Cultural Studies Research

Overview

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field, represented in every social science, examining the relationships between systems and structures of power and the social phenomena, practices, and processes of contemporary culture. It is especially associated with postmodernist critiques of hegemony, patriarchy, colonialism, and systematic oppression and with work that examines the way cultural and social forces inform the meaning of, shape the understanding of, and construct the human experience of, many phenomena, including natural or biological phenomena.

The field of cultural studies developed in the mid-twentieth century and spread to American universities by the 1980s. By the 2020s, hundreds of US universities offered cultural studies courses. The discipline engages with contemporary culture from a framework or frameworks that is interested in the processes and changing practices of cultures and the systems of power that impact or are enforced by social phenomena. It is innately interdisciplinary, and many professors of cultural studies are actually employed by departments of sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, or philosophy, among others.

Because it so often deals with systems of power, cultural studies is more politically engaged in its treatment of cultural phenomena than, for instance, cultural anthropology or cultural history. In addition to the major social sciences, it draws on feminist theory, critical race theory, media studies, translation studies, and postcolonialism. Cultural studies research is defined as much by how it studies as by what it studies. While the prison system, for instance, can be examined from a number of methodological points of view—the psychology of rehabilitation, the ethics of incarceration, the politics of criminal justice—cultural studies examines it with an interest in how the demographics of the prison population differ from those of the general public, how parolees and formerly imprisoned people are treated in society, the power dynamics in the corrections industry, the role of for-profit prisons, the use of prison labor, the construction of criminality as an element of social identity, the politics of abolitionism, and so on. The British scholars, among whom the field was first developed, were particularly interested in hegemony—the dominance of one state over others. Not coincidentally, World War II had just ended British hegemony over the many constituent parts of its former empire, and the emerging “new world order” was recontextualizing the colonialist dream of European hegemony over Africa and Asia.

Major cultural studies theorists include sociologist Theodor Adorno, who coined the term “culture industry” for the producers of mass media; semiotician Roland Barthes; sociologist and media analyst Jean Baudrillard; social media and online culture theorist Danah Boyd; gender theorist Judith Butler; postmodern philosopher Gilles Deleuze; historian of ideas Michel Foucault; science and technology studies scholar Donna Haraway; intersectionality scholar bell hooks; and radical philosopher/cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. While the discipline attracted the interest of many scholars working to analyze contemporary culture and influenced many other academic disciplines, during the first decades of the twenty-first century it also attracted criticism, particularly from conservatives concerned with what they perceived as liberal influence on higher and secondary education.

Further Insights

The social construct is one of the key concepts in cultural studies, as well as one of the biggest sources of contention. The twenty-first-century debate over gender and sex is a good example. Biological sex is a physical reality, albeit one that does not comport to a binary based on primary or secondary sexual characteristics or chromosomes. Gender is not biological as such, but is a set of socially and culturally determined assumptions, expectations, and beliefs about specific gender roles—in modern western culture, “male/man/boy” and “female/woman/girl.” “People assigned female at birth generally have XX chromosomes” is a statement of scientific fact, albeit an oversimplification; “women wear dresses,” “women are less assertive,” or “women are adept nurturers” are statements about the expectations that have historically been attached to femaleness or femininity and rely on generalizations and stereotypes which are often harmful. The distinction has been made explicitly since the 1950s and is found conceptually throughout history, despite claims to the contrary.

Race is another area where social and cultural forces have constructed definitions and labels based on certain biological factors. It may need to be pointed out that race, as the term is generally understood by people in the twenty-first century, is not based on any genetic factor. There is no gene for “Whiteness,” “Blackness,” or any other race (for a small number of isolated ethnic groups, there is a gene held in common by the group, but this ethnicity is not defined by the presence of this single gene). There is no blood test anyone can take that will show what race they are, nor any essential physical characteristic, whether phenotypical or genetic, that defines any given race. In fact, “race” originally described language groups, and later nation-state affiliations; only around the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did societies adopt the modern sense of race as denoting specific hereditary phenotypical traits. There has been a long history since of explaining differences between groups of people with reference to racial traits, with the implication that there are genes or other physical origins for differences between racial groups. Many of these proposed explanations are explicitly racist and White supremacist; others more covertly so, and even in the twenty-first century, it is not hard to find someone arguing that racial disparities in wealth or access to opportunity are the result of physical differences rather than cultural ones or structural inequities. “Cultural differences,” too, is sometimes used as a euphemism for phenotypical racial differences, in much the same way that “urban” can be a negative euphemism in the US for “Black” or “African American.”

Furthermore, the changing definition of race in the Enlightenment was not a neutral process, but one that justified European colonialism, imperialism, and the enslavement of African people (the context in which the “one drop rule” originated, which, by arguing that any amount of African heritage defines an individual as Black, implicitly treated Blackness less as a genetic trait and more as a toxin). Though that rule is no longer used in the United States, American discourse surrounding multiracial people still often reflects the concept of hypodescent—in which a person of multiple heritages is categorized primarily by the most disadvantaged one. This is part of the larger scheme of American racial thinking, in which Whiteness is less a phenotype and more a degree of acceptance into the dominant cultural group. Numerous histories have discussed the ways that various immigrant groups—Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants, for instance—were not originally considered White in the United States, but are classified as such today by the Census and other official agencies. As these groups became less marked by their outward cultural identities, and overall more assimilated, mainstream US society began to consider them White. Other important work in this area discusses how race and ethnicity are discussed differently in the United States, why Hispanic identity is considered separate from race in the Census, and whether Middle Easterners are White (and if not, what is the intended or accidental message when “Middle Eastern” or “Arab” was not listed as an option in the Census or other surveys until 2020).

Cultural studies challenges the essentialism of historical views of race and elucidates the systems that have arisen to exert the social forces that shape our understanding of race and the effect of race on the individual and society. To say that racial essentialism does not exist or that race is not a physical fact is not the same as saying race doesn’t exist—that is the fallacy of colorblindness. People defined by American culture as White are treated differently and given different levels of access than those defined as Black, Asian, Native American, Middle Eastern, or any other race, which remains true even when considered independently from economic factors. Some of these forces operate similarly to those which construct gender identity and gender norms, or are enforced by the same institutions. Sometimes these forces interact with one another, such that there are distinct identities like “African-American woman” or “straight White man” that are more than the sum of racial and gender identities.

Issues

Cultural studies is often the target of criticism from factions who believe that modern education and scholarship suffer from not enough emphasis on hard science, practical skills, and the trades. The criticisms vary. Some point out the fact that cultural studies, like literary criticism and other disciplines in the liberal arts, makes claims which are unfalsifiable, as opposed to the rigorous laboratory environments of the sciences. Others, particularly conservatives, may argue that cultural studies is a form of indoctrination that challenges students’ patriotism, respect for American heritage and historical figures, and vilifies White men and American heroes. Others allege that cultural studies is so full of jargon that even the experts do not really understand what they are talking about. To be clear, most of these criticisms are, at best, overstated, or predicated on cherry-picked examples. It is not true, for instance, that Americans today receive less of an education in science than in the past, and the smaller percentage of postsecondary students enrolled in trade schools is the result, first and foremost, of the substantial increase in the percentage of students who enroll in college at all, as well as the perceived job market value of a bachelor’s degree. Some concepts connected to cultural studies, particularly critical race theory, were singled out for criticism by conservative lawmakers and educators in the US during the 2020s; in some cases, lawmakers attempted to purge or ban these concepts from public school curricula.

The unfalsifiability complaint is largely a strawman. There is work across the sciences that cannot be tested in rigorous laboratory conditions for one reason or another, but this does not mean that those disciplines have not developed careful standards for research. Furthermore, this complaint is frequently weaponized by ideologues in order to criticize what they view as a loosely defined left-wing academic industry, though in truth there is no shortage of conservatives in the liberal arts and social sciences. Much of the hostility towards cultural studies from social and political conservatives is tied up in a traditionalist/modernist schism in Western culture dating to the late nineteenth century and influential on the late twentieth century “culture wars.”

Much of the work in cultural studies is grounded in postmodernism’s critiques of universalism—the claim that there are universal, objective truths about human nature, morality, and other topics, truths that are true across all cultures (which, by extension, means that cultures where these truths are not reflected are in the wrong). This informs the perception that cultural studies is invested in attacking patriotism or American history, in making White students feel guilty for being White, and so on. The rejection of universalism means acknowledging, for one, that claims of American cultural superiority are suspect if for no other reason than that the notion of cultural superiority is suspect, and for another, that one’s own beliefs and values may be held not because they accord to some universal standard that is as real as gravity or mathematics, but because of the degree to which one’s culture and social environment have shaped those beliefs. The leap that these critics of cultural studies fail to make is that rejecting truth claims predicated on universalism is not the same as saying that a particular claim is false; it is saying, foremost, that the criteria for truth and falsehood are invalid.

That some critics of cultural studies have advanced bad faith arguments does not mean that none of the criticisms of the field have merit. The Sokal hoax or Sokal affair is an event that is still regularly discussed both within cultural studies and by its critics. In 1996, Alan Sokal was a professor of physics at New York University. Inspired by Higher Superstition (1994), a criticism of the “academic left” by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt that disparaged the level of scrutiny to which papers were subjected by many journals, Sokal submitted a paper to Social Text, a progressive academic journal published by Duke University Press (having been founded as an independent collective). The paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was deliberate nonsense that claimed quantum gravity—a theory of gravity consistent with the principles of quantum mechanics rather than Einstein’s relativity—is a social construct. The paper was accepted, and three weeks later, Sokal published a paper in the 1990s intellectual magazine Lingua Franca.

The Social Text paper was peppered with real and imagined academic jargon like “counterhegemonic narrative” and “emancipatory mathematics,” invoked socialists and feminists, described scientific research as self-referential, and seemed to conflate the phrase “prochoice” from the reproductive rights movement with the axiom of choice, a mathematical statement from set theory. The Sokal hoax naturally caused a minor scandal, bringing attention to postmodernism and cultural studies from a general public not normally attuned to current research and theory in the field (Brienza, 2015).

But Sokal seems to have cherry-picked his target. Social Text, while a well-regarded journal, was not at the time a peer-reviewed journal, and it was out of the ordinary for them to publish a paper that made claims about physics and mathematics that were outside the expertise of the editors—partly because it was out of the ordinary for anyone to submit such a paper. It was also an explicitly partisan journal, and either its partisanship or its lack of peer review would be enough to mark it as out of the ordinary among academic journals with major university affiliation (Brienza, 2015). Furthermore, the editors had suggested revisions and edits to the paper which Sokal had refused to make, instead taking the chance that they would eventually publish it anyway (as they did). This does not necessarily discredit Sokal’s criticism, but it does make it a narrower one; you could as well say that the Sokal hoax reveals the necessity of robust peer review as much as it reveals problems with cultural studies.

Not long after the paper was published, while responses to it and a war of words between Sokal and French philosopher Jacques Derrida were still getting press, Sokal published his book Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, co-written with physicist Jean Bricmont. Sokal and Bricmont used the occasion to accuse postmodernist academics in general of being guilty of misrepresenting, misusing, or misunderstanding science, and making outlandish or nonsensical claims. While it received some praise from the scientific community, many scholars in the humanities felt that the authors had misunderstood or willfully misread cultural studies research in much the same manner they accused postmodernists of misunderstanding science.

Terms & Concepts

Critical Theory: In cultural studies, critical theory generally refers specifically to critique of society and social issues that is grounded in cultural and historical context. Influenced by modernism, the Frankfurt School, Marxism, and structuralism, the postmodern critical theory of cultural studies challenges the idea of the scholar’s objectivity and, instead, encourages an understanding that the scholar cannot be reduced to an outsider standing outside of the system he describes.

Cultural Critic: A cultural critic is a critic not only of specific cultural products, like film or literature, but also of a culture as a whole. The concerns of cultural studies overlap with those of cultural criticism, and often cultural critics are also scholars of cultural studies or one of its associated disciplines. Adorno is one of the best-known examples, his work having consisted largely of critiques of the culture industry and fascism. Camille Paglia is a significant contemporary example, her body of work consisting of a feminist critique of contemporary culture, as well as of many of the strains of thought in cultural studies.

Hegemony: The domination of one state over others. In cultural studies, this is especially discussed with reference to the cultural dominance of American cultural exports over those of other countries (or in some contexts, the domestic cultural products of other countries), the hegemony of the Global North over the Global South, and colonialist or imperialist institutions.

Peer Review: Peer review or refereeing is a process to which papers are subject before publication at most major scholarly journals. More specifically focused than developmental editing or the fact-checking employed by news magazines, peer review calls for the scrutiny of a scholarly paper from one or more experts in the same field (or specialty), since the level of research expected from a scholarly journal necessarily means the editorial board cannot be expected to be well-informed enough to evaluate errors, oversights, or significance in every paper they publish. Ideally, peer review is double blind, meaning that the reviewer does not know the identity of the author or authors, and vice versa. In practice, in many fields it is difficult to conceal authors’ identity, because the research world is a small one, and even if the reviewer is not already aware that Author X has been at work on a particular project, they are likely familiar with the major names of the field and their areas of specialty or interest. Regardless, peer review is an imperfect process, and periodic scandals erupt when bad, falsified, or plagiarized research is published.

Postmodernism: A movement developing in the mid-twentieth century across academic disciplines and the arts, characterized by a skepticism towards the received narrative of Western culture and the assumptions and products of the Enlightenment, as well as by a self-aware, ironic, often self-referential approach to the arts.

Social Construct: One of the concepts found in every area of cultural studies is that of the social construct, which posits that certain phenomena are shaped or formed through social interactions and cultural forces.

Universalism: The philosophical claim that some ideas, values, or beliefs are held (or alternately, applicable) universally across human culture and throughout history. Specific universalist schools and thinkers vary in their claims, and although universalism is widely associated with its absolutist framing—which says that it is possible to articulate a system of ethics which is true in all times and places—one of the most influential universalist schools is utilitarianism, which in most formulations rejects claims of absolute right or absolute wrong actions, in favor of evaluating each action according to its consequences.

Bibliography

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Franklin, James. "The Sokal Hoax and Postmodernist Embarrassment." Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 14(3), 359–62, 1 July 2010, doi.org/10.1080/713657734. Accessed 6 Jan. 2025.

Hsu, Hua. "Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies." The New Yorker, 17 July 2017, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/stuart-hall-and-the-rise-of-cultural-studies. Accessed 6 Jan. 2025.

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Secor, Marie, and Lynda Walsh. “A Rhetorical Perspective on the Sokal Hoax.” Written Communication, vol. 21, no. 1, Jan. 2004, pp. 69–91. EBSCOhost, doi.org/10.1177/0741088303261037. Accessed 6 Jan. 2025.

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