Pop Culture and the Curriculum

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<snip>

As someone who has given an award winning 
paper on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as retroactive female heroine - in which I 
compared storylines to several canonized texts from the Middle Ages, 
Victorian, and American Romantic periods - I cannot help but say back to 
Katha - I have studied the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, I speak 4 
languages fluently (5 if you count American sign), and I have both read and 
taught a plethora of books from before 1500 some of which appeared in my 
Buffy paper.  Don't misread this, I am not the NYU professor Katha so easily 
dismissed but I could have been.  And I mention my credentials vis-a-vis 
Katha's attempts to decredential such a scholar because I want those of you 
who have taken position one above to think long and hard about the 
assumptions embedded in that position.  Has it really been so long since the 
"culture wars" in academia when feminist scholars objected to the absence of 
women in the canon? the absence of women in history courses? not to mention 
the absence of people of color?  Do we really still believe that T.S. Elliot 
is inherently gifted and the author of Nancy Drew is not?  Why not?  I 
studied Elliot's poems in high school (as well as the Koran) and I do not 
doubt his talent.  But I have also read Nancy Drew, and all though she may 
not be on my personal list of high literature, when I sit down to teach a 
class on the changing female heroine in literature Nancy Drew strikes me as 
far more appropriate.

Next semester I will be teaching a course on Global Sexualities.  We will 
look at Greco-Roman poetry and art, contemporary films like Show Me Love and 
Hsung, read novels by Hall, Woolf, alongside lesbian detective novels, the 
Bat Girl comic strip, and the L Word, the Hunger, and Workout.  We will 
discuss these texts alongside theories of race, class, sexuality, and 
ability written by both comtemporary and classic theorists - most of whom, 
if they are from the West, are in the canon.  Students will be asked to 
write one historical essay and one contemporary one.  They will also be 
asked to move across disciplines, theories, and concepts.  The goal of the 
course is to understand the ways in which identity is formed publicly and 
privately and how the state, the community, and the individual police the 
boundaries of such a culture over time.  If I want my students to understand 
the so-called "power lesbian" I cannot assign Sappho.  If I want them to 
understand how the "power lesbian" resonates with longstanding fears of the 
vagina detentata I cannot help but show them slides of Sappho and Her Lover, 
or have them read Siobhan Sommerville.  I suppose that some parents will be 
unhappy they pay for both cable and my class when their child only needs to 
see the L Word once, but those who understand that intellectualism is not 
"the books under glass" (See Woolf Three Guineas) will know their money is 
well spent.

To the second position - I say what I originally tried to post before the 
polarization of this topic:

I teach a class this semester traditional taught with a reader, a multiple 
choice mid-term, and final.  The reader contains basic articles written at 
an 8th grade reading level, and heavily edited essays that traditionally are 
not assigned pre-college.  It meets several general ed requirements and is 
usually taken by students across the disciplines as one of the only courses 
that kills three gen eds for the price of one.

Currently, I teach the course with a course packet of essays between 30-50 
pages long written by theorists, historians, literary and cultural critics.  
The essays are hard reading and generally take my students two reads to get 
the key concepts.  From day one my two TAs encouraged students to form 
reading and writing groups to pass the course.  They kept a running list of 
students who wanted extra help and provided the list to each student who 
asked.  Students are required to write a short (one page) paper for each 
reading in which they identify the thesis, key supporting points, and then 
how the argument relates to the other readings for the day.  We grade the 
papers after class and return them the following session.  The writing 
assignments serve three purposes: 1) students read the material assigned 
because the alternative is to lose both participation and writing assignment 
points, 2) since they read the material and tried to gleam its key points 
they are also able to participate confidently in class, and 3) we are able 
to assess their writing skills and give them feedback before the big papers 
are due, and they are able to gage what is expected in their writing.

The problems I have encountered in teaching this course have to do with the 
lowered expectations of my colleagues who don't think it is their job to 
teach critical reading or writing skills.  Like some on this list, they 
spend all of their energy lamenting the decline of highschool education 
and/or the consumer culture of higher ed instead of engaging in pedagogical 
strategies to turn the tide.  Their students come to my class and complain 
vocally about the reading load, writing load, and "unrealistic expectations" 
and I spend weeks reading belligerent emails and being called into the 
director's office who would prefer the students were happy than learning. So 
I do truly empathize with the idea that what you teach can cost you your 
job.  But if we all live in fear or are motivated by being friends with our 
students rather than educators than we really are the ignorant bumkins Katha 
would like us to believe populate the university system.

The reality is someone has to do it.  We can point the finger and/or play 
everybody's friend, or we can develop strategies to teach the skills that 
our students need.  My strategies require hours of extra grading and extra 
office hours.  With my current enrollment, which just keeps climbing b/c 
students really do want to learn when they come to college, I would die if I 
did not have two TAs to run study groups and help with the grading.  I get 
that for those without the extra hands and minds the way I do it would be 
much harder.  But, I believe that if we stop pointing fingers and summarily 
dismissing the skills we as Women's Studies scholars bring to the table, 
then several people on this list would have the room to share their teaching 
strategies with regards to this topic.  Further, I think that scholars on 
this list who really do fear for their jobs need those on this list who have 
been successful to share their strategies and help stop the dumbing down of 
our classrooms.

<snip> I am proud to be a Women's Studies Professor 
and I have enjoyed the productive exchanges with those who feel the same.  I 
look forward to hearing more of your voices mixed in with those who would 
call us ignorant because we actually watch and render intellectually 
productive our TVs.

-A Riley
riley  AT  nospam.com

As a teacher and director of Women's Studies I am baffled by the idea
that teaching about popular culture is somehow antithetical to
learning about the structural causes of oppression.  I do both in my
introductory and other classes; it is as valuable to assign Suzanna
Danuta Walter's book, All the Rage deconstructing the uses of
television's uses of gay visibility as it is to use Suzanne Pharr's
work on Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism.  Students are more receptive
to understanding the structural causes of a matrix of oppression, of
sexism, racism, classism and heterosexism/homophobia, if they become
more critically literate of the popular culture with which they are
all too familiar.

I would be interested in how people integrate attention to
representations and structural issues in their classes or written
work.  An exercise that I use in class, adapted from one by then
Univ. of Missouri-Columbia gsta, Pam McClure, called "Babes in
Toyland," really hits home as to how early we learn about gender
differentiation and stereotyping.  The students go to a toy store and
analyze how the store is structured and what kinds of gender messages
are embodied in the colors coding the aisles, any racial and gender
depictions of children on the toy boxes, etc.  My intro students are
really surprised by their results.

Thanks, 
Barbara Scott Winkler, Director, Women's Studies, 
Southern Oregon University 
winklerb  AT  charter.net

While the number of potential subjects and approaches has increased 
enormously, university education has nowhere that I know of actually 
involved increasing the amount of time students spend in school or in 
particular courses (rather the contrary, as I noted a few days ago).  Hence, 
much as we might like, it is not possible to  simply embrace a "both/and" 
perspective.  It seems clear to me that as teachers we constantly have to 
make hard choices, decide what to include and what to omit. In how many 
different courses is it desirable to use pop culture?

 Is it likely Michael Kimmel's commuting colleague would be happy to teach 
Buffy *instead of* the classics?  To appreciate  new hires whose work could 
well be exclusively on Buffy, with no knowledge of those classics? That is 
the problem, as I see it, and the actual situation we face. (A related 
problem, of course, is teaching those classics only to dismiss or attack 
them as not having the requisite positions on race, class, sex, etc.)  No 
matter how much we talk about "opening" the curriculum we cannot avoid the 
fact that it is being "closed" in many areas. I note how many of the 
messages defending pop culture (or "less demanding" books) end up seeming 
not to actually perceive differences between things, or actively declare 
there are none.  Is that part of what we teach these days?  That it's 
inappropriate for students to notice distinctions?  If they do, might they 
not say: "Why are we reading this miserably written piece of work in a 
literature class?  And how can you criticize my papers when on the other 
hand you [the teacher] are insisting there aren't qualitative differences 
among writers or are revealing that your selection of texts has nothing to 
do with those qualities?"

The problem is a real one;  time is short and defenses of popular culture 
are unconvincing as long as they don't address this reality.  Hard choices 
have to be made; too many strictly non-education-related elements are 
influencing those choices. Our students do not come to the university with 
much of a background in anything, since at the lower levels the same sorts 
of choices are being made about what to teach, how entertaining education 
needs to be these days, how teachers are to be evaluated, etc.

Some things are easier than others; some things have less value.  Isn't it 
the business of teachers to be able to discern such differences? After all, 
we never do teach *everything*. The presence of teachers who genuinely seem 
to believe that pop culture (actually it's "mass culture") is as good a way 
to teach their subject as any other seems not to bode well for the education 
of American students (of course the same trend has devloped in many other 
countries as well).

I once had an argument with a secondary-school teacher who said that since 
all language is equal, she had no grounds on which to criticize her students 
who, in class, used "mo****f***er" and its variations as virtually their 
only term of criticism.  I suggested the students needed to read some 
Shakespeare, who would  introduce them to a rich array of inventive and 
insulting terms, so they would not be limited to the tedious repetition of 
just these few.  The issue (leaving aside appropriateness of particular 
levels of discourse in particular settings) was their lack of resources  and 
the teacher could very well address that.  I still think this is the case. 
And I still think my students should be reading Machado de Assis and not 
Paulo Coelho.

DP
daphne.patai  AT  spanport.umass.edu
 

  Just wanted to say I wasn't threatening to take my marbles and go
home. I really enjoy the list and think Iam learning a lot from it,
even when I disagree, as it seems I do from time to time. It just
seemed that perhaps what I regarded as a fun exchange was getting on
people's nerves.
 
  About studying Buffy, chick lit, Survivor et al, I am totally sure
that many profs who teach pop culture are brilliant and deeply
learned, like the prof Michael Kimmel (hi, Michael) mentions who is a
classics scholar and polymath, to say nothing of WNST list members. My
point was more that students aren't so educated. They don't have that
background. They haven't had their cultural breakfast yet. I guess I
think they should read more books, more old books, more challenging
books, and so on, before they deconstruct TV shows for college credit.

  The pop culture/high culture discussion is connected to another
discussion, about how much work students are willing/able to do. The
need to assign short books is very troubling.  I totally believe in
higher ed, and in making it more accessible to disadvantaged students.
If the problems of preparedness were limited to disadvantaged
students, that would be one thing.  But kids with all the advantages
come to college unable to write a decent paper, unwilling to do the
two-three hours of studying per class hour, and unwilling to tackle un
'fun" subjects. Think how many more kids want to take 'creative
writing' than want to read-- as if you could be a writer without
reading deeply and voraciously and ransacking history.  So I place the
teaching of Buffy in that context-- which, to someone who thinks buffy
is a brilliant artistic experience, must seem unfair.

  So anyway, these are just my gloomy thoughts. I realize I am out of
step, I have rather old-fashioned ideas about literary study, and the
older I get, the more old-fashioned they become!

Katha
katha.pollitt  AT  gmail.com

<snip>

2/ while it would be foolish to negate the significant effects in terms 
of literacy and cultural capital (as well as distrust of 'high' culture) 
that systemic and structural discrimination and disadvantage have on 
students, lack of such cultural capital or eruditition or skills doesn't 
mean students are stupid or can't engage in sophisticated reading and 
analysis.  indeed, they often have insights others don't.  i don't see 
how buffy or survivor are any more 'relevant' to african americans or 
poor whites or native americans or whoever than they are to whites, in 
many cases they are a lot *less* so.

moreover, the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture are not always 
discrete, even if there are identifiable differences.  courses can 
introduce mixes and hybridities, interweaving the 2 - and thereby 
opening conversations about high culture, low culture, elite culture, 
popular culture (in both senses:  'of the people' and 'mass culture'), 
cultural hybridity etc etc etc.

how about, for example, starting with billie holiday singing strange 
fruit (of which a contemporary remix version is available) (nina simone 
singing four women also occurs to me) then follow up with alice walker's 
short story 'The Flowers' a 2-page-long story about a young girl in the 
US south who stumbles across the corpse of a lynched man? 
who do you think is going to have the most insightful understanding of 
these cultural productions?

why not give the normally 'inferior' groups some advantage of 
'superiority' in terms of culture and history?  it's really not so hard 
to set up!

3/ which leads me to the next problem i'm seeing in this conversation:  
*which* popular culture is being talked about.  buffy and survivor are 
white mainstream.  (well i've never watched either so couldn't be 
completely sure so maybe am assuming too much...). 

why not show gurinder chadha's "what's cooking?" as a popular-culture 
intro to talking about ethnicity, class, sexuality, politics and 
cultural hybridity in the US?  then follow up with some 'high culture' 
readings by working class and ethnic minority writers?  or show chadha's 
'bride and prejudice' and then get them reading jane austen and talking 
about women, class, marriage, history, english colonialism in india....????

why not, ramping it up a notch, get them to see the film wuthering 
heights, then read the book, then read maryse condT's reworking of that 
story in her 'migration of hearts' or whatever the english title is.  
what a range of topics this opens up!

or why not look at ann petry's and maryse condT's retellings of the 
story of tituba?  two very different books, written almost 20 years 
apart, with such a wealth of cultural and historical references.  condT 
even gets in some popular culture.  there is a ref. by one of tituba's 
lovers, i forget which one now, to 'ma sorciFre bien aimTe' which is the 
french title of the US TV show 'bewitched'.  nice little crosscultural 
injoke, probably lost in translation.  but her book is terrific, it goes 
into so many different areas.

4/ so many 'high culture' books are made into films or musical comedies 
(e.g. les misTrables !!).  so many popular cultural productions have 
high-cultural/historical references, even if truncated or ideologically 
skewed as someone, i believe, mentioned in relation to buffy (?).  so, 
use the popular culture as a way in to talking about these more in-depth 
subjects.  it's really not so hard

- moreover, as someone pointed out, it's often the privileged kids who 
can't write an essay and can't be bothered grappling with difficult 
texts.  same in australia.


gail dines said the question is less what is taught as how it is 
taught.  i would say that the question is both one of *what* is taught 
and the *way* it is taught.  if students can relate to the themes they 
will find a way into the difficulties of more complex material, given an 
entry point that invites them in and appropriate guidance through the 
difficulties (and often, confronting nature) of the material.


maybe the examples i put forward are not perceived as the most 
immediately relevant for your students, even though most of them are set 
in the US and call up specifically US references.  but there are surely 
many others.  frankly, given the extraordinary wealth of 
high/popular/hybrid culture you have in the US, if i were teaching 
there, survivor and buffy would each get about half an hour max (if i 
used them at all), as a portal to having more complex conversations with 
richer materials (whether 'popular' or 'high').

bronwyn

-- 
***********************************************
Dr Bronwyn Winter
Senior Lecturer
Dept of French Studies 
School of Languages and Cultures
Mungo McCallum Building A17
University of Sydney  NSW 2006
Australia

email: bronwyn.winter  AT  arts.usyd.edu.au

***********************************************

Hi all,
Just a couple of thoughts:

I teach at a mid-sized, mid-price-range, mostly 
middle-class Midwestern university and I teach 
Intro Women's Studies utilizing novels, poetry, 
and drama (big plug here for Josefina Lopez' play 
*Real Women Have Curves* [not just like the 
movie] for body image, immigration, and 
ethnicity-and-language issues) in addition to the 
standard intro textbook materials.

Every semester, I have at least four students 
(out of about 50) who tell me "this is the first 
book I've ever read all the way through." When I 
ask about the novels they were assigned in high 
school, many shrug and say "I read some of it." 
The books that get this amazing (to me) comment 
most often are two that exist on the border 
between literary and popular: Sue Monk Kidd's 
*Secret Life of Bees* and Danzy Senna's 
*Caucasia* (although I did have one student say 
this about *The Handmaid's Tale* last year). By 
teaching these books first in the semester, 
rather than a book considered a "classic," am I 
dumbing down? Or am I opening a door into 
literature for these students so they might be 
more willing to read another book? I can't know 
for sure, of course.  But I do note that both of 
these books directly address conflicts around 
racial identity in the post WWII US, and it's a 
bit difficult to get at that information from 
many of the books considered "classics" of 
American literature by women.

Also, just an intertextual aside: I belong to 
another academic listproc, of a literary 
organization (*not* feminist in focus). While 
we've been having this conversation on WMST-L, 
those scholars have been tracing the textual 
markers of some on-line scandal known as 
lonelygirl 15 (I think--I'm not in the loop on 
internet news) and whether this incident 
constitutes a new narrative form, and how the 
changes in narrative form over the years 
influence how contemporary readers receive 
classic texts. Just thought that was a kind of 
amusing confluence of internet activity.

Peace, all,
Jeannie
-- 
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Jeannie Ludlow, Ph.D.		jludlow  AT  bgnet.bgsu.edu
Undergraduate Advisor
Women's Studies
228 East Hall
Bowling Green State U
Bowling Green OH 43403
(419)372-6816

Hello all-

            I take both sides on this issue. I am often appalled at what my
students don't know about the world. Recently I brought up conflicts in
Northern Ireland between the Protestants and Catholics and was met with
mystified looks. The college students had never heard of this! This happens
a lot. I mention something in passing that should be part of shared
knowledge and students don't know it. But I am thinking of two other factors
that bear on this discussion.

            First, colleges and universities have all but abandoned general
education requirements. Of course, the pursuit of gen ed is an abyss. I've
been on several gen ed committees, generations of them! But requiring
students to complete little more than major requirements seems the coward's
way out. On the other hand, the importance of popular culture today is very
different than it has been in the past, even 40 years ago, and we ignore it
in academe at our peril.

            Capitalism has taken what we consider "choice" and used it to
market literally everything. Billions of dollars go into shaping how we
think and, ultimately, making us feel inadequate without the help of "x"
product. Part of the issue is that the "product" can be a way of thinking
about something - class, race, gender, etc. Witness the biased "Path to
9/11" recently shown on TV. I was just reading that movies that show
explicit gay sex are rated more restrictively than those portraying
similarly explicit heterosexual sex. Movies and TV shows reflect our culture
and shape it too.

Young people today learn how to think an dhow to live via popular culture as
communicated via electronic media, more than any other generation before it.
Teaching them to think critically about what has become part of their "air"
is extremely important. It generally also involves reading challenging works
and doing comparative analyses with "older" and more conventional works.
Simply asking them to read the conventional works does not necessarily help
them to make the translations/comparisons/critical analyses of popular
culture.

My two cents.

 

Dorothy C. Miller, D.S.W., Director
Flora  Stone Mather Center for Women
& Clinical Associate Professor
Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences
Case Western Reserve University
10900 Euclid Ave.
Cleveland, OH 44106-7175


"Afraid is a country where they issue us passports at birth and hope we
never seek citizenship in any other country." ~ Audre Lorde

At the same time, giving scholarly time and legitimacy to Buffy the 
Vampire Slayer and gangsta rap is about accommodating consumer-driven 
playpen schooling (which is very attracftive to the institutions these 
days!), not about building critical skills students need to defend 
themselves against this relentless and ever more sophisticated assault! 
  Popular culture is anti-feminist (and racist and classist and 
homophobic and etc) BY DEFINITION!!!  What we may be experiencing in 
this conversation is the great (and currently widening) divide between 
WS scholars and advocates grounded in the social sciences and those 
grounded in literature.

Deb Louis
dlouis44  AT  sbcglobal.net