What Is Cultural Studies?

Cultural Studies as a literary theory began with the works… Cultural Studies is an extremely interdisciplinary theory that can encompass many fields, including anthropology, political science, and even philosophy and ethics. It began with the works of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart in the late 1950s and early 1960s before being adopted and expanded by Stuart Hall in the late 1960s. This theory moved away from the reading of literature for literature’s sake, and instead begins to regard it both as a product created by a culture and a object influencing that culture. Though the general aims and guidelines of Cultural Studies are hard to pin down, it can broadly be considered a theory that provides new methods for examining the cultural

A debate is a direct manifestation of the political and cultural ideologies that often have to be interpreted from literary works. In the case of the GOP, they are one of the two major political parties in the United States; they currently serve as the majority in the legislature at all levels, and, if polling numbers are any indication, they seem to also represent the beliefs of a significant percentage of the American public. This debate, in particular, contained a pattern of statements and positions that betrayed a reality Republicans want to deny: there is an implicit bias in the country against women. Several examples of this behavior can be presented, in the same way that textual evidence can be teased from a

When discussing appointments to the Supreme Court, the candidates only entertained the idea of selecting a man with a conservative track record. Planned Parenthood and overall spending on women’s health issues repeatedly came under attack. All of these slights against women—deliberate or subconscious, premeditated or impulsive—accumulate into a cultural practice in American society, and the Republican base being represented in this case, that still considers women less capable than men in the political arena. Women were systematically dismissed, underrepresented, mocked, ignored, and trivialized throughout the night. A Cultural Studies approach would look at this distinct pattern as a representative of underlying cultural symbols and