Gender and Popular Culture
Lehigh University
Bethlehem, PA
Date: October 12, 2012

21st century media platforms have allowed for a broader incorporation of positionalities and subjectivities within popular media. Alternative media avenues—from Etsy and Facebook to Tumblr and YouTube—democratize cultural production and provide new locales for self/group identification. Thus, social movements like Hip-Hop and Do-­‐It-­‐Yourself find opportunities within these spaces to originate and expand unique cultural forms from among traditionally marginalized voices. In this way, communities are fashioning discourses ambivalent of or oppositional to hegemonic discourses born-­‐out in mass media popular culture.

Real-­‐time Identities:
New Readings in Gender and Popular Culture, is an interdisciplinary graduate student conference designed to critically engage the possibilities and challenges of the post-­‐modern period as it relates to concerns of race, class, gender, and sexuality within the popular culture sphere.