The Importance Of Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies work with an inclusive definition of culture. To put it in simple words, culture is how we live among others. Culture is not embodied in written text; it is the practices and processes of making meanings in our everyday lives among other individuals. It is thus possible to say that cultures are made from the production, the reproduction, the coding, the decoding and the consumption of meanings being shared meanings or not. To see culture as a process of making shared meanings does not mean that cultural studies believe that culture is harmonious. If there is a rigid body of theories and methods, it means that there have been conflictual arguments around cultural studies. As would say Stuart Hall: “Cultural Studies has multiple

In this view, media images help to shape our view of the world influencing our values, morals: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media and Representation provide the symbols, myths, and discourses through which we create a common culture and through which we insert ourselves into this culture. If Media and Representation create a common culture, on the other hand, it is also a source of conflict which separates those who consider themselves as “normal” to those who are seen as “different”. In this view, media demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence, and who is not. They allow the power of the forces to control while suppressing the powerless; on the other hand, they unfold the false-consciousness and ideology by showing to the powerless that they have been pre-disposed to stay in their places, to be oppressed and never to revolt. The act of oppressing and controlling one group is called Hegemony. Hegemony is the dominance of one group over another, often supported by legitimating norms and ideas. The term hegemony is today often used as shorthand to describe the relatively dominant position of a particular set of ideas and their associated tendency to become intuitive, thereby

Therefore, for the powerful groups pressurising the less powerful ones, ideology is of prior importance. Dominant ideologies serve to produce and reproduce domination and subordination. Ideologies of class, for instance, celebrate upper class life and denigrate the working class one. Ideologies of gender promote sexist representations of women while giving all the merits to men and ideologies of race uses racist representations of people of colour and various minority groups. Ideologies make inequalities and subordination appear natural, and thus induce consent to relations of domination. With the introduction of the Italian politician and philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’ in cultural studies, the concept of “The Self and The other” took a considerable place in Cultural Studies. In order to develop the other in cultural studies, it is important to give a definition of The other. The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies hence says that “the notion of the other is closely linked to those of identity and difference in that identity is understood to be defined in part by its difference from the other. In other words, everything which does not form part of the “powerful social group” is said to be the ‘other’, for instance, everything which is not male, white, western, rich is said to be ‘the other’. What is in fact unjust is that those differences will always involve a relationship of power, of