While popular culture has often been thought of as a frivolous and superficial phenomenon, various scholars have highlighted the ways in which mass media can transmit and reinforce critical ideas about gender. Through films, advertisements, music, magazines and the internet, various images about the appropriate ways to perform masculinities and femininities are presented, perpetuated and preserved. Furthermore, in today’s age, where mass media is so easily accessible and prevalent, popular culture becomes one of the most critical sites where hegemonic ideas about gender are produced, represented and ultimately, consumed. However, audiences are not completely passive in their absorption of meanings and representations in media, and furthermore, people actively construct their own gendered identities.
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While popular has often been thought of as little more than a tool of amusement, recent scholars, such as Zeisler (2008), Milestone & Meyer (2012) and Leavy & Trier-Bieniek (2014), have brought attention to the importance of popular culture in enabling people to understand how to live in the world, and in particular, how to understand gender. In social theory today, gender is mainly understood to be a social construct however, theorists such as Judith Butler (1998) have taken this idea one step further and argued that gender is a continual “performance” which is constituted through a “stylised repetition of acts” (Butler: 519; Butler 1990 as cited in Salih 2007; Leavy & Trier-Bieniek 2014:3). Popular culture becomes integral to gender performances as agents actively “construct” and perform their gendered selves through the use of cultural “texts”, and consequentially, these texts often include popular television shows, films and music (Butler 1988: 519,
While popular has often been thought of as little more than a tool of amusement, recent scholars, such as Zeisler (2008), Milestone & Meyer (2012) and Leavy & Trier-Bieniek (2014), have brought attention to the importance of popular culture in enabling people to understand how to live in the world, and in particular, how to understand gender. In social theory today, gender is mainly understood to be a social construct however, theorists such as Judith Butler (1998) have taken this idea one step further and argued that gender is a continual “performance” which is constituted through a “stylised repetition of acts” (Butler: 519; Butler 1990 as cited in Salih 2007; Leavy & Trier-Bieniek 2014:3). Popular culture becomes integral to gender performances as agents actively “construct” and perform their gendered selves through the use of cultural “texts”, and consequentially, these texts often include popular television shows, films and music (Butler 1988: 519,