An analysis of Dick Hebdige’s The Meaning of Style and Maynard’s “What Colour Under: Class, Whiteness and Homoerotic Advertising.”
This paper analyzes Maynard’s article concerning homoerotica as employed to sell men’s underwear among other products, and Hebdige’s more general comments on the power of subcultures when representing reality via media. The paper notes the differences in these articles but discusses their similarities with regard to the nature of popular culture and the motifs of which it tends to make use in achieving mainly commercial goals. The paper shows how both pieces help the reader to view subcultures, and what is held to be subcultural, as rather fragile entities, that are now much manipulated by media interests towards a ‘total’ and mass cultural incorporation.
Hebdige and Maynard have both written on the popular media’s use of themes which have at first been assigned to the subcultural, or the deviant, seeming to have no place whatsoever within the consciousness of mainstream, prime-time viewing audiences. Although the authors approach different topics, one more theoretical and Maynard’s more case-study oriented, their work’s underlying concepts can be seen to be most similar with regard to the nature of popular culture and the motifs of which it tends to make use in achieving mainly commercial goals. In introducing much of this thinking, it is helpful to appreciate that because television advertising, for example, reflects a greater ethnic and racial diversity, this does not indicate a less racially or ethnically ‘blind’ North American cultural mainstream. Instead, we are shown that media motifs and representations have varied sources, some of them relating directly to engineered and commercial ends.