ABSTRACT
In understanding the ways in which popular culture and feminist discourse support and contest each other, three discursive processes, in particular, are central. These are processes of production, representation and consumption. It is the interaction of these three processes that constructs, Milestone and Meyer argue, ‘what we commonly identify as gender identities’ (2012: 1). As Rowley asserts, however contested the relative importance of the themes of production, representation and consumption, ‘we cannot account for the complex ways in which gender and popular culture matter in global politics without considering all three’ (2009: 313). Understanding the power of popular culture texts by engaging with who produces popular culture, its representative, symbolic authority (and how visual and linguistic representations produce meaning) and the practices of consumption that drive and reproduce popular culture permits us a closer mapping of the relations of power, gendered forces, hierarchies and myths through which popular culture enables us to make sense of the world.
