a mash-up of online lectures originally given/discussed in my Politics of Sex class (February 28, 2011 and March 9, 2011), combined with a worksheet distributed in my Pop Culture Woman class (2007)
Making the Normal Strange
Here’s a passage from Codes of Gender that I think fits with our class and our earlier discussions about being cultural critics and critical thinkers:
And this may be [Erving] Goffman’s most lasting contribution – to help us question what we’re told is normal or natural, when it may just as well be destructive or unjust. While these representations may look normal – in that they don’t look strange to us – we have to remember that they communicate powerful ideas surrounding femininity and masculinity. And while the gender displays have been around for some time, the fact is that they have been chosen for prominence. And this means that the ideas they communicate come from someone’s imagination. Images do not fall from heaven fully formed. They are the creations of human beings. People are behind the cameras giving instructions. There is no such thing as a neutral or natural image. As one ad very tellingly states: “Our fantasies, your realities.”
All images are authored by someone, and it is up to us whether we choose to participate passively in the worlds that are created for us by meekly accepting the ideas behind them, and reinforcing them through our silence, or whether we choose to engage the world actively by recognizing what is happening and not reinforce it – question it, point out how strange normality can actually be. It’s only when you make something strange and unacceptable that you have any chance of changing it, any chance of intervening into that social process. And that was the main point of Goffman’s analysis – to make what was invisible visible, so that we have a choice to make about how we want to participate in the worlds we inhabit.
Codes of Gender
Controlling Images
Controlling Images: In “Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images,” Patricia Hill Collins describes how “controlling images are designed to make racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life” (69).
Motivated Representations
Motivated Representations: bell hooks writes: “What does it mean that media has such control of our imaginations that they don’t want to accept that there are conscious manipulations taking place and that in fact, we want to reserve particularly for the arena of movie making [or production of advertisements] a certain sense of magic? A certain sense that reality is being documented…” (cultural criticism and transformation).
Here’s one more take on the impact of some “controlling images” and “motivated representations” on different women from Jean Kilbourne’sKilling Us Softly, part 4.
Organized and Controlled
I think that part of the power of cultural criticism and cultural studies has been its sort of political intervention as a force in American society to say, there really is a conscious manipulation of representations and it’s not about magical thinking, it’s not about pure imagination, creativity, it’s about people consciously knowing what kinds of images will produce a certain kind of impact.
bell hooks, Cultural Criticism and Transformation
Heterosexuality is just not natural! It is socially organized and controlled. To understand how we give meaning to one of our major institutions is to participate as a critical consumer and citizen actively engaged in the production of cultural and the social order
Ingraham, “Thinking Straight,” 81
How to be a Cultural Critic in 6 steps
Download worksheet.
STEP ONE: We must recognize the power of the media to influence our attitudes and behaviors…
STEP TWO: We need to start thinking critically about what we see and hear instead of just taking those images and sounds for granted…
STEP THREE: We need to ask questions about the damaging ideologies that these images/sounds perpetuate…
STEP FOUR: …recognize our participation in that perpetuation by critically interrogating our own complicated relationship to media as critics and consumers…

STEP FIVE: …and learn how to resist being seduced by the images and sounds that bombard us every day.
STEP SIX: Finally, we must channel our frustration and anger about the damaging images/sounds that media communicate into a nuanced analysis of media.