Things that people expect, things that are common to everyday people and things that are widely known and liked are much of what constitutes 'popular culture'. While the main populace adheres to specificities when it comes to their way of life such as their mass media, their production of commodities, their clothing, and things such as their ethics and their religious mindset, there may be subsets produced through such things as ethnicity, religion, gender that create whole distinct identifications of what is accepted, what is widely known and what constitutes being popular.
From the readings in Outlaw Culture and Where the Girls Are, the authors present to us studies of the African American cultural experience and the cultural experience of American Women. Both authors begin their presentations by examining why that particular sub-culture of American culture is alienated and in absentia from the often male, often patriarchal representations of American culture. In Where the Girls Are, Susan Douglas writes with an attitude of incredulity that almost 50% of the population could be so misrepresented and exploited. Her study is presented as a way to set the record straight while embracing what was presented as mass media imagery within its historical context. She wants us to learn how much we were Gidget and as we grew and changed, so did our imagery with us and in certain cases, in spite of us.
In the essay Race and Ethnicity, Howard Winant and Michael Omi utilize case history studies to help define the differences between race and ethnicity and then they go on to develop the history of racial disparity within the culture of the US. It is their determination that race is more than skin color; it is rather a social concept, specifically a socio-historical concept, requiring extensive study within that context. In order to do this, one must understand the rule of hypo-descent - that there is nothing in between black and white,...