Page 167 - Decoding Culture

160 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

Gender and cultural studies

How, then, can we summarize the effect of feminist sensibilities on
the cultural studies project? First of all, at a practical level feminism
made women 'visible' to cultural studies, just as it did in so many of
the social sciences and humanities. The importance of that is not to
be underestimated. However prominent a topic of study women
may be today, it is worth recalling quite how invisible they were
before feminism made its presence felt. The sociology into which
I was educated in the first half of the 1960s, for example, paid little
attention to women, except in very specific areas and in very lim­
ited ways, and this continued to be the case even as sociology
garnered its reputation for political radicalism as the decade pro­
gressed. In addition to the practical achievement of pushing
women into the foreground of scholarly attention, feminism also
promoted the cause of gender theory. To see the significance of
women as a topic of study was also to recognize that gender was a
much neglected, but nevertheless fundamental, feature of all social
and cultural analysis. In cultural studies this meant both examining
gendered culture, cultural products that were differentially associ­
ated with men and women, and examining gender in culture.
Although the former has been crucial - witness the studies of
women's cultural forms considered in the last section - it is
arguable that the diffusion of a gender awareness throughout the
emerging theories and methods of cultural studies has finally had
the more pervasive influence.
Turning, therefore, to these more theoretical matters, this chap­
ter's discussion suggests three broad areas in which feminism has
had a lasting impact on the practice of cultural studies: theories of
spectatorship; theories of the interrelation of ideology, reading and
resistance; theories of (gendered) pleasure and (gender) identity.
The first of the three emerges from the gendered spectatorship

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