Below you will find some terms that may crop up in your readings or discussions.  This glossary is in no way meant to represent the full complexity of the terms and theories addressed, but should serve instead as a jumping-off point for further critical reading and understanding.

The Online Dictionary of Sociology from Athabasca University can be found at <http://bitbucket.icaap.org/>, and can be searched by term or phrase.

articulation:  the act by which cultural texts and practices create/negotiate/define meaning; engages the idea that texts and practices are not “inscribed” with meaning, so within the field of culture we can see a struggle to articulate (rearticulate, disarticulate) texts and practices for specific political and ideological uses; meaning is the site and result of struggle; see Stuart Hall, Gramsci.

base & superstructure:  The base is the combination of the forces of production (the raw materials, tools, workers, skills, etc.) and the relations of production (the class relations of those engaged in production); the conditions determine the content/form of the superstructure.  The superstructure consists of the institutions

(political, legal, educational, cultural) and the forms of social consciousness generated by the institutions; the superstructure expresses and legitimizes the base.

binary oppositions:  way of dividing the world into mutually exclusive categories such as man/woman, good/bad, black/white, us/them); for Barthes (and others) the privileged term in the opposition can be shown as dependent on other for meaning, creating a “violent hierarchy.”

bricolage:  process by which youth subcultures appropriate meanings for products and recombine them in new ways for their own purposes, to establish meanings not necessarily intended by the producers; see Hebdige.

capitalism:  an economic system based on private or corporate ownership of capital (goods, services, etc.).

carnival life/ the carnivalesque:  according to Bakhtin, “life” where there is no division between performer and spectator; what is created when carnival themes/traditions mock, reverse, parody, or otherwise invert the “standard” social order.

commercialization:  the idea that "authentic" culture is devalued by making it too accessible, making it a cultural commodity; see the Frankfurt School.  Note: the Frankfurt School does not object to the democratization of culture, only to the idea that the culture industry’s assimilation of culture establishes cultural equality while preserving dominance.

compromise equilibrium:  the process within which the text and practices of popular culture move; it is both historical (at one point in history a text might be labeled popular culture, and at a different point labeled another form of culture) and synchronic (moving between resistance and incorporation at any given historical moment); see Gramsci.

connotation:  the secondary meanings that cultural texts and practices carry or support.

counter-culture:  A radical culture that rejects or works against established, conventional, or dominant social values and practices.

cultural capital:  the cultural assets or access of a particular class, as distinguished from material capital;  see Bourdieu.

cultural populism:  the idea that the cultural texts and practices of “ordinary” people are more important than those of the “elite.”

cultural studies:  area of critical study which draws from a variety of other fields of study (such as anthropology, sociology, gender studies, feminism, literary criticism, history, psychoanalysis) in order to discuss contemporary texts and cultural practices.

culture industry:  the products and processes of mass culture, marked by homogeneity and predictability; see. the Frankfurt School.

denotation:  primary signification.

diachronic: studies the historical development of given language; relates to particular texts/practices/phenomena as they change over time.

dialogic:  how language is used and how language-use is always articulated with other social and cultural practices—is in dialogue/potential conflict with other uses of language, other cultural texts/practices; see Foucault.

différence:  engages ideas both of what differs and what is deferred; see Saussure and Derrida.

discourse:  the means by which institutions wield power through a process of definition and exclusion; inseparable from power; see Foucault.

discourse formations:  conceptual frameworks that allow some modes of thought and deny others; body of unwritten rules which attempt to regulate what can be written, thought, and acted upon in a particular field; see Foucault.

double coding:  awareness of the “already said”; see Eco.

dual systems theory:  puts Marxist and radical feminist analysis together, locating women’s oppression in a complex articulation of capitalism and patriarchy.

economic determinism:  the idea that what is happening in the superstructure is a passive reflection of what is happening in the base.

ethnography:  the recording of human culture in a systematic way.

encrusted text:  a primary text encrusted within a sublevel of texts produced by the culture industry to promote it (includes ads, criticism, comments, fanmags, etc.) to form a “super” text.

existentialist feminism:  argues that women are oppressed because they are/are seen as the “Other” or the secondary in relation to the “Self” or primary existence of men; man, then, defines his own existence (is subject), while woman is defined by what she is not; see de Beauvoir.

false consciousness:  idea that members of a social class absorb and become committed to values and beliefs that serve and support the interests of other classes rather than their own.

female gaze:  way of engaging ideas of how women look at popular culture or struggle to articulate/disarticulate/rearticulate meaning within capitalism, patriarchy, etc.

fort-da game:  according to Lacan, the second stage of development in which we articulate our demands through language—“here”/“gone.

hegemony:  the system in which the views of a particular group or groups in society, through a process of combined consent and coercion, dominates, establishes, or controls the views of subordinate groups in society; the dominant ideology of a given culture.

hyperreal:  mode of existence in which reality and simulation are experienced as being without difference.

Ideological State Apparatuses:  systems or institutions that reproduce material practice of ideology, including educational institutions, organized religion, family, organized politics, etc.  see Althusser.

the imaginary:  order of subjectivity; the attempt to find ourselves in what is not ourselves; see Lacan.

incorporation:  process of incorporating (integrating, uniting, subsuming) an idea, individual, or group into an already-existing system so that the incorporated idea (individual, etc.) is indistinguishable from the system.

interpretive community:  a loosely connected group who share similar values and assumptions, consume similar cultural products, and tend to use and interpret them similarly; see Radway.

interpretative fallacy:  the view that a text has a single meaning which it is task of criticism to uncover; engages the idea that a text is decentered (not centered on authorial intent, but rather consists of confrontation among several discourses (explicit, implicit, silent, absent).

langue: system of language; rules and conventions that organize it; language as social institution; see Barthes.

liberal feminism:  states that there is no systemic determination of women’s oppression, but rather a problem of male prejudice against women, embodied in law or expressed in the exclusion of women from particular areas of life; involves a commitment to reforms concerning the equality of civil rights and opportunity in welfare, health, employment, education, etc.

l’objet petit a:  the quest for a non-existent object, signifying an imaginary moment of plenitude which we now “lack”; see Lacan.

male gaze:  an inscription of the image of woman as an object of male desire; see Mulvey.

Marxist feminism:  feminism in which the domination of women by men is seen as a consequence of capital’s domination over labor (capitalism is the true oppressor); applies Marxist theories regarding the relationship between materials and modes of production to women’s status and class in, say, the role of the family.

metanarratives:  universalist stories which operate as homogenizing forces, via inclusion and exclusion of a plurality of narratives.

mirror phase:  according to Lacan, the first stage of development in which we begin to construct a sense of self as a self meant to challenge the experience of fragmentation and to promise control over our own needs.

mode of production:  the way a society is organized to produce the necessities of life;  basically, the way a society produces its means of existence determines the social, political, and cultural shape of that society and that society’s future development.

myth:  broadly, the stories a culture tells itself to banish contradictions, make the world understandable/habitable, and make peace with selves and existences.

Oedipus complex:  according to Lacan,  the third stage of development in which we focus our desire towards the pursuit of a fixed signified.

paradigmatic axis of language:  meaning can be changed by substituting parts, operating along plane of associations.

parole: individual utterance/use of language

pastiche:  blank parody; whereas parody is intended to mock divergence from convention, pastiche has no intention or sense of a convention from which to diverge.

patriarchy:  “rule by the father”; the social situation or institution in which men have and control wealth, power, and status over women.

poaching:  describes the act of readers making what they want to make of a given text; see de Certeau.

polysemus:  describes a text as open to both dominant and oppositional readings; see Fiske.

post-feminism: the idea, not that feminism is thing of past or has done all its work, but that boundaries between feminists and non-feminists are more “fuzzy.”

postmodern feminism:  opposes essentialism (belief that gender differences are innate rather than socially constructed), and advocates a plurality of knowledges.

the problematic:  the theoretical/ideological structure which frames and produces the repertoire of crisscrossing and competing discourses out of which a text or practice is materially organized—relates to what it includes/exclude; see Althusser.

psychoanalytic feminism:  growing out of psychoanalysis, examines how gender is normalized in the structure of the human mind.

radical feminism:  argues that the present patriarchal system results in women’s oppression, that it is a system of domination in which men as a group have power over women as a group.

reflection theory:  the idea that the politics of a text or practice can be reduced to the economic conditions of its production.

repressive hypothesis:  suggests an approach to sexuality in terms of censorship and prohibition; the idea that different discourses on sexuality are not about sexuality but, rather, constitute sexuality; see Foucault.

scopophilia: the pleasure of looking, of taking others as objects and subjecting them to a controlling gaze; re: sexual objectification, using another person for sexual stimulation through sight; see Mulvey.

sign:  unit of meaning made up of a signifier and a signified; the relationship between signifier and signified is based on cultural convention, and therefore arbitrary; see Saussure, Barthes.

simulacrum:  an identical copy without an original; see Baudrillard.

socialist feminism:  perspective that women are treated as second-class citizens in patriarchal capitalism, and that the key to women’s oppression is the economic system of capitalism; similar to Marxist feminism, but specifically addressing class with gender.

standardization:  extends from general to specific; pseudo-individual; promotes passive listening and demands inattention/distraction to consume; operates as social cement; see the Frankfurt School.

subculture:  the collective values and practices of particular group located within and distinguishable from a larger group or culture.

the symbolic:  the order of culture, of human subjectivity; see Lacan.

synchronic: studies a given language at particular moment in time; moving between resistance and incorporation.

syntagmatic axis of language:  meaning is completed only when the final word is spoken or inscribed.