The long and influential tradition in cultural studies of theorizing subcultures, especially youth subcultures, is a good example of this critical attention to everyday modes of popular resistance. Cultural studies understands subcultures to be engaged in overt, if complex, processes of aberrant identity production in which cultural consumption is used to articulate distinctive modes of social selfhood and to foster alternative cultural values.

Sponsor Message.

Glbtq Bricolage

The term often used for this process of resistant subcultural consumption is "bricolage," the adaptation of existing forms and commodities to produce new significances unintended by their original producers. It is a process widely evidenced in queer subcultures, where glbtq people regularly appropriate texts and objects from mainstream culture--films, songs, celebrities, fashion--and imbue them with new queer meanings and values.

That this practice can assume vital political significance is neatly illustrated by the bricolage strategies of AIDS activist groups in the early 1990s, such as ACT UP and Gran Fury, whereby various mainstream texts from Nazi symbols to Benetton advertisements were recycled in order to critique and challenge institutional and complacency in the face of the AIDS crisis.

Media Fandoms

A slightly different site of popular resistance and one that has also been the focus of sustained critical attention in cultural studies is media fandoms. Cultural studies refutes dismissive views of popular culture fans as immature or pathological, arguing instead that they are involved in significant and often highly sophisticated processes of what Paul Willis terms "symbolic creativity," reworking media commodities to accommodate the fans' own social needs and desires.

Glbtq people have long cultivated fan-based practices around various popular media forms, and the cultural studies reading of media fandoms as creative agencies offers a productive frame within which to consider and make sense of these practices. To offer but one example of many, Henry Jenkins's examination of glbtq fans of the ever popular television series Star Trek demonstrates how these fans engage in extensive and skillful interventions with the text in order to claim it for queer investment and use.

One particularly striking queer fan practice surveyed by Jenkins is "slash fiction," a form of fan writing that takes same-sex characters from popular media forms--such as Kirk and Spock in Star Trek--and features them in fictional homosexual romance narratives. While slash fiction might seem an innocuous, if quirky, act of projective fantasy, Jenkins suggests that it is in fact engaged in subversive processes of "semiotic guerrilla warfare," whereby the ideological norms of the original media material are upended and replaced with utopian queer possibilities.

Significantly, this particular fan practice is not limited to glbtq-identified fans alone--indeed, its most popular adherents seem to be straight-identified women. As such, it serves to highlight that manifestations of queer resistance, like queer desire, are surprisingly unpredictable.

Critical Interventions

When cultural studies engages with the popular and the "ordinary," it does so primarily to understand--and thus to try to change--the power relations that shape the most intimate and/or quotidian details of our lives, power relations that are ordinarily no more apparent or remarkable to us than the air we breathe. In this respect, cultural studies is not a disengaged mode of academic knowledge but a political practice in its own right.

Most fundamentally, cultural studies seeks to promote an understanding of the competing possibilities and constraints of everyday culture, thus enabling both the development of critical knowledge and the production of new cultural forms and spaces consonant with emancipatory interests.

The commitment of cultural studies to developing a transformative critique of contemporary culture--one that exposes social inequities and divisions while equally promoting modes of tactical resistance--renders it an invaluable critical practice for glbtq people.

Not only does it furnish tools with which to dismantle oppressive hierarchies of power, such as heteronormativity and homophobia, or help recover the important histories of ordinary and marginal social groups, but cultural studies also ultimately helps work toward the realization of what Laclau and Mouffe term "radical democracy": "A society where everyone, whatever his/her sex, race, economic position, sexual orientation, will be in an effective situation of equality and participation, where no basis of discrimination will remain and where self management will exist in all fields."

Feminist literary theory is a complex, dynamic area of study that draws from a wide range of critical theories.

Gay, lesbian, and queer studies are separate but related fields of cultural inquiry that attempt to establish the centrality of gender and sexuality within a particular area of investigation.

Although gay, lesbian, and queer theory are related practices, the three terms delineate separate emphases marked by different assumptions about the relationship between gender and sexuality.

Post-modern theory has led to the problematizing of marginalized and "other" peoples and cultures and to viewing homosexuality as a social construction.

Until the recent emergence of openly gay and lesbian texts, gay and lesbian readers have "homosexualized" heterosexual literature to make it relevant to their lives.

Women's studies, an interdisciplinary academic field that was inaugurated at major universities around 1970, is now offered at every conceivable type of academic institution throughout the world.

Using bold images and confrontational tactics, ACT UP worked to promote awareness of AIDS and challenge the complacency of politicians and government officials in the early years of the epidemic.

One of France's leading lesbian theorists and political activists, Geneviève Pastre is a writer and publisher who has made lesbian feminism the root of her political and literary work.