesome subjectivity is literally to cast aspersions on unwholesome, un(in)formed, partial and hybridic identities” (p. 4) clashes almost violently against my perspective and experience as an evolved and accepting individual, despite my white, middle-aged heterosexuality – although I acknowledge this may be in part because the article is from another (perhaps ‘bygone’) decade and that the particular Australian sociological landscape I inhabit may not be indicatively ‘main-stream’.

In McRobbie’s examination of Baudrillard’s work on “the disavowal of fictions, narratives and stories, with the growth of the age of science, reason and the enlightenment, [disguising] the fact that these were constructed within great overarching narratives and stories”, and “bigger [stories] of conquest, decimation and militarization” (p. 5), I believe I start to find my first glimpses of light, my first dawnings of understanding. I start to realise that perhaps the significant shift from modernism to postmodernism – as expressed through popular culture – is the shift to the micro-story; the story of “me”, of the voice of the individual.

I shall explore this glimmer of light further.