Date: Sun, 20 Jul 1997 11:13:45 -0400 (EDT)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-FEM: Popular culture


David wrote:

> Here are two resources for those who share my twisted
> interests or (like Mal) are just plain wicked.

> [1] Kismaric, Carol and Marvin Heiferman, "Growing Up With
>     Dick and Jane: Learning and Living the American Dream,"
>     (c)1996, ISBN 0-00-649246-0.

>     This one is sort of in the spirit of Stephanie Coontz's
>     "The Way We Never Were," except this is just the "Dick
>     and Jane" readers of Scott, Foresman and Co., which scores
>     of millions of young North Americans used to learn both
>     reading and socially appropriate behaviors.

I find it curious that you, on the one hand, call interest in popular
culture "twisted" or "wicked" and, on the other, say (correctly, in my view) 
that it is an important vehicle for teaching socially appropriate behaviors.
If culture has this kind of role, then does it not warrant interest?

It seems to me that any revolutionary political movement has to concern itself
with the possibilities (and impossibilities) of non-mainstream "popular 
cultures" as vehicles for questioning, contestation, analysis, organizing,
thinking about what is to be done and teaching each other how to do it.
In other words, for learning socially appropriate behaviors. 

What are the available means?  Some obvious non-answers: 35mm film, Broadway
musicals.  Some answers warranting thought: music, cartoons, the Net, video. 
Would it be possible to create a serious non-mainstream video culture?

A more "wicked" bemusement on my part is why popular culture changes.  By this
I mean: why is it, for example, that Hollywood now makes films that deal with
homosexuality, and in a manner that is on the side of "understanding and
tolerance"?  Why are there now, for example, no Hollywood films that are
rabidly anti-homosexual?  And why deal with the subject at all?  An obvious
answer is that popular culture is a means of quelling fires before they start,
and it does so by presenting as resolvable or already resolved whatever 
social contradictions come to the foreground.  So its main lesson, then, would
be that there are no real contradictions except those described by the sigh
"such is life".  On the other hand, we all agree that it does also teach
_behavior_.  So does it, for example, teach tolerance?  Does Madonna, as Matt 
has ventured, teach a new feminine morality? 


-m