Feminism and Pop Culture, Andi Zeisler, Seal Studies, 2008.
Andi Zeisler, cofounder of Bitch Magazine, has written a useful and concise primer on feminism and US mass media. At 150 pages of text, it is necessarily brief and very purposefully accessible to untutored readers. That is what makes it quite useful.
Feminist theorizing about representation in popular culture, led by film theorists, and elaborated on by performance theorists and other semioticians has a well-deserved reputation for its abstract and difficult-to-understand language. One needs a guide and an initiation into that body of knowledge. This is not a criticism of the feminist theorizing of the images of women over the last 30 years or so. That work has created worlds through its development of new concepts and ways of thinking. But a new way in for the uninitiated is a welcomed development. Certainly, this is not a replacement for the heavier theoretical work, but a map that can help to navigate it. Like any introduction, it should serve as the first, not the last word on the subject.
This is a book that can serve in an introductory women’s studies class, or even a first year composition class. It has Questions for Discussion and Topics for Research at the end that lend themselves to classroom or other group settings. It is just as useful, and perhaps more relevant for someone reading on their own—enough on its own to start to make sense of the contradictory gender codes that make up mass media.
Zeisler does a nice job of maintaining the complexity of the ambivalent impulses at work in popular culture without oversimplifying. The book introduces and lightly touches upon a wide variety of media, including advertising, music, music video, television shows, films, and magazines. One of her basic points is that popular culture is not a force for evil or for good for the politics of feminism or in the lives of women. It can never be reduced that way—and she spins a tight narrative that explores the reasons we are both seduced and repelled by the stories mass media tell us about gender. It is all in the context of changing feminist politics—especially insightful is her take on the characterization of the ‘sex wars’ and their place in the popular stories told about feminism, and the contentious place of ‘third-wave feminism’ in popular culture.
This book is part of a series by Seal Studies that include the titles: A History of U.S. Feminisms by Rory Dicker (May 2008), and Transgender History by Susan Stryker (May 2008) and the forthcoming Men and Feminism by Shira Tarrant (May 2009). They all come in at 150 pages and introduce the reader to basic feminist frames outside of academic language and style. That is a turn-off to some and an entrée to others. I think the series though, is an important political move toward access and inclusion. And at least as important, it speaks to ways that these topics have become part of a necessary cultural literacy—topics influential enough to be boiled down to essentials for casual readers, from a body of knowledge wide enough and deep enough to boil down.