Laura Grindstaff

Culture and Popular Culture: A Case for Sociology

The study of popular culture has a long and intimate relationship to the field of cultural sociology, being both a subcategory of the field and a separate arena of inquiry taken up by other disciplines. This article examines the intellectual traditions that have shaped the sociology of popular culture, traces the points of connection and difference between sociologists and other scholars studying popular culture, and argues for the continued relevance of cultural sociology for addressing key issues and concerns within the realm of “the popular,” broadly conceived. These developments include the rise of new media/communication technologies and the increasing interdependence between popular culture and other arenas of social life.

Reality Celebrity: Branded Affect and the Emotion Economy

More than any other form of media, reality television has reignited interest in celebrity discourse because of the genre’s incorporation of ordinary people and the conflation of ordinariness with raw, real emotion. This article argues that reality TV is part of an emerging “emotion economy” that generates unique forms of celebrity by producing and circulating heightened emotional performances as “branded affect.” A key signifier of what reality TV is and is becoming, branded affect underscores the commodification of emotion in the contemporary media landscape and the changing nature and meaning of celebrity.

“Hands on Hips, Smiles on Lips!” Gender, Race, and the Performance of Spirit in Cheerleading

Cheerleading has long been synonymous with “spirit” because of its traditional sideline role in supporting school sports programs. In recent decades, however, cheerleading has become more athletic and competitive—even a sport in its own right. This essay is an ethnographic exploration of the emotional dimensions of cheerleading in light of these changes. We argue that spirit is a regulating but also flexible concept that is deployed in order to manage and uphold ideologies of emotion, and that these ideologies are central to the ways in which cheerleading reproduces racialized gender difference. On the one hand, the performance guidelines for spirit stabilize the emotional dimensions of cheerleading in the face of the activitys shifting priorities. On the other hand, the performance framing encourages participants to distance themselves from cheerleadings emotional script, allowing them to abdicate responsibility for it. The ambiguity surrounding the performance of spirit—whether it should be read as “real” or “play”—facilitates this dynamic.

Book Review: Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model

gender plays in exacerbating or mitigating growing social class disparities. Are moderately educated women more advantaged than their male counterparts? Does the sex of the child born to unmarried parents influence union stability, paternal involvement, or (re)marriage? A summary chapter that integrated the arguments posed by the various chapters and set them in a broader historical context would also have suggested directions for the next generation of scholars. That said, this book exposes issues that will only become more important as the children born into these complex families form families of their own. One clear contribution is the grist this volume provides in identifying important future research directions. It will make a useful addition to graduate courses and for disciplinary diverse family scholars.

Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social TheorySensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory, by HowesDavid. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 283 pp.

more extensive than this. Those concerned with Orientalist depictions of “Eastern” society would learn much regarding how to address the limitations of such work. Philosophers not acquainted with Tibetan Buddhist philosophy would likewise be drawn into the work. On another level, ethnographers from any discipline would be interested in how Liberman weds ethnographic description, detailed transcripts, and videotaped material in an analysis. Serving a number of audiences, some of which are highly specialized, means that the content of the book (especially areas in which the content of Tibetan philosophical thought is discussed) can be hard to access. This is part of the point of the approach utilized by the author. Rather than bending the phenomenon to the reader, the reader, to really understand the phenomenon, needs to immerse his or herself in the phenomenon. Reducing the phenomenon so that people understand would in essence lose it. However, even if one does not wish to devote one’s life in the way that the author has to the topic, there is still much to gain from the book. The entirety of the work is best summarized by Liberman when he asserts, “So long as we reduce other to objects, we will never witness their truth” (p.12). Rather than focusing on idealized formulations of what would constitute legitimate practice, Liberman tells readers that we need to examine the practices themselves, and allow our understanding of the phenomenon to emerge from them rather than being imposing categories on them. This is perhaps the most important message in the book. To better understand that which we are studying, we must not be afraid to take the time necessary to get close to it.

60 cloth. ISBN: 0-472-09846-2.

In Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America, Diana Kendall uses frame analysis to examine how news and entertainment media contribute to the social construction of social class in the United States. Framing is the process by which sense is made of events, and media framing is the process by which information and entertainment are packaged by the media before being presented to an audience. Kendall is less interested in how the framing of media texts results from journalistic practices and routines than in how potential readers and viewers might be making sense of the texts once they are in circulation. The texts, in this case, consist of newspaper articles (predominantly from The New York Times) and selected television entertainment shows. Calling the media “the primary storytellers of the 21st Century” (p. 18), Kendall examines the kinds of stories that are being told and speculates as to how they shape/influence our ideas about class and class inequality. She identifies six classes (following the Gilbert-Kahl model); each class is associated with a different set of media frames and the six substantive chapters of the book discuss these frames in detail. Overall, the frames associated with the middle and upper classes are more positive/admiring than those associated with the working and poverty classes. The rich, for example, are portrayed as generous and caring, or as leading enviable lifestyles, while the poor are often characterized as deviant in their behavior and the working classes as buffoons, bigots, or members of greedy unions. The middle class, by contrast, is framed as the model to which all Americans should aspire, despite also being framed as having a tenuous hold on economic stability. What the various frames have in common is the tendency to portray class as an individual rather than social or structural phenomenon. In keeping with the media’s penchant for telling stories around individual characters, class gets expressed as a matter of money (or lack of) and lifestyle rather than as a social location shaped by differential structures of opportunity. In the final and concluding chapter, Kendall addresses how the media may effect consumers, arguing that many people live vicariously through the media and spend more than they can afford trying to emulate wealthy celebrities. The book is written in accessible prose and engages the key literature on media and framing. Its conclusions are solid but not earth-shattering: sociologists and other media scholars have long lamented the promotion of consumerism through the media, as well as the proclivity of media professionals (not to mention Americans more generally) to think about social issues and events in individual rather than structural terms. As for the specific frames discussed, it’s difficult to know to what degree they reflect the class categories identified prior to analysis and/or the specific media included as data. There is not much information on data or methodology. Kendall says that she chose The New York Times because it is extensively archived and its stories are reprinted in other newspapers. Good reasons, but it’s also the case that the NYT has a largely middle-class, professional readership and thus its content can be assumed to channel the interests of that readership. By contrast, the various television entertainment shows that Kendall references—which are never systematically identified but were chosen, the author tells us, for their explicit focus on class themes— presumably cater to a less professionalized audience, television in general being a more “mass” mass medium than print. I found myself wondering about significant differences in frames and framing devices by medium and genre. It seems logical that the frames deployed by the NYT differ from those deployed by, say, Paris Hilton’s reality show The Simple Life. It would have been helpful to know why such disparate forms of media were treated as essentially equivalent forms of data, for being part of the same media system doesn’t necessarily render insignificant qualitative distinctions among media. Another quibble I have with the book is the lack of consistency in its stance toward the relationship between mediated and lived