The liberation movements of the 1960s and the 1970s have often been characterized as the origin of an “identity politics” that superseded the dominance of class-based movements in the United States. This characterization is somewhat misleading in that the Black liberation, Black feminist, and allied movements of the period were often resolutely anti-capitalist. The famous 1977 Black feminist text, “the Combahee River Collective Statement,” for example, declared “We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. Critical / cultural studies emerged in the United States and the United Kingdom in dialogue with these movements and their intellectual thought as the former gradually won space and influence in universities in the form of departments of Black studies; African American and Africana studies; ethnic studies; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; and more. Its scholars have increasingly drawn on the insights of these and subsequent political and intellectual movements in stressing the importance of studying the relationships between categories like class, race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and ability when studying the relationship between media, culture, identity, and power.
Representation in these literatures typically refers to how different cultural media depicts race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of identity and difference, though questions of who has the power to represent whom and how audiences can respond to dominant representations of identity with creativity and resistance also animate this scholarship. This guide provides an introduction to research on identity and cultural difference in critical / cultural communication. After a brief history of the treatment of identity and difference in cultural studies, it focuses on three key areas of cultural studies research on identity and difference: representation, reception, and production. An understanding of these topics will be useful for students seeking to understand the significance of identity and representation in critical / cultural studies and beyond.
A Brief History of Identity and Difference in Critical Communication Research
As discussed in detail in our Introductory Guide to Critical / Cultural Studies, from the turn of the 20th century to the post-WWII era, one dominant narrative told by cultural critics described the decline of high culture and the inferiority of the “mass” or “popular” culture that was displacing it. This type of cultural nostalgia is not uncommon; it seems to emerge in response to periods of substantial cultural change. When jazz began to displace classical music’s cultural dominance, or the Internet took over US culture in 1993, public and scholarly outcry warning of the decline of Western culture soon followed.
Breaking with this reactionary tendency, scholars at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies set out to develop an approach to understanding culture as a space of social and political struggle. This approach to cultural studies developed in the United Kingdom at the same time as critical feminist thought, critical approaches to race, queer thought, and post and anti-colonial criticism started to gain influence in the Western academy more broadly, spurred on by the era’s identity-based movements.
These movements also unsettled Marxist theories of culture, like those of the Frankfurt School, that understand media and popular culture primarily as a reflection of economic or class-based power structures. Collectively, critical / cultural scholars helped initiate a turn to the study of identity in communication research. They urged critics to acknowledge that the power structures related to cultural identity, including race, gender, and sexuality, are just as socially and politically significant as those related to class, and sought to understand how media and popular culture participate in the production of cultural identity and difference.
However, despite the serious attention cultural scholarship began paying to race and other forms of cultural difference in the 1960s and 1970s, research on race, identity, and identity politics has only slowly found a home in communication studies. As Lisa Flores (2016) points out, it was not until the 1990s that the National Communication Association’s Black Caucus, Asian / Pacific Caucuses, and other identity-based organizations were founded and a more visible push for diversity and inclusion began.
Spotlight on Scholarship – Featured Scholars in Critical / Culture Research on Identity and Representation
Discover how cultural studies scholars have explored the relationship between culture, identity, and power, from representations of race, gender, and sexuality on television to the racial implications of national security and immigration politics in the post-9/11 world.
Dr. Paula Chakravartty is James Weldon Johnson Associate Professor at the Gallatin School for Individualized Study and the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her research focuses on migration, colonization, and race in analyzing the global, political economies that define contemporary culture. These themes are explored carefully in her two books, Media Policy and Globalization (Edinburgh University Press 2006) and Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Dr. Chakravartty has also been a vocal critic of the lack of inclusion and diversity in the discipline of communication; she is first author of the essay #CommunicationSoWhite, which, first published in the Journal of Communication in 2018, continues to make waves in the discipline today.
Dr. Lisa Flores is Josephine Berry Weiss Chair of the Humanities and Professor in the Departments of Communication Arts & Sciences and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Her scholarship, focused on racial, intersectional rhetorical criticism, has appeared in some of the field’s most competitive and influential journals, including The Quarterly Journal of Speech. She is the author of the book, Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant, which won both the Diamond Anniversary Book Award and the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address from the National Communication Association. Learn more about Dr. Flores’ work in our exclusive interview.
Dr. Alfred L. Martin Jr. is Associate Professor in the School of Communication at the University of Miami. His research draws from Black and queer media studies to consider the roles of media production and reception in television representations of black gayness. This is the primary subject of Dr. Martin’s g book, The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom (Indiana University Press, 2021). Dr. Martin has widely published in some of the field’s top journals and has been an important voice in efforts to diversify communication scholarship. Currently, Dr. Martin also serves as Department Chair of Cinematic Arts at the University of Miami and has served on the editorial boards of the scholarly journals Communication and Critical / Cultural Studies and Queer Studies in Popular Culture.
Dr. Kumarini Silva is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is also part of the Critical Ethnic Studies Collective -- an interdisciplinary collaboration dedicated to critical work on race, ethnicity, and cultural difference. Dr. Silva is the author of the book, Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), that investigates the state’s production, regulation, and violent policing of “brown identity” in a post-9/11 context. She is also the editor of two important volumes on identity and difference: Feminist Erasures: Challenging Backlash Culture (Palgrave UK, 2015) and Migration, Identity, and Belonging: Defining Borders and Boundaries of the Homeland (Routledge 2020). Discover more about Dr. Silva’s research in our exclusive interview.
Representation: Culture, Identity, and Difference
Many critical / cultural scholars argue that identity categories are socially constructed through cultural practices of representation. It is, in other words, communication — visual, written, and spoken representations — that makes cultural identity meaningful. Representation provides frames for interpreting cultural difference, and works to imbue that difference with political and moral associations. In doing so, communication shapes identity and conditions how people are perceived and treated by governments, media actors, and other people.
As discussed in our article on Critical / Cultural Studies in Media and Popular Culture, media scholars have typically looked to popular cultural discourses in order to analyze the social construction of identity, evaluating how literature, films, and television depict race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other forms of sociocultural difference. In the simplest terms, critics of representation attend to who gets represented (which cultural groups and practices are made visible or invisible, which groups or identities are assumed as the norm) as well how certain cultural groups are represented (according to which stereotypes or tropes). However, a few things are important to note about the cultural studies approach to representation that scholars sometimes overlook when working with the concept.
First, the production of cultural identities is not limited to the messages produced by mass media; it is pervasive throughout culture. A great deal of the work of doing cultural criticism involves locating the not-so-obvious ways in which hierarchies of identity are perpetuated and enforced by dominant cultural discourses. Legal, educational, religious, and scientific discourses are prominent examples of sites of institutional representation, involved in producing the meaning of race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and more. The representations produced by media institutions form an important part of the context of identity formation, alongside these other elements of culture.
For example, Paul Gilroy (1997), Stuart Hall (1993), and many others have explored the construction of race as a category fabricated through discourses surrounding the transatlantic slave trade. In dialogue with critical race scholars like Franz Fanon (1952), they critique the scientific discourses that emerged to sustain and justify racial oppression. This pseudoscientific discourse on racial difference was, of course, grossly inaccurate, but scientific accuracy was not its goal. The “biological reality” of racial difference that these scientific discourses allegedly described was, in fact, produced retroactively as a justification for the slave trade and colonization. Hall and Gilroy both contend that there is no “essential” reality to race: race itself is a cultural construction, a direct product of racism and colonialism.
Second, this constructivist orientation of the critical / cultural perspective toward identity is “anti-essentialist,” which is to say, it does not position identity as something fixed or necessary, but as an outcome of relations of culture and power. Part of the work of studying representation, then, is interpreting how different cultural groups are defined and portrayed by various institutional discourses, including the discourses of media and popular culture. Stereotypes and negative representations are harmful, from this point of view, not because they fail to represent cultural groups accurately, or as they “really are,” but because these representations help construct the reality of how those groups will be perceived and treated by society, and even how they will perceive themselves, regardless of their accuracy (Dryer 2014).
Finally, and most importantly, critical / cultural scholarship does not view the study of representation as sufficient to understanding the cultural politics of media or popular culture. Understanding the significance of what the media represents also requires analyzing the production and reception of media as well.
As Julie D’Acci puts it in her important article on the “crisis” of cultural studies, cultural studies’ disciplinary approach to culture is meant to bring together the study of “industries, programs, audiences, and contexts” (2004). D’Acci is sharply critical of the reduction of cultural studies in some media scholarship to a simplistic interpretation of the ideology represented by media messaging, a trend that Alfred L. Martin (2021) argues continues to hinder the study of media, representation, and identity today. To counter this trend, critical / cultural scholars have emphasized the significance of audience reception, as well as the politics of media industries and media production to struggles over identity and politics.
Reception: Active Audiences and Intersectionality
Stuart Hall’s writings provide a robust foundation for the study of representation, as well as the study of active audiences. In his famous account of communication as encoding / decoding, Hall offers that there are three different ways an audience member might read or interpret the representations a message transmitted to them: dominant, negotiated and oppositional. A dominant reading accepts what a text represents as true and does not contest its epistemic or ideological assumptions. In a negotiated reading, the audience may challenge what the text represents as true or moral, but accept some of its meaning or enjoy some other element of the text. An oppositional reading rejects the meaning of the text, or its ideology, entirely, or reappropriates the text to radical ends.
This emphasis on the audience in this model was a revelation for media studies, which, up until this point, had been almost universally focused on the politics of the message and its transmission. While, in some cases, audience research has perhaps overcompensated and assigned too much agency to the audience, assuming they have near complete freedom in how they react to cultural discourses and forgetting about power and context in the process, other critical / cultural scholars have developed sophisticated theories of how one’s identity and social position provide the standpoint from which we interpret media and culture, conditioning our relationship to knowledge and experience (Haraway 1998).
For example, critical feminist scholar and literary critic bell hooks (1992) argues that the specific cultural location inhabited by Black women has, over time, generated oppositional ways of viewing cinema that differ, not only from how white people view cinema, but from the viewing practices of Black men as well. Consequently, hooks stresses the importance of considering the intersectionality of identity when one discusses the reception of media texts. Hook’s discussion reflects the way cultural studies views the media as a space of power and resistance. Her work also foregrounds the importance of “intersectionality” in scholarly considerations of the relationship between audiences and media texts.
Intersectionality is a concept coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (2006) that has become central to contemporary research on identity and cultural difference. An intersectional perspective contends that to be a Black woman, for example, is to live at the “intersection” of anti-Black racism and patriarchy. Black men, hooks argued, while subjected to the former oppressive structures, do not experience the latter form of oppression. For this reason, they receive the messages of cinema from a different standpoint than Black women, and their enjoyment of cinema and interpretation of its content differs as a result. This is reflected, hooks argues, by the fact that early Black filmmakers, predominantly men, often replicated the objectifying or dehumanizing gaze that white cinema employs to represent Black women.
This discussion illustrates how, in dialogue with feminist and antiracist thought, critical / culture studies has argued for the activity of the audience and the importance of one’s cultural standpoint in the reception of media representations. It is important that this does not mean the political impact of media representations are voluntary. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of critical / cultural studies’ approach to media representations is that it can account for both power and resistance in its discussions of the politics of media. People in different standpoints might interpret or respond to a racist message differently, but these modes of reception are not voluntary; they are, themselves, products of the relationship between culture and power.
Production: Who Represents Whom?
One of the greatest risks run by critical work on representation is to take what is represented by a media text as the thing that matters most about its politics. Without a doubt, media representations of identity and cultural difference do a great deal of work to construct the public perception and treatment of identity. However, the content or message that is circulated only gives us partial insight into the politics at work in the process of representation.
As Richard Dryer argues in his discussion of gay stereotypes in film and television, who gets to do the work of representation matters a great deal. Surveying a variety of examples from film and television, he points out that heterosexual culture does the work of representing gay culture, so that heterosexual culture is assumed as the implicit norm or standpoint of interpretation within these representations. Similarly, Alfred Martin (2021) reflects on the popular practice of casting heterosexual actors to play queer characters, and white producers using their social capital to “tell stories about people of color” as instances where the representation of difference leaves oppressive power structures relatively undisturbed. Real inclusion and diversity in media representation, these authors and many more argue, requires diversification of media industries. That is, it requires more inclusive practices of production, with real creative control being extended to marginalized groups.
Further, the study of institutional representations is only part of the picture. Specifically, it tells us how identity is represented by those with political power. Powerful actors produce and circulate cultural representations that set the terms for how we think about and treat cultural identity. But members of these cultural groups are not ‘cultural dupes,’ as Stuart Hall put it, and Grossberg has frequently reiterated. They are active agents, always struggling within and against these dominant formations to define themselves. Critical / cultural scholars have, as a result, looked to the discourses of media and popular culture as a space of social struggle, where subversive, oppositional, and otherwise generative cultural discourse might emerge.
Sufficiently engaging with representation therefore involves going beyond the study of what gets represented in popular culture and considering, more generally, how power dynamics inform every level of media production. This involves seeing how exclusion takes place in the media industry, as well as how creative producers and members of marginalized communities form resistant or niche cultures and produce meaningful work within those oppressive contexts.
Critical / Cultural Research on Identity and Representation Today
Critical / cultural studies has developed important approaches to analyzing the role media representations play in constructing identity and cultural difference. The scholarly perspectives discussed here are all relatively contemporary and have become more and more central in academic discourse over the last decade.
Still, there are two features of more recent scholarship on identity and difference that make it unique. First, as Paul Gilroy presciently observed in his 1996 article on identity and difference, the turn to study identity and cultural politics is demanded, not only by movements of marginalized groups, but also by the nationalistic and conservative appeals to identity that follow as a reaction to these movements. While most of the work on representation and identity continues to concern marginalized groups seeking progressive change, today the study of identity in relationship to right-wing, white supremacist, and/or nationalist extremism has become more urgent than ever, both in the United States and internationally (Flisfeder 2017; Ganesh 2020).
Second, the study of identity and representation has motivated communication scholars to interrogate how their own discipline might perpetuate similar biases and exclusions to those found elsewhere in culture. Efforts led by scholars of color to diversify communication scholarship have recently thrust the need to interrogate the racist and otherwise exclusionary aspects of communication studies into the spotlight. Emphasizing the underrepresentation of scholars of color within the discipline and its various subfields, this movement, organized around the hashtag #communicationsowhite, has recently succeeded in bringing real change to the leadership structure of the National Communication Association (Chakravartty et al. 2018).
The focus on race, sexuality, ability, and other forms of cultural difference championed by critical / cultural scholars has not influenced communication studies without eliciting its share of resistance and backlash. This has come from within the discipline and from without. In recent years, media institutions and politicians in the United States and Europe have declared an ideological opposition to the type of critical thought on race, identity, and difference discussed here, claiming it is antithetical to national interests. As such, critical / cultural scholars find themselves now, as they have throughout their history, at the center of the most important political and intellectual struggles taking place in the academy today.
Sources and Additional Resources
To learn more about critical / cultural studies and its explorations of the politics of identity, difference, and representation, check out our exclusive Critical / Cultural Studies Research interviews with some of the field’s leading scholars, as well the following important texts:
- Chakravartty, Paula, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, Charlton McIlwain. 2018. #CommunicationSoWhite, Journal of Communication, 68(2):254–266.
- Combahee River Collective. 1977. “Combahee River Collective Statement.” https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf
- Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 2017. On Intersectionality: Essential Writings. The New Press.
- D’Acci, Julie. 2004. “Cultural Studies, Television Studies, and the Crisis in the Humanities,” in Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, Duke University Press.
- Durham, Meenakshi Gigi, and Douglas Kellner, eds. 2006. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Blackwell.
- Dryer, Richard. 2006. “Stereotyping.” In Durham, Meenakshi Gigi, and Douglas Kellner, eds. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Blackwell.
- Flores, Lisa A. 2003. “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20(4):362–87. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0739318032000142025.
- Flores, Lisa A. 2016. “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism.” Review of Communication 16, no. 1, 4-24.
- Flisfeder, Matthew. 2018. “‘Trump’—What does the name signify? Or, Protofascism and the Alt-right: Three Contradictions of the Present Conjuncture.” Cultural Politics, 14(1):1-19.
- Ganesh, Bharath. 2020. “Weaponizing White Thymos: Flows of Rage in the Online Audiences of the Alt-Right.” Cultural Studies, 34(6):892-924.
- Gilroy, Paul. 1996. British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of Identity, in Media and Cultural Studies.
- Gilroy, Paul. 1997. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Verso.
- Hall, Stuart. 1973. “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” in Essential Essays, Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies, ed. David Morely Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
- Hall, Stuart. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signification, New York: Sage.
- Hall, Stuart. 1993. “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture.” Social Justice: a Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order, Vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 104-115.
- Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, 13(3):575-599.
- Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. Oxford University Press.
- Johnson, Richard. 1986. “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” Social Text, Winter, 1986/87:38–80.
- Johnson, Azeezat, Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Beth Kamunge, eds. 2018. The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence, Zed Books.
- King Watts, Eric. 2017. “Postracial Fantasies, Blackness, and Zombies.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 14(4):317-333.
- Martin Jr., Alfred L. 2020. “For Scholars … When Studying the Queer of Color Image Alone Isn’t Enough,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 17(1):69-74, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14791420.2020.1723797.
- Martin, Judith N., Robert L. Krizek, Thomas K. Nakayama, and Lisa Bradford. 1996. “Exploring Whiteness: A Study of Self-labels for White Americans.” Communication Quarterly, 44(2):125-144.
- Mulvey, Laura. 2006. “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema” in Durham, Meenakshi Gigi, and Douglas Kellner, eds. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Blackwell
- Nakayama, Thomas K., and Robert L. Krizek. 1995. “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81(2):291-309.
- Ono, Kent A. 2011. Critical Rhetorics of Race. Vol. 12. NYU Press.
- Ono, Kent A., and John M. Sloop. 1995. “The critique of vernacular discourse.” Communications Monographs, 62 (1):19-46.
- Saucier, P. Khalil and Tryon P Woods, editors. 2016. Conceptual Aphasia in Black. Lexington Books.
- Silva, Kumarini. 2010. “Brown: From Identity to Identification.” Cultural Studies, 24(2): 167–182. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502380903541597.
- Silva, Kumarini. 2016. Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State. University of Minnesota Press.
- Solomon, Martha. 1985. The Rhetoric of Dehumanization: An Analysis of Medical reports of the Tuskegee Syphilis Project. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 49(4):233-247.
- Squires, Catherine, Eric King Watts, Mary Douglas Vavrus, Kent A. Ono, Kathleen Feyh, Bernadette Marie Calafell, and Daniel C. Brouwer. 2010. “What Is This ‘Post-’ in Postracial, Postfeminist… (Fill in the Blank)?” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 34(3):210–53. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0196859910371375.
Additional Topics on Research in Critical / Cultural Studies
This article discusses the history and social significance of critical/cultural studies in the field of communication scholarship, including its role in popular culture, racial and ethnic identity, and representation, political movements, and social justice.
Learn about the rich history of critical / cultural studies and how it has informed scholars’ examination of media and popular culture over the years. Also discover the ways in which media and pop culture consumption provides opportunities for resistance to existing stereotypes and power structures.
