Page 111 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

homologies in the way that the cultural theorist does; nevertheless, the creativity
and cultural responses of groups are not random but expressive of social
contradictions. Thus subcultures are said to live out important criticisms and
88 insights into contemporary capitalism and its culture. They ‘understand’ in the logic
of cultural action something of their own conditions of existence. Indeed, the
concept of homology, crossed with that of bricolage, was to play a significant part
in cultural studies’ seminal work on youth cultures whereby the creative, expressive
and symbolic work of subcultures was read as a form of resistance. Thus, the boots,
braces, cropped hair, Stayprest shirts and Ska music of Skinheads in the late 1960s
and 1970s was grasped as a stylistic symbolic bricolage that communicated the
hardness of working class masculinity and resonated with the group’s situated social
relations in a homological unity.
Links Bricolage, resistance, structure, style, subculture, symbolic, youth culture

hooks, bell – aka Gloria Watkins (1952– ) hooks is an African American feminist
writer whose thinking is centrally concerned with the intersections of class, gender
and race in culture and politics. Political engagement and a certain polemically
oriented non-academic style of writing that has pedagogic and interventionist
objectives mark her work. She is critical of ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’,
a phrase that echoes a concern with the abuses of male power in the context of both
race and class in the contemporary United States. Thus she has been critical of both
white middle class feminism and black men’s oppression of black women. She is a
prolific and eclectic writer whose recent work has explored rap music, film, black
‘folk’ culture, African American politics and the character of teaching and learning.
• Associated concepts Capitalism, class, gender, patriarchy, popular culture, race.
• Tradition(s) Cultural studies, feminism, Marxism.
• Reading hooks, b. (1990) Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics Boston, MA:
South End Press.

Humanism A general term for the philosophical view that places unified human
beings at the centre of any understanding of the universe. More specifically,
humanism posits the existence of an ‘inner core’ as the source of meaning and
action as theorized by Descartes in his famous phrase ‘I think therefore I am’. Thus,
for humanism we are understood to be unique and whole persons endowed with
the capacities of reason, consciousness and agency. Here the rational, conscious
individual subject is placed at the heart of Western philosophy and culture. In
putting the human being at the centre of meaning and action, humanism displaces
God and religion from their traditional pre-modern location at the heart of the
universe. As such, humanism partakes of the Enlightenment philosophy of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but cannot be simply identified with it since
humanism is arguably the ascendant attitude of contemporary common sense.
In placing human beings at the centre of culture, humanism could be seen as
encouraging the individualism that is so much a marker of contemporary Western
social life. Thus, conceiving of the person in the style of humanism is not simply