Identity and Power
This is not fixed; it is constructed, performed, and shaped by culture, society, and lived experience.
What is "identity"?
The process by which dominant groups maintain power through cultural consent, not physical force.
What is "hegemony"?
This is Wendy Griswold's model showing the connection between culture and meaning-making.
What is the "cultural diamond"?
In semiotics, the form of a word or image.
What is "the signifier"?
This term describes how identities overlap and combine to create distinct experiences of privilege and discrimination.
What is "intersectionality"?
This analogy shows how we are often blind to the cultural assumptions shaping our own worldview.
What is "the fishbowl analogy"?
According to Stuart Hall, producers _______ messages and audiences _______ them.
What is "encode" and "decode"?
The emotional or cultural associations attached to a sign.
What is "connotation"?
What are "structural, economic, and cultural"?
The concept that describes how non-dominant communities use pop culture to resist, challenge, and reimagine dominant narratives.
What is "counter-hegemony"?
Name and describe the three reading positions, as theorized by Stuart Hall.
Dominant / Hegemonic: The audience fully accepts the producer's intended meaning.
Negotiated: The audience broadly accepts the message but adapts or modifies parts of it based on their own social context.
Oppositional: The audience fully rejects the intended meaning and substitutes a reading based on entirely different values.
Developed by Claude Steele, this concept describes anxiety about confirming a negative stereotype.
What is "stereotype threat"?
Explain how pop culture both reflects and reinforces identity.
Pop culture defines who is “normal” vs. “other,” reinforcing group boundaries and unequal access to power/resources, which then reinforce stereotypes and representation in media.
Name the two "Schools" and their main differences.
What are the "Frankfurt School" and the "Birmingham School"?
The Frankfurt School: The "culture industry" produces commercially standardized content that serves elite interests and pacifies the working class.
The Birmingham School: Audiences are not passive -- they decode media in ways that may accept, negotiate, or resist the intended message.
Name the four parts of Wendy Griswold's Cultural Diamond and what this model tells us about pop culture and identity.
What are "Cultural Object, Creator, Receiver, and Social World"?
All four elements are connected -- meaning is not made by any single element in isolation.
Pop culture shapes identity through these connections: who creates, for whom, under what conditions, and in what historical moment.
Name/describe the five steps for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).
1. Surface: The immediate, literal content -- what is said or shown
2. Language & Symbols: Word choice, visual codes, tone, metaphors -- how it is said
3. Identity & Representation: Who is centered, who is marginalized, how social groups are portrayed
4. Power: Who benefits? Whose perspective is normalized? What ideologies are reinforced?
5. Cultural Context (Big Picture): The broader social, historical, and political context shaping the artifact