Abstract
For sociologists of culture, popular culture is a continually moving target that can change from one day to the next. In Pop Culture Freaks: Identity, Mass Media, and Society, Dustin Kidd uses the matrix of identity (or matrix of domination), alongside the cultural category of the freak, as a framework to better understand the relationships between identity and popular culture. By doing so he provides readers with leverage to analyze and understand contemporary popular culture from a variety of sociological perspectives.
Kidd is specifically interested in how race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability influence the production, content, audiences, and social world of popular culture. Throughout the book he emphasizes several arguments. First, popular culture plays the contradictory role of integrating us into the social world while simultaneously telling us we have failed to integrate. Given this dynamic, Kidd argues the culture industry treats everyone as freaks that have something wrong with them. The same industry then sells a way to overcome the feeling of being a freak that will ultimately be unsuccessful. This dynamic results in people continually consuming popular culture. For his second argument, Kidd draws on the conceptual framework of the cultural diamond (Griswold 2012). The framework encourages analysts to account for the interrelationships between cultural objects, the creators of the cultural objects, the recipients of the cultural objects, and the larger social world. Kidd specifically argues that popular culture is embedded and connected to the social world and that one must address the relationships between the cultural objects, their creators, their recipients, and the broader social world. Finally, he argues that identities influence popular culture by creating disparities in the production, content, and consumption of popular culture.
Structurally, there are eight chapters in the book. The first chapter, “The Matrix Is Everywhere: An Introduction to the Sociology of Popular Culture,” introduces the framework Kidd is using and the arguments I outlined above. Chapters 2 through 6 focus on specific identities, while chapter 7 focuses on popular culture from a global perspective. Chapter 8 concludes the book and offers several ways to resist the mass media matrix. Each chapter (except the concluding chapter) includes additional resources, usually videos and websites, that could be useful for instructors or students. There are five appendices that provide brief histories of the different culture industries, including histories of printing and publishing (Appendix 1), the music industry (Appendix 2), the film industry (Appendix 3), the television industry (Appendix 4), and the Internet (Appendix 5).
The substantive chapters of the book, which focus on race (chapter 2), class (chapter 3), gender (chapter 4), sexuality (chapter 5), and disability (chapter 6), expand on his arguments from the first chapter and incorporate the relevant literatures specific to each identity. In these chapters, Kidd introduces a classic and contemporary theory as a way to explain the dimension of identity under consideration. For example, in the race chapter, he introduces Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness for the classic theory and Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory for the contemporary theory. The author then follows the brief theoretical frameworks by presenting basic demographic information on the category of difference in the social world. Depending on the dimension of identity, Kidd discusses some of the problems of quantifying the identity. Specifically, he discusses some of the limitations when measuring race, class, and disability. Then the author explores representations of the difference in a variety of areas of popular culture, such as film, television, or music. Kidd follows this with a section exploring the influence of the identity on the production of popular culture and a section on the identity’s influence on the audiences for popular culture. Interspersed throughout the chapters are short “Methodology Moments” exploring the different methods that are used to study popular culture, such as audience ethnographies and content analysis. Kidd also explores global popular culture in a separate chapter by focusing on specific instances of popular culture in South Korea, Argentina, India, and Nigeria.
While the structure of the middle chapters on identity (chapters 2 through 6) works well to discuss the influence of the identity under consideration on the representations, production, and consumption of popular culture, there is a disconnect between the theories discussed at the beginning of each chapter and the rest of the chapter. The theoretical frameworks could provide powerful tools to analyze popular culture, but they are not applied in his analysis in the rest of the chapter. Instructors adopting the text might want to consider elaborating on some of the theories during class discussions. Further, the pairing of some of the theories with particular topics might want to be reconsidered for those using the text. For example, using Durkheim and functionalism to discuss sexuality or symbolic interactionism to explain global popular culture might be problematic given the underlying premises of those theories and the limited space Kidd devotes to them.
In terms of other content, Kidd touches on important pieces in the sociology of pop culture. These include studies by Pescosolido and colleagues on children’s books, Shively’s study exploring racial differences in interpreting film, and Grindstaff’s ethnographic study of television talk shows. Some of the findings are nicely summarized in diagrams that are easily interpretable. I appreciated the use of the matrix of domination to understand popular culture. Most scholars end up focusing on one dimension of difference in relationship to some cultural object. By focusing on multiple dimensions of difference in relationship to a variety of cultural objects, Kidd makes an important step in applying intersectional arguments to the sociological study of culture. While Kidd acknowledges the abilities of audiences to make different uses of popular culture, I fear the book overall is too indebted to mass culture theory. Such theorizing assumes that audiences and consumers are mostly passive in the face of the dominating culture industry. The final chapter, “Freaks in the Matrix: A Conclusion and an Invitation,” offers possible ways to resist the culture industry, but the overall impression is that meaning is largely encoded by the people producing popular culture with little agency given to the audience or consumer. To perhaps balance the picture, instructors using this text may want to introduce work related to participatory cultures and fandom (Jenkins 2012) or from cultural studies related to encoding and decoding (Hall 1980).
There is a somewhat significant omission in the book, in that there is a lack of discussion about cultural omnivores and univores. Broadly, this thesis posits that those with a higher class standing or status consume a wider breadth of culture (omnivores), while those with a lower class standing or status consume a narrower range of culture (univores) (Peterson and Kern 1996). The literature that examines cultural omnivores and univores tends to have a problem delineating whether cultural omnivorism is a class or status phenomena, which then opens up the issue of what are class and status and how does one measure them. With those problems and the themes Kidd discusses throughout the book, I could see why he might avoid discussing that body of literature. However, I do think the class chapter (chapter 3) provides a somewhat inaccurate take on how sociologists have understood the relationship between class and culture. Kidd largely draws on Pierre Bourdieu and Herbert Gans, who both argue there is a direct connection between one’s class standing and the type of culture one consumes, even though a substantial number of sociologists have found evidence that challenges that line of argument (Alderson, Junisbai, and Heacock 2007; Chan 2010; Lizardo and Skiles 2008). Since the omnivore/univore taste pattern has been found in a variety of national contexts, it could have also been addressed in the chapter on global popular culture.
Overall, the book would work well in introductory to intermediate-level undergraduate courses, specifically, courses related to the sociology of culture, popular culture, the media, and culture and inequality. The text is written in an easily understandable manner. The theories introduced in each chapter, alongside the methodological notes, could serve as a starting point to discuss with students the different theories and methods used to explore popular culture. The appendices provide nice succinct overviews of development of different cultural industries. The examples Kidd uses from popular culture, for the most part, should be relatable and familiar to students. His examples range from Lady Gaga and the television show Modern Family to the Harry Potter books and film series and advertisements by Belvedere Vodka and Calvin Klein.
Even though popular culture can change quickly, I see the book providing a solid frame for students to sociologically analyze current popular culture. For example, with the important role placed on freaks in the book, it would be interesting to discuss with students American Horror Story: Freak Show, the fourth season of an anthology television series based in the horror genre, using the frameworks developed in the book. The frameworks in the book also lend themselves to analyzing and discussing the diversity of representations along the lines of gender, race, sexuality, and disability in such television shows as Transparent, Orange is the New Black, Master of None, Fresh off the Boat, Black-ish, Switched at Birth, and so on. Depending on the structure, content, and goals of the course, I could see the book as helping form the basis of assignments exploring the representations of identity in popular culture.