Representations and resistance
INTRODUCTION
Many popular cultural forms and practices have a claim to be representatively postmodern even though they may be forms and practices which never passed through any recognisable modernist phase. Popular culture has been defined as ‘a site of struggle’ where many of these issues and meanings are determined and debated. However, contemporary cultural critics have been mainly male (Hoggart, Williams, Barthes, Huyssen, West, Hall, Grossberg and CCCS [Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham University]). Feminism in its intersection with dimensions of cultural studies and cultural theory, particularly postmodernism, has re-evaluated popular culture forms—music, style, dance, social rituals—from a feminist/postfeminist position. This chapter will focus on the reevaluation of popular cultural forms as ‘sites of struggle’ for feminist and postfeminist writers.