industries.
In this way, one can see how the impact of social difference (race, gender, sexuality, physical ability) can have an impact upon one’s economic class status. In fact, the social differences that this book attempts to discuss – race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability – cannot be readily separated out as discrete categories. For example, people of color are men and women, rich and poor, straight and gay. Cultural theorists refer to this complexity of identity as intersectionality: every human being on the planet is marked by various signifiers of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability in similar‐but‐different ways. Being a deaf working‐class white male suggests a person who has certain privileges and opportunities based upon being white and male, as well as certain disadvantages based on being deaf and working class. Being a black female means dealing with both patriarchal assumptions about male superiority and lingering ideas of white supremacy, while white women only have to deal with patriarchy (and possibly class). Being a lesbian of color might mean one is triply oppressed – potentially discriminated against on three separate levels of social difference. Encountering real‐world prejudice on account of those differences, non‐white, non‐male, non‐heterosexual people, as well as those considered disabled, may have trouble finding good jobs and subsequent economic success. The point is not to find out “which group is more oppressed than some other one,” but to recognize how all of these various forms of social difference can and do interact in complex ways, producing complex identities and social groupings.
Most ideologies, being belief systems, are only relatively coherent, and may sometimes contain overlaps, contradictions, and/or gaps. The dominant ideology of any given culture is never stable and rigid. Instead, dominant ideologies and ruling assumptions are constantly in flux, a state of things referred to by cultural theorists as hegemony – the ongoing struggle to maintain the consent of the people to a system that governs them (and which may or may not oppress them in some ways). Hegemony is thus a complex theory that attempts to account for the confusing and often contradictory ways in which modern Western societies change and evolve. Whereas “ideology” is often used in ahistorical ways – as an unchanging or stable set of beliefs – hegemony refers to the way that social control must be won over and over again within different eras and within different cultures. For example, we should not speak of patriarchal ideology as a monolithic concept that means the same thing in different eras and in different situations. Rather, the hegemonic struggle of patriarchy to maintain power is a fluid and dynamic thing that allows for its ongoing maintenance but also the possibility of its alteration. For example, specific early twentieth‐century patriarchal ideologies were challenged and changed when women won the right to vote in 1920, but that did not destroy the hegemony of American patriarchy.
Thus, the dominant ideology of a culture is always open to change and revision via the ebb and flow of hegemonic negotiation, the processes whereby various social groups exert pressure on the dominant hegemony. In another example, over the last fifty years, American civil rights groups have worked to expose and overturn the entrenched system of prejudice that has oppressed their communities for generations. Often, these fights include attempts to instill pride and self‐worth in the minority groups that have been traditionally disparaged. In the process, the ideological biases of racial superiority are being challenged, but the basic assumption that individuals can be grouped according to their race is not. While these efforts attempt to disrupt one level of assumptions, a more basic ideological belief is kept intact. In this case the dominant hegemonic concept of racial difference as a valuable social marker remains untouched, even as the individual ideologies of white supremacy are challenged. (More recent cultural theorists have begun to challenge the very notion of such rigid categorizations, a topic explored more fully in future chapters. For example, the obvious fact of biracial or multiracial individuals inherently challenges the idea that race is some sort of stable category.)
Ideological struggle is therefore an ongoing political process that surrounds us constantly, bombarding individuals at every moment with messages about how the world should and could function. Such struggles can be both obvious and subtle. One obvious way of disseminating and maintaining social control is through oppressive and violent means, through institutions such as armies, wars, police forces, terrorism, and torture – institutions known as repressive state apparatuses (RSAs). Violent, repressive discrimination is part of American history, as evidenced by terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, political assassinations, police brutality, and the continued presence of hate crimes. More subtly, the state can also enforce ideological assumptions through legal discrimination. For example, the so‐called Jim Crow Laws of the American South during the first half of the twentieth century legally inscribed African Americans as second‐class citizens. Current examples would be the lack of federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation; in fact, “religious freedom” laws are an attempt to enact statutes that would expressly protect such discrimination. Legal discrimination tacitly helps maintain occupational discrimination. What these few examples also show is that discrimination and bias are systemic problems as well as individualized ones. Just as a single person can be a bigot, those same biases can be incorporated into the very structures of our “free” nation: this is known as institutionalized discrimination.
While institutionalized discrimination and other oppressive measures overtly attempt to impose certain ideologies upon a society, there are still more subtle means of doing so that often do not even feel or look like social control. Winning over the “hearts and minds” of a society with what are called ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) usually proves more effective than more oppressive measures, since the population acquiesces to those in power frequently without even being aware that it is doing so. ISAs include various non‐violent social formations such as schools, the family, the church, and the media institutions – including film and television – that shape and represent our culture in certain ways. They spread ideology not through intimidation and oppression, but by example and education. In schools, students learn skills such as reading and math, but they are also taught to believe certain things about America, and how to be productive, law‐abiding citizens. The enormously popular Dick and Jane books taught many American youngsters not only how to read, but also how boys and girls were supposed to behave (and most importantly, that boys and girls behave differently). Institutionalized religion is also an ideological state apparatus, in which theological beliefs help sustain ideological imperatives. Many Christian denominations during the country’s first century used the Bible to justify slavery and segregation of the races. Some faiths still demonize homosexuality and argue that women should subjugate themselves to men. Historically, people have considered children born with differing physical abilities as signs of sin or evil; it was not that long ago when left‐handed children were forced to use their right hand, because the left hand was considered sinister or Satanic. Even the structure of the family itself is an ISA, in which sons and daughters are taught ideological concepts by their parents. In the United States, families have traditionally been idealized as patriarchal, with the father as the leader.
All of this points to how ideologies function through what cultural theorists call overdetermination, which means that any given ideology is disseminated through culture via multiple cultural institutions. Patriarchal masculinity, for example, is pervasive. It is upheld in many religions, foregrounded in much media, taught in schools (see Dick and Jane above), celebrated through sports, honored through warfare, rewarded through capitalism, and thought to be the bedrock of both the nuclear family and society itself. This is one of things that makes challenging (let alone changing) dominant ideologies so difficult. Our cultural institutions’ ideologies are deeply intertwined; they support and implicitly value and validate one another. For example, take the #MeToo movement, which has rocked Hollywood by calling attention to the sexist behaviors of powerful men in the media industries. The #MeToo movement is but one front on the struggle to undermine patriarchal attitudes and sexist behaviors towards women. #MeToo may be slowly spreading (or not) to churches and the military and the sports industries and the US government itself, but it remains to be seen how successful it will be in checking male abuses. Ideally, the movement will have some lasting effect
