- Industry: Printing & publishing
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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
A tip of 15–20 percent added on to pre-tax bills for restaurants, hotels, beauty salons, taxis and other services hardly seems an extraordinary surcharge in a global economy.
Yet, for many workers, tips represent a primary source of income, eclipsing any hourly wage (which may be lowered to reflect tips or erased by government deductions from a presumed higher income). Hence, tipping is not only a reward or recognition for service but a necessity. For those in elite establishments, this may mean a substantial and rapid cash income, but it may also uncomfortably underscore dependence and difference in service-sector interactions.
Industry:Culture
A variety of approaches to the topic of women and literature has emerged in the last thirty years as Women’s Studies has solidified and expanded as an academic field, building on the earlier work of women writers and philosophers. While the rise of academic feminism in the US coincides to some degree with the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, its history both extends back further in time and is also largely yet to be written.
Much feminist literary criticism and women-and-literature courses take writing by women as their object of analysis, noting that women have borne witness to their lives and assumed artistic authority despite patriarchal culture’s prohibitions, its denigration of female minds and imaginations, and the material difficulties historically facing women writers, including the demands of wife-and motherhood and the limitations of women’s education and property rights. But within feminist criticism emphases vary. Some readers and critics simply affirm the value of women’s texts by according them attention equal to or greater than men’s texts, looking to balance the historic dominance of the masculine point of view. Others attempt to identify a female tradition of writing—women writers consciously examining the status of their sex in their place and time and building upon the work of literary foremothers in the context of women’s relative silence.
Biographically informed approaches, using paraliterary documents and information in order to take account of the effect of social pressures and expectations on women’s creative lives and expression, is held by some to be more effectively feminist than the more traditional approach of taking the literary object out of its context. Further, in a gesture critical of aesthetic hierarchies and cognizant of women’s exclusion from their formation, literary importance and critical attention are accorded to non-traditional and unpublished writing genres like diaries and letters in this approach. Deriving alternative criteria from the form and content of women’s writing—criteria that dissent from and criticize the existing literary canon—is a similar project of feminist criticism. This often results in the revaluation of popular, sentimental and politically or socially engaged writing: writing that manifests other interests and seeks out different audiences than does the high literary culture historically dominated by men. As a consequence of these approaches, much of literary history is in the process of being rewritten.
Feminist criticism is not limited to women’s writing. Working on the assumption that gender roles are not a given but that gender is a social construct and gender ideology is propounded and reinforced through literature as through other social institutions, gender critics read literary texts from the masculine mainstream using gender as a lens. They explore these texts’ unacknowledged gender biases and note their dependence on gender stereotypes, on the flattening and simplification of women characters and of relations between men and women. Further, they uncover these texts’ regulation of gender roles through encouraging identification with normative gender behavior and punishment of gender deviance. Thus feminist critics extend their project to the examination and critique of masculine roles, deeming those roles no less constructed, and constricting, than the feminine; they further note the tacit enforcement of heterosexuality in much mainstream literature.
Beyond feminist approaches to literary works and literary history is the domain of feminist theory in which writers work to limn the historical, political, psychological and linguistic means by which gender ideology has been formed and reproduced over time.
Further, increasingly the work of women writers and critics of color, third-world critics, lesbians and working-class writers has functioned to extend and critique earlier feminist criticism. These critics argue, from their various positions, that Anglo-European feminism has historically been unselfconsciously white, middle class and heterosexual in its approach and focus, and has merely extended masculine individualist notions of the self to white women. Further, they argue that Western women were and have remained complicit with such forces as colonialism, racism and classism. While working to include the literature and history of such doubly excluded women, these critics further break down the category of “women” and attest to the multiplicity of women’s lives and roles.
Rather than claiming multiple victimization and exclusion based upon both gender and other categories of identity they work to identify alternative histories and literatures, including the previously unrecognized traditions, notions of selfhood, and forms of power and community, among, for example, ethnic-minority queer, or disabled women.
Gilbert and Gubar’s work in the 1970s was an epoch-making look at an alternative set of women writers’ practices and traditions. Elaine Showalter and Catherine Stimpson’s early work is also from this period, while Carol Gilligan’s work on “women’s voices” as unique continues to have influence among those interested in identifying “women’s ways of knowing.” European psychoanalytic and poststructuralist criticism by Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva and the Lacanian critic Luce Iragaray enjoyed a strong vogue in the 1980s.
American critics doing their own work involving psychoanalysis and gender included Jane Gallop and Shoshana Felman. In the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s, Donna Harraway pioneered arguments from a postmodern, post-gender position, while Judith Butler incorporated poststructuralist philosophy in her work to emphasize that gender is performed rather than essential. These theoretical positions have influenced how women’s work is read, de-emphasizing the idea of an alternative tradition and focusing instead on the constitutive and critical incoherences of “the subject”—i.e. the selfconscious individual—constituted under patriarchy and through its language.
Alternatively critics like Janice Radway departing from an emphasis on academic expertise, have sought to learn and acknowledge what women readers of various class and educational backgrounds understand about their own cultural practices as readers.
Among the various theorists pointing out the limitations of white feminism’s approaches, sometimes utilizing, sometimes criticizing its focus on the incoherence or non-existence of the subject, have been African American critics like bell hooks, Chicanas/Latinas like Gloria Anzaldúa and post-colonial thinkers like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
The reading and teaching of literature by women is now the norm rather than the exception. Besides the existence of Women’s Studies classes and programs, mainstream anthologies (like those from Norton, Longmans, and Heath) now incorporate work by women side-by-side with that of men as a matter of course, and the anthologies have grown correspondingly Further, both womencentered presses (like England’s Virago, the Feminist Press of the City University of New York, or Kitchen Table) and mainstream publishers have joined in the process of publishing new women’s texts and recovering and reprinting earlier ones. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976) are among the most-read books in high schools and college freshman courses throughout the US. The incorporation of feminist approaches into the academic mainstream does not lessen the importance of feminist academic and paraacademic institutions like the journals Signs (established 1975), Women’s Studies (established 1972), Women’s Review of Books (1984) and Genders (1988). These institutions and others continue to testify to the notion that from women’s history and literature springs a fount of criticism of the mainstream and a celebration of the many other forms of seeing and being that exist.
Industry:Culture
Academy Awards set the tone, in terms of recognition, ceremony and glamour, for many media awards that now annually recognize both excellence and box-office receipts. These awards, especially as telecast internationally, reaffirm celebrity, glamour and values of American production despite questions about the nature of the selection process. They also eclipse many smaller local and festival awards around the country. These major awards and their spectacles reinforce economic success for studios, works and artists who position themselves through advertisements, gifts and screenings to “bring their works” to the attention of voters.
The Oscars, 13½ inch statuettes awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, first appeared in 1927 when Wings captured Best Picture while German-born Emil Jannings won Best Actor. Oscar nominations are decided upon within specialist branches before the final vote of all academy members. As the ceremony has moved from a hotel auditorium to wider audiences, professional roles have been taken by comedian hosts (Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg), and sets and production numbers have become increasingly elaborate—as have jewelry hair and costumes for stars. While moments of political intrusion are often remembered (Marlon Brando’s Native American substitute, George C. Scott’s refusal, Richard Gere’s pleas for Tibet), the Oscars tend to reaffirm the priority of Hollywood as the entertainment capital.
Indeed, workers in technical fields and “lesser-interest” awards are relegated to earlier, less publicized ceremonies so that the narrative of the Oscars focuses on the final naming of the highest categories—Best Picture and Best Director. Foreign films were added as a category in 1947. In the 1990s, limited-voting awards like the New York Film Critics and Golden Globes gained increasing attention as forerunners for the Oscars.
The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences held its first small ceremony for the Emmy in Hollywood on January 25, 1949. Its six categories remained broad, for example, Most Outstanding Television Personality (ventriloquist Shirley Dinsdale) and Most Popular Television Program (Pantomime Quiz; KTLA), reflecting the limited scale of a nascent industry that served only 1 million sets. In the second year, categories like Children’s Television, Public Service and even advertising were added; divisions of genre and gender became established in the 1950s. Regional awards also emerged in major markets somewhat later in the 1950s as performance and programming awards topped fifty by 1970. Like the Oscars, the awards became television events in themselves, including a separate daytime Emmy presentation. Emmys also have been torn between the recognition of changing definitions of quality or breakthrough achievements and popularity—how does one compare the investigative news of 60 Minutes with baseball coverage, daytime soaps or musical variety? Nonetheless, this confluence promotes a sense of celebrity which increasingly crosses genres.
Other national media-award shows have emerged complementing these, like the televised spectacle of the Grammies (music) and Country Music Awards. Broadway’s Tony Awards (founded 1947) also have emerged to national television audiences and repackaging in Broadway advertisements that highlight the number of nominations (as well as debates over the constitution of each category).
Some awards also combine movies, television and other fields, for example music, while stressing popularity and pseudo-democracy (People’s Choice), while others draw the attention of specific audiences—MTV awards have added youngeroriented categories like Best Kiss. Meanwhile, Essence magazine sponsors awards for African achievement and ESPN hands out the ESPYS. More serious retrospective awards, including Kennedy Center Honors and American Film Institute retrospectives, have also been packaged for wider audiences. Cable television, moreover, created new premiums such as the Cable Ace awards, which recognize the burgeoning power and diversity of these channels, even as they muscle into Emmys and Golden Globes.
Overall, awards as recognition may have vital meanings in terms of careers, box-office revenues, thematic trends and even corporate survivals. At the same time, as live televisual events, they bring the excitement of uncertain outcomes (as in sports events and game shows), individual triumphs and glamorous success to audiences in the US and worldwide.
Industry:Culture
According to Larry Gross in Contested Closets (1993), “outing” actually coincides with the nineteenthcentury introduction of the homosexual and, thus, the homosexual closet.
Since then, impulses to make public that which is private (especially sexuality) are confounded by paradoxical impulses to protect those very same issues. Journalism complicates this: where is the line in issues of public and private when discussing a public figure? Reporting on a public figure’s private sexual affairs has always stirred a controversial, yet prurient, response. Throw in gay and lesbian life and either the strong arm of the closet protects the figure from scandal or, unlike his or her heterosexual counterpart, the figure’s reputation is ruined. This imbalance prompted journalist/activist Michelangelo Signorile to query the favored newsworthiness and biased protection of heterosexual affairs. Although others had “outed” previously, Signorile articulated “outing” as a complicated political gesture, making it a political tool and an art form in the gay magazine Outweek (1989–91). Signorile contends that “outing critiques and corrects the double standard in journalism on reporting on homosexuals and heterosexuals.” Furthermore, “in cases where a closeted politician is voting anti-gay in order to protect his closet, outing displays the political hypocrisy” (interview, 11/22/98).
Industry:Culture
According to the Federal Reserve Board, outstanding consumer credit has soared from $6,577.8 million in January 1943 to $1,370,880 million in October 1999. Much of this increase has come in revolving credit, a concept that appears in Federal Reserve statistics as of 1968, as major associations like Visa and Mastercard consolidated. By the late 1990s, over 2 billion credit cards circulated in the United States—roughly nine per person. Credit has facilitated consumerism (and debt) as hallmarks and dangers of the middle class; credit cards have become badges of identity as well as status. Yet, this global revolution has also excluded the poor in important ways.
Earlier credit arrangements incorporated divisions of wealth and class. Department stores, clubs and other services arranged billing or charge accounts for the bourgeoisie.
American Express, founded in 1850, has carved out a niche based on travel, corporate money management and financial networking for an elite clientele, competing with Diner’s Club and Carte Blanche. American Express charges a user’s fee for this service and demands complete monthly payments; it also charges merchants more.
By contrast, those of limited means have depended on personalized arrangements which have sometimes kept them locked into debt with merchants or employers. Others have relied on layaways (planned pre-payment to gain necessary goods), as well as savings and denial. Through yet another scheme, rental-purchase, those without credit pay many times the value of goods as they use them before possessing them outright. In emergencies not covered by public assistance, the poor turn to families or fall into the hands of predatory loan sharks who compound high interests on a weekly or monthly basis. Credit unions and similar community ventures have sought to establish more concrete savings and credit plans for workers and low-income groups.
Middle-class credit, by contrast, took shape in particular through consortia of banks that facilitated payment through interconnecting branches in major cities. Franklin National Bank offered such a card in 1951, replacing experimental bank script. By 1966 the Interbank Card Association emerged, establishing global ties for what would become Mastercard within a few years. Visa emerged from the Bank of American Bankamericard (1958), consolidating national and international ties in the early 1970s and taking on its current name in 1976. Together, these cards now account for 75 percent of the American market; 50 percent for Visa, which issued 298 million cards in the US in 1998. They are also hotly marketed at people at the beginning of financial maturity: 70 percent of college undergraduates have at least one, while special offers (usually reduced initial financing) are mailed out weekly to target demographics, and televised advertising underscores that “for everything else, there is Mastercard.” Citizens, in turn, use these cards to establish credit ratings to validate future borrowing.
Since banks issuing one or both cards do not handle other cards, this Visa-Mastercard monopoly has been attacked by American Express as well as by the smaller Discovery card, originally founded and backed by merchandiser Sears Roebuck. In fact, Visa and Mastercard have shown flexibility in organizing co-branding arrangements with airlines, vendors and even charities that account for 20,000 different kinds of credit cards available. The message of all, however, is the same: consumerism is part of American identity and credit cards, like driver’s licenses, are routinely solicited for identification as well as necessities for such practices as car rental.
Unlike American Express, Visa and Mastercard charge less and may have no user’s fee; instead, 75 percent of their profits come from charges on balances left unpaid, which may reach 26 percent annually The weight of this debt has contributed to growing bankruptcies and emphasized the alternative of debit cards or check cards which draw money directly from accounts without exceeding available limits or charging interest. For those who have lost their credit rating, new markets for credit counseling, debt consolidation (often borrowing against house equity) and secured credit cards, which allow spending up to a fixed-deposit limit, all offer routes into American consumer debt.
Not all observers are sanguine about the ease or implications of this transformation of an American way of life. Critics have frequently raised questions about privacy and control of personal knowledge, especially as credit cards mesh with the ubiquities of ecommerce and increasingly smart cards are promoted. Yet, in this, it is also clear that the US is not alone: Visa has issued 800 million cards worldwide and touts itself as a universal currency where the total expenses for 1998 products and services reached $1,400,000 million.
Industry:Culture
Accounting for a small fraction of American music sales, Christian music exists at the margins of the music business. For example, most religious albums are sold not at record stores but through religious bookstores. Many artists find tension between the view of their work as a religious ministry and the economic need to make profitable, popular music. Like the secular country music industry the Christian music industry is based in Nashville, Tennessee, and is most popular in the Southern Bible belt states. Well-known Christian music artists include Amy Grant, the group DC Talk and Michael W. Smith.
Industry:Culture
Act passed by Congress, at President Johnson’s behest, following the attack by state troopers and white extremists on Martin Luther King, Jr. and civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. King had been demonstrating the disparity between eligible black voters and the number registered in the counties around Selma.
The Act made all testing for literacy character, or constitutional awareness illegal, allowing only age, residence and citizenship for determining eligibility to vote.
Reinstating powers for the federal government that had not been seen in the South since Reconstruction, the Attorney-General was empowered, where necessary to appoint federal examiners to register voters.
Industry:Culture
Actors create the illusion of believable characters through imaginative dramatization.
Throughout American history, actors have worked in a variety of venues, including theater, film and television. Since the Second World War, most prominent actors have been known primarily for their film work, although many of them also perform in theater, television and advertising (in descending degree of “legitimacy,” if not remuneration).
Famous actors (“stars”) have a powerful cultural influence since they reflect and structure our ideals, particularly with respect to aspects of social identity including race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and religion. Because these “ideals” are often manufactured according to Eurocentric values, many actors from marginalized groups have been excluded from this vision.
In the postwar period, acting in America has been greatly influenced by the theories of Konstantin Stanislavski (1863–1938), a Russian actor, producer and theorist. In 1948, Lee Strasberg started the Actors Studio in New York, basing his approach on Stanislavski’s theories. This approach, known as “method acting,” stresses emotional truth and internal transformation (i.e. “living the part”). Prior to Stanislavski’s work, many actors were primarily concerned with external signs of characterization (gesture, expression, costuming, vocal tone, etc.). Stanislavski didn’t discount the importance of these elements, but emphasized that most great acting can be linked to a “creative state of mind,” which promotes organic and convincing performances. American acting teachers such as Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler have carried awareness of this “method acting” style throughout the United States.
One of the first American actors to become known for “method acting” was Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1954). Until this time, American acting had been characterized by a more mannered style, particularly during the silent film era defined by such stars as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Louise Brooks. With the rise of “talkies” in 1927, acting styles became less histrionic, but still mannered in comparison with “method acting,” which took hold in the postwar era.
Notable stars in the 1930s and 1940s included Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, James Stewart, Judy Garland, Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Orson Welles, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, Hattie McDaniel, Henry Fonda, Joan Crawford, John Wayne, Carole Lombard, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. After the emergence of method acting, acting styles in America generally became less formal and more subtle—a shift often explained by the increasing prevalence of the cinema (associated with the close scrutiny of the camera) and the declining popularity of live theater. “Method acting” has remained popular into the twenty-first century though each decade is characterized by varying styles and personalities.
After the Second World War, many of the actors working during the 1930s and early 1940s continued to be active in the Hollywood studio system, which dominated American film-making for most of the twentieth century. After 1945, however, there was a move towards realism in American film-making that dovetailed nicely with Stanislavski’s emphasis on natural, organic acting styles. Until the 1950s, however, this new realism was mostly characterized by grittier themes (such as in film noir), as opposed to different acting styles. Actors like Rita Hayworth, Robert Mitchum, Lana Turner, Kirk Douglas, Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray (as well as a number of those mentioned above) became stars. By the 1950s, television began to absorb many of the audiences usually reserved for the movies, creating a new venue for aspiring actors, and encouraging directors to experiment artistically. At around this time, the “method acting” described by Stanislavski began to be incorporated into the Hollywood tradition more fully, although the light entertainment typical of the Hollywood tradition continued.
New stars like James Dean, Grace Kelly, Montgomery Clift, Doris Day, Harry Belafonte, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Lemmon, Sidney Poitier, Audrey Hepburn and Paul Newman began to appear, and comic actor Marilyn Monroe became famous as a blonde sex symbol and icon of an era.
By the 1960s and 1970s, Hollywood clearly felt the squeeze created by the new competition on the small screen. The volatile political climate at this time, characterized by the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement and the women’s liberation movement, also influenced creative expression during this period, and “method acting” firmly took hold as increasing numbers of actors were offered challenging dramatic or comedic roles. A new generation of “serious actors” (or actor/comedians) emerged, including Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Anne Bancroft, Warren Beatty, Woody Allen, James Earl Jones, Mia Farrow, Jodie Foster, Michael Douglas, Susan Sarandon, Al Pacino, Clint Eastwood, Cicily Tyson, Jon Voight, Shirley Maclaine and Robert Redford.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood started to move away from dramas towards blockbusters. In these films, the main stars were often the special effects, yet many actors of this generation took their craft quite seriously and studied “method acting”— sometimes for years before they began acting professionally. As the directors of this period became known as the “film school generation,” the actors of this period might also be known as the “acting school generation.” This generation included such actors as Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Richard Dreyfuss, Laurence Fishburne, Glenn Close, Jason Scott Lee, William Hurt, Angela Bassett, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Kathy Bates, Kevin Kline and Morgan Freeman.
Nearing the 1990s, independent films began to emerge in opposition to the Hollywood scene. Bolstered by the Sundance Institute founded by Robert Redford and the Independent Feature Project in New York, the “Independents” challenged the blockbuster ethic, which was increasingly prevalent in Hollywood. Actors such as Parker Posey, John Turtorro, Adrienne Shelley, Frances McDormand and Ed Burns strove to create offbeat characters imbued with a real sense of individuality.
Industry:Culture
Adulthood is marked in American society as in most cultures worldwide, by both rituals and responsibilities. Differences in individual and collective experience and values, however, make these passages of teenage years foci of anxiety as well as badges of maturity.
Judaism and many Christian traditions celebrate rituals around adult participation in the community (Bar/Bat Mitzvah confirmation, baptism in some evangelical traditions).
American Catholies, nonetheless, have debated the meaning and timing of confirmation as a socially relevant life sacrament.
Other secular landmarks are reached—and responded to—in different ways throughout the teenage years. Obtaining a driver’s license at sixteen (with some states permitting a learner’s permit a year earlier) has become a major point of transition in an automobile culture. Freedom, responsibility and danger intertwine here in both mass culture and parental nightmares. Various commencements/graduations (especially high school), voting (at eighteen) and legal access to alcohol (at twenty-one) also indicate increasing responsibility as well as risk. These fixed ages also lead to attempts to anticipate or subvert the law, especially with regard to alcohol and tobacco.
Passages may be gendered in both religious and secular observations. Women, for example, are often still classified as adults in terms of sexuality and marriageability. In a small segment of immigrant families, female circumcision occurs as the girl reaches puberty although avoidance of this tradition has also been used to claim refugee status in the US. The quinceanos, an often lavish celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday has become widespread in Cuban American and other Latino groups. This represents an adaptation of debutante parties held by the Cuban elite, augmented by the newfound affluence of many exiles: one father rented the Orange Bowl, Miami’s football stadium, for a party. Coming-out parties and debutante balls are generally considered upper class (and sometimes dated) formalities, but they have also served to reinforce class endogamy.
Meanwhile, at eighteen, men have been expected to register for the selective service. In the Vietnam era, this act became a boiling point of protest, as well as a commitment with potentially devastating consequences; while the draft was ended in the 1970s, registration remains an obligation. The US, with its longstanding tradition of a volunteer army, is unusual in the absence of compulsory military service as a male rite of passage—although it may be evoked in debates like the intergenerational conflict between Bob Dole, wounded in the Second World War, and Bill Clinton, who avoided service in Vietnam.
One of the crucial elements of coming of age, however, has even less ceremony: leaving home. American youths have often sought independence in living, whether moving away to college, taking an apartment with work-mates, joining a commune or defining a separate space in the home (basement or garage apartment). This can also be linked to entry into the job market and is hence dependent on cycles of employment opportunity. Since the 1980s, media have also focused on children who stay—or return— to the family home in their twenties or thirties as social dilemmas.
Industry:Culture
Advice columnists have been a staple of American newspaper copy in the twentieth century, particu larly in sections of the newspaper that cater to women’s interests.
Generally women themselves, advice columnists often respond to letters from their readers. These letters ask about some personal or family issue, such as possible marital infidelity or poor relations with in-laws. Some other advice columnists specialize in matters concerning housekeeping and household economics, or proper etiquette.
As with the notion of newspaper columnists more generally, the mixture of objective and interpretive reporting that characterized so much pre-twentieth century journalism generally makes it difficult to find a starting point for the institution in its present form.
The initial impetus for the modern American advice column, however, probably came in the late 1800s with an influx of immigrant readers or other residents newly arrived to the city, who were often confused about how to act in the unfamiliar American urban environment. One of the first advice columnists was Marie Manning, who began writing a regular column for the romantically confused in 1898 under the pen name “Beatrix Fairfax.” When she moved to William Randolf Hearst’s New York Journal, her editor gave her a column of her own when queries concerning romantic entanglements threatened to overwhelm the writers on the “Letters to the Editor” desk. Another famous early advice columnist was “Emily Post,” who dispensed etiquette advice. Two of the most famous and most widely syndicated American advice columnists in the postwar era have been sisters Ann Landers (Eppie Lederer) and Abigail van Buren (“Dear Abby”).
Industry:Culture
