to use their wealth and power to buy off accusers and shield their misdeeds.
As these various examples hopefully demonstrate, ideology functions most smoothly when it is so embedded in everyday life that more overt oppressive measures become unnecessary. In fact, the use of oppression usually indicates that large sections of a society are beginning to diverge from the dominant ideology. At their most successful, ISAs act as reinforcements for individuals who have already been inculcated into dominant ideology. Such individuals are said to have internalized ideology, or to have adopted socially constructed ideological assumptions into their own senses of self. Such internalizing can have significant effects on people, especially members of minority groups. No matter what social group one might identify with, we all are constantly bombarded by images, ideas, and ideologies of straight white male superiority and centrality, and these constructs are consciously and unconsciously internalized by everyone. For straight white men, those images can reinforce feelings of superiority. For everyone else, those images and ideas can produce mild to severe self‐hatred or create a psychological state in which individuals limit their own potential. In effect, we might allow the dominant ideology to tell us what we are or are not capable of – that women are not good at math, that African Americans can only excel at sports, that people from the lower classes must remain uneducated, that someone in a wheelchair cannot be an elected official, or that being homosexual is a shameful thing. Possibly the least noticeable but potentially most damaging, this type of internalized discrimination is sometimes termed ego‐destructive, because it actively works against an individual’s sense of psychological well‐being. Such ego‐destructive ideologies may be especially harmful because they are often fostered by those groups and individuals who allegedly love and nurture us: rejection from families and religions is still a common occurrence for many people who are considered different from the “norm.”
The strength and tenacity of such internalized ideology within an efficiently working hegemonic system allow people to consider their society open and free, since it appears that no one is forcing anyone else to live a certain way, or keeping them from reaching their highest possible levels of achievement. Yet the subtlety of ideological state apparatuses and the subconscious impact of ego‐destructive discrimination severely undercut and problematize the avowed principles of liberty and equality upon which the United States was founded. Hallowed as these principles are, the functioning of white patriarchal capitalism as our nation’s dominant ideology militates against social equality in a variety of ways.
Culture and Cultural Studies
While the school, the church, and the family serve as classic examples of ideological state apparatuses, potentially the most pervasive of ISAs (at least in the past century) is the mass media – newspapers, magazines, television, radio, film, video games, and now the Internet and the World Wide Web. Many theorists feel that in today’s electronic world, the media has more influence on cultural ideas and ideologies than do schools, religions, and families combined. The bulk of this book will examine historically how one branch of this mass media, the American cinema, has worked to exemplify and reinforce (and more rarely challenge) the hegemonic domination of white patriarchal capitalism.
One of the first arguments used to resist focusing on American cinema as a conveyer of ideological messages is that Hollywood movies are merely “entertainment.” Consequently, as the argument goes, academics are reading too much into these things. What do ideas like ideology and hegemony have to do with mindless escapism? To answer such questions, one has to recognize that cinema (and all other mass media) are important parts of American culture. Culture refers to the characteristic features of a civilization or state, or the behavior typical of a group or class. Culture is thus deeply connected to ideology: one might say it is the “real‐world” manifestation of ideology, since characteristic features, social behaviors, and cultural products all convey ideology.
Historically, European culture judged itself to be superior to all other cultures on the globe. “True” culture was thought to be synonymous with Western notions of high art – classical music, “serious” literature and theater, etc. – and other cultures were judged to be deficient by those standards. Today we try to discuss different cultures without making such value judgments; we also understand that any given group’s culture is more than just its most “respectable” and officially “important” art works. Culture also encompasses the modes of everyday life: how one behaves in a social situation, the type of clothes one wears, the slang one uses when talking to friends, etc. This definition of culture includes the so‐called low art of popular music, comic books, paperback novels, video games, movies, and television – forms of culture that interact with far more people than do those found only in museums or opera houses. Even language itself shapes and is shaped by culture, and thus conveys ideological meanings. For example, the Euro‐American cultural tradition that associates “white” with goodness and “black” with evil cannot help but influence how we think about race, which we often define in the same terms.
Within any given society, there are multiple cultures that differ in varying degrees from one another. In the United States, one can find a variety of cultures: hip‐hop, Chicano, Mennonite, conservative Christian, millennial, just to name a few. As intersectional theory posits, cultural identities co‐exist and overlap (for example, a black female hip‐hop millennial), but cultural groupings rarely exist in equal balance with one another. Rather, the culture of the ruling or most powerful group in a society tends to be the dominant culture, expressing its values and beliefs through ideologies and other cultural forms. The group with the most control has the greater means to produce and disseminate their preferred cultural attitudes throughout the rest of the society – their music, their literature, their standards of behavior become the norm for the rest of the society. For example, Native Americans have historically had less opportunity than Anglo Americans to get the funding or training necessary to make films or television programs. Consequently, the white man’s version of “how the West was won” has been filmed and televised literally thousands of times, while Native Americans have had very little chance to present their viewpoint of that era on film or video.
The culture of any marginalized or minority group is often labeled a subculture. Subcultures can have their effect on the dominant culture by contributing to the active hegemonic negotiation of dominant ideology, but usually this only happens to the extent that a subculture’s concerns can be adapted to the needs of the dominant ruling interests. For example, hip‐hop and rap music styles have crossed over into mainstream popular music – but in an altered (and some might say watered‐down) version. This is broadly called commodification (turning something into a product for sale) and more specifically incorporation (the stripping of an ideology or cultural artifact’s more “dangerous” or critical meanings so that the watered‐down artifact can be sold to mainstream culture). Another good example of this process is the history of earrings worn on men. Some men in the 1970s started to wear earrings as a “coming out” gesture – to announce to the world that they belonged to the emerging gay male subculture. As an act of coming out, the gesture was political and meant to challenge a dominant culture that ignored or suppressed the existence of gay men. Today, however, many, many men wear earrings – not because they want the world to know that they are gay, but because earrings for men have become a commodity that can be bought and sold as part of a depoliticized fashion trend. The gay political meaning of men wearing earrings has been stripped from the act – it was commodified and incorporated within the dominant culture. In perhaps a more recent example, tattoos were once the province of a small minority of people: mostly sailors and working‐class men who perhaps once were sailors. Tattoos signified a sort of gruff masculinity, which was initially appealing to women and gay men of decades past. Today, tattoos have been commodified and incorporated into dominant culture – people from all walks of life acquire them for a variety of reasons. It is highly unlikely that a young female film scholar with a tattoo of Atticus Finch and his daughter Jem from To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) is trying to convey her rough‐and‐tumble working
