The document discusses marginalized audiences and their consumption of popular culture. It examines how women, gay people, and the Philippine masses make meaning from cultural products based on their experiences. Several works are analyzed that look at how these groups interpret texts and assert their own readings, including studies on Filipino gay men living abroad, superhero characters in the Philippines, and women's reading of romance novels. The document advocates that marginalized audiences deserve to have their interpretations and pleasures taken seriously rather than being dismissed.

1. Marginalized Audiences
and
Popular Culture Consumption
Cindy Cruz 86-16518
PhD Media Studies
Media 331
Dr . Roland Tolentino

2. TEDTalks Diliman: “Art Art Ka Diyan”

3. • Marginalized Audiences (class, gender, race)
– Women
– Bakla / gay in diaspora
– The Philippine masses – postcolonial psyche
• Popular Culture Consumption
– Creation of meaning based on experience and
outlooks
– Interpretation
– Negotiation
– Assertion
• Validity of Consumption, Meaning-making
• Theodor Adorno vs. John Fiske
• Continuously contested and negotiated
meanings, anomalous categories (nature/culture)

4. • From Darna to Zsazsa Zaturna: Desire and
Fantasy by Soledad Reyes
• Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora
by Martin Manalansan
• Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader
edited and introduced by John Storey
– “Dallas and the Ideology of Mass Culture” by Ien
Ang
– “Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure” by Ien Ang
– “Reading Reading the Romance” by Janice Radway
– “Feminism and Popular Culture” by Morag Shiach

5. “Dallas and
the Ideology of Mass Culture”
by Ien Ang

6. • Analysis: “I wanted... to understand this
pleasure without having to pass judgment on
whether Dallas is good or bad.”
• Ideology of Mass Culture: popular cultural
products and practices as “bad mass culture”
• Identity as a “person of taste” or (selfappointed) “cultural expert” distinguishes one
from others who don’t recognize “bad mass
culture”
• Dismissive of mass culture and those who are
taken by it

7. • Popular culture and ideology of mass culture:
ways people talk about culture vs. people’s
cultural practices
• Populist position: refusal to let preferences be
determined by the ideology of mass culture
• Dialectic between the intellectual dominance
of the ideology of mass culture and the
spontaneous, practical attraction of the
populist ideology

8. • Bourgeois aesthetic: an art object is judged
according to extremely formal, universalized
criteria devoid of subjective passions and
pleasures
• Popular “aesthetic”: significance of a cultural
object can differ from person to person and
from situation to situation
– Based on affirmation of continuity of cultural
forms and daily life, a deep-rooted desire for
participation, and emotional involvement
– the recognition of pleasure, and that pleasure is a
personal thing

9. From Darna to
Zsazsa Zaturna:
Desire and Fantasy
by Soledad Reyes

10. “Of Borders and Margins:
Some Perspectives on Philippine Popular Texts”
• The “bakya” crowd: term for popular taste
that captured elitist contempt for products
produced for and consumed and positively
lapped up by the lower class
• Arbiters of taste: authority figures (educated
elite, literati, culturati, intelligensia) prescribed how texts must be written and
analyzed

11. • Public: incapable of doing anything but
uncritically accept fare served to them
• Can interpret and produce their own
meanings, shaped by their own experience
and understanding of life
• Text as site of complex contestations,
prolonged negotiations colonial discourse,
values inversion and rejection
• Native vs. Foreign (the quintessential “secondrate, trying-hard copycat”)

12. “Fernando Poe, Jr.:
The Making of a Legend”
• FPJ films: deeply immersed codes and
conventions of popular literature
• FPJ acted in and directed films which remained
traditional and conformed to conventional
patterns in plot structure, character delineation,
point of view, language development, and
utilization of a recurring and universal theme.
• The rich and the intelligent are powerless to
regulate popular perceptions.

13. “Readers and Viewers and
the League of Extraordinary Creators”
• Television series resonate with the viewers’ needs
that go beyond the wish to occupy their time, to
be offered entertaining fare.
• There is something more to discover in these
popular forms that labels such as “bad art that
provides instant gratification” can ever
approximate.
• Because these texts have been products of
specific sociohistorical conditions... they deserve
to be treated with more respect, especially in the
academe that still subscribes to the “Great
Western Tradition”.

14. “Feminism and Popular Culture”
by Morag Shiach

15. • Culture is a space of meaning, creativity and
humanism
• It is “ordinary” and “the way of life as a whole” of
any particular social or national group
• Popular culture as a site of resistance
• The working-class people participated in history,
struggling to shape it, rather than being subjected
to it (not helpless victims of historical change)
• Cultural forms exclude or marginalize women,
describing them as representative of the “typical
working-class condition”

16. • The production of popular texts assumed
masculinity in models of collective and public
cultural consumption.
• The attempt to develop a feminist critique has
driven women increasingly towards questions of
pleasure and consumption, and away from those
of history and production.
• Examination of isolated economic and cultural
role of housewife, relations of reproduction, and
ideology of romance fiction
• Consumption of soap operas and romance fiction
is a transgressive act, if not progressive
• Transgressive relations with cultural commodities

17. “Reading Reading the Romance”
by Janice Radway
“Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure”
by Ien Ang

18. “Reading Reading The Romance”
• Romance fiction: the differences between
popular” and “elite” literature
• Even an ethnographic description of a “native’s”
point of view must be an interpretation... my own
construction of my informants’ construction of
what they were up to in reading romances.
• Romance reading is a profoundly conflicted
activity centered upon a profoundly conflicted
form ( constituted a rebellion against the
patriarchal role they subscribed to)
• The hero is constructed androgynously:
spectacular masculine phallic power and capacity
for tenderness and attentive concern.

19. “Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure”
• The pleasureableness of the pleasure of romance
reading is missing from Radway’s interpretive
framework
• The intrusion of Radway’s politicizing agenda in
the ethnography is suspect
• The judgment on romance reading and their
social practice: “An illusion of pleasure while it
leaves their real situation unchanged”
• The repetitious reading of romantic fictions
offers... the opportunity to continue to enjoy the
excitement of romance and romantic scenes
without being intereupted by the dark side of
sexual relationships.

20. Global Divas:
Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora
by Martin Manalansan

21. • Bakla vs. Gay
• Byuti and Drama
• Philippine vs. American cultural icons and
representations (Philippine bading’s language
and accompanying body language vs. the
“disco-dancing Oscar Wilde-reading Streisand
ticket-holding friend of Dorothy’s)
• Body image and codes of dressing
• Places and spaces: homes, gay establishments
• Fear of Tita Aida (AIDS) and Tita Imee
(Immigration)

22. • Events: Voguing parties, Santa Cruzan
• The discriminated, feminized gay who spends
to the valorized and desired diasporic Asian
who is spent for/on
• Kinship in diaspora - other baklas as family,
relationships with friends are deemed
incestuous
• Socioeconomic class: Philippine class
consciousness carried over to the US, US class
not so easily determined

23. • Diasporic queers in particular refuse the
assimilative framework not because they carry
with them much of the baggage of tradition
but that their sense of selfhood and belonging
are framed in the process of cultural
translation and transformation. (p.124)
• Filipino gay men are continually positioning
and repositioning their performances and
themselves through varying modes of drama
and biyuti depending on the kinds of
exclusions and affinities they face in daily life.
(p.124)

24. • Memories of the homeland and the issue of
postcolonial cultural and psychic displacement
persist in many Filipino gay immigrant lives.
(p.137)
• For the Filipino bakla who has indeed crossed
borders, living in New York City – the iconic
place for America – mimicry is transformed
from a longing for an America whose physical
space he now occupies into a struggle for a
symbolic place in the US social imaginary.
(p.139)

25. • Stereotypically, the bakla is viewed as an artisan
in crafts that involve mimicry and transformation
such as lip-synching, cosmetology, and female
impersonation. (p.130)
• The church is a space for nostalgia, a place for
remembering as well as a way of settling in.
(p118)
• I use the idioms of drama and byuti as a valuable
means by which to understand the Filipino gay
men’s shifting notions of self and identity in
specific moments and, conversely, the relative
experience of stability, essence, and placement.
(p.92)

26. • Ang, Ien. “Dallas and the Ideology of Mass Culture”,
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (John
Storey ed.)
• Ang, Ien. “Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure”,
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (John
Storey ed.)
• Manalansan, Martin. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in
the Diaspora.
• Radway, Janice. “Reading Reading the Romance”,
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (John
Storey ed.)
• Reyes, Soledad. From Darna to Zsazsa Zaturna: Desire
and Fantasy.
• Shiach, Morag. “Feminism and Popular Culture”, Cultural
Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (John Storey ed.)
• TEDTalks: “Art Art Ka Diyan” (excerpts)