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political statements cannot be communicated in a language that lacks the
ring of posterity, and therefore that political sentiments, to be persuasive,
require trained intellects or populist rhetoricians." If shopping centers
were for an earlier generation of Marxists symbols of the fetishism of
commodities, then contemporary advocates of cultural studies, such as
Meaghan Morris, find them "overwhelmingly and constitutively para–
doxical," embodying uniformity on the one hand and, on the other, a
tendency to "dissolve at anyone point into a fluidity and indeterminacy
that might suit any philosopher's delirium of an abstract femininity ..." If
Rambo can be seen as little more than a money-maker, he also repre–
sents, argues William Warner, the vulnerability of the American male at a
time when masculinity is being brought into question; besides, as Douglas
Kellner writes, he has "long hair, a head-band, eats only natural foods ...
is close to nature, and is hostile toward bureaucracy, the state, and tech–
nology ..."
Enthusiasts for cultural studies are the first to admit that popular cul–
ture is not always pretty; its images can be violent, pornographic, racist,
and militarist, doing real harm to real people. But popularity must be re–
spected for its own sake; if a product sells, there must be something to it.
There is, in this sympathy for the popular, an element of realism; unlike
some feminists against pornography, who simply want to wish away an
ugliness they do not like (and who, according to Ross, therefore sound
like the Cold War intellectuals of a previous generation), writers in the
tradition of cultural studies are more likely to try and discover why por–
nography has appeal - and not just to men.
Doing this, however, often requires rather complicated gymnastics.
And, truth be told, cultural studies stumbled badly. To claim, as endless
writers in this tradition do, that Madonna serves feminist goals by chal–
lenging the border between masculine and feminine represents little more
than celebrity envy.
It
is a short step from that position to sympathy for
sado-masochism or even the argument of Shannon Bell, who finds that
feminist critics of prostitution, the ultimate form of women's degradation,
silence prostitutes by insisting on a difference between licit and illicit sex.
Perhaps the most painful example of the inability of cultural studies to
deal with ugliness is bell hook's treatment of "gangsta rap." Feminists
must be "bold and fierce" in their condemnation of black rapsters who
preach violence against women, she claims. But we should also recognize
that the white power structure has an interest in having black music "stir
up controversy to appeal to audiences." Gangsta rappers are just dupes of
the machinations of white elites. Therefore, as hooks inelegantly con–
cludes, "our feminist critiques of black male sexism fail as meaningful
political interventions if they seek to demonize black males, and do not
