Page 138 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

MASS CULTURE

• The apparent teleology intrinsic to it, that is, the positing of an inevitable point
to which history is moving (that is, the demise of capitalism and the arrival of
a classless society).
• The determinism and reductionism inherent in some readings of Marxism by 115
which culture is to be explained by reference to the workings of the economy.
• The apparent success of capitalism, not merely its survival but its
transformation and expansion.
• The failure of proletarian revolutions to occur on a widespread scale and to
generate classless societies where they have transpired.

Links Base and superstructure, capitalism, class, cultural materialism, ideology, post-
Marxism, reductionism

Masculinity An identity category that refers to the cultural characteristics associated
with being a man. That is, masculinity is a discursive-performative construction that
describes and disciplines the cultural meaning of being a man. Masculinity is not
an essential quality of embodied subjects but a matter of representation, that is,
masculinity is constituted by ways of speaking about and disciplining bodies. As
such, masculinity is a site of continual political struggle over meaning in the
context of multiple modes of being a man.
In Western culture the current period may be the first time in which some men
are seeing themselves as possessing a problematic ‘masculinity’. The sense that
masculinity is not an unchanging given of nature has sparked a growing research
interest into men and masculinity. This work has focused on cultural
representations of men and masculinity, the character of men’s lives as they
experience them and the problems that men face in contemporary culture.
Traditional masculinity has encompassed the values of strength, power, stoicism,
action, control, independence, self-sufficiency, camaraderie and work amongst
others. Devalued were relationships, verbal ability, domestic life, tenderness,
communication, women and children. In particular, the contemporary male
concern with metaphors of reason, control and distance is an instantiation of wider
discourses of masculinity circulated in the context of modernity.
These traditional values of masculinity may no longer be serving men well and
a number of critics now talk about a ‘crisis of masculinity’. A very substantial
number of men in the West are at some point in their lives implicated in depression,
suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, violence and crime. Some of the problems men face
can be understood to be an outcome of the incompatibility between ascendant
notions of masculinity and that which is required to live contentedly in the
contemporary social world. It has been argued that the central problems of men’s
lives are rooted in the adoption of impossible images of masculinity that men try,
but fail, to live up to.
Links Identity, femininity, gender, men’s movement, representation, sex, subjectivity

Mass culture Mass culture is a pejorative term developed by both conservative literary
critics and Marxist theorists from the 1930s onwards to suggest the inferiority of