Not Our Regularly Scheduled Programming: Integrating Feminist Theory, Popular Culture, and Writing Pedagogy

Abstract

“I wouldn’t pay for that class.” That was the response offered by a male acquaintance when I described my composition course: one that situates feminist and queer theory as a lens through which to view, analyze, and discuss contemporary television. I brushed off his remark. In fact, I would have dismissed it entirely as a bit of casual or unconscious patronizing if not for a similar conversation several weeks later with a female acquaintance. She assured me that though she had loved a similar class at her Ivy League college, she couldn’t imagine “wasting her parents’ money” pursuing such topics and instead opted for a more practical route in engineering. Though anecdotal, such comments point to larger issues with which those of us in the humanities are all too familiar: the delineation of “serious” and “frivolous” studies or of “employable” and “unemployable” majors. These comments perhaps attest as well to the rise of the “neoliberal university” scholars have adeptly described: an increasingly corporate, market-driven academy, in Brenda R. Weber’s neat assessment, “where students can prove to a potential employer that they qualify as good workers” and where “professors . . . who aim to address complex social and intellectual issues are often met with hostility and/or denigrated as liberal or old-fashioned” (128). Of course, this denigration is not new. Cultural studies scholars have long discussed the problems the field faces in defining itself as a serious area of study, and they have renewed our sense of its centrality (Barker; Couldry; Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler). Still others have queried and fortified the specific role of popular culture in the classroom (Alvermann, Moon, and Hagwood; Buckingham; Buckingham and Sefton-Green; Giroux). Most important, we have come to understand that the issue that has plagued cultural studies and much of the humanities—the presumptuous designation of “proper” and “improper” subjects of inquiry—re/ produces the central concerns of feminist, Not Our Regularly Scheduled Programming: Integrating Feminist Theory, Popular Culture, and Writing Pedagogy