Politics and Popular Culture: Stretching Imaginaries and Filling in Holes

Abstract

Abstract Popular culture artifacts are often places and spaces where societal expectations can be exercised, pushed on, prodded, to see how audiences and consumers react, and what they are willing to accept and perhaps what they will not abide. This is one of the prime values of studying popular culture – to see the ways that narratives and characters can provide audiences with paths towards experimentation in their thinking, to reconceptualize ideas and expectations. Much of this is often pegged to different representation, and that is certainly valuable. But the research on narrative and its impact indicates the importance of what is communicated by way of storyline and how this also contributes to the shaping of ideas and conceptions. This essay explores three narrative spaces that demonstrate how popular culture contributes to our thinking about different ideas and dimensions of political life. Imaginaries of women and power, abortion, and the 25th Amendment provide examples of the toggling between real life and fictional presentations. In two of these examples, popular culture has not necessarily provided a space for priming and imagining so much as it has filled in gaps of our general knowledge with misrepresentation and incorrect data, which undermines the value that popular culture can otherwise provide. This is one side of the dynamic. The other side of the dynamic is that we, as citizen audiences, get to try on different ideas and become accustomed to new ways of thinking, which is equally important to consider within politics, and points to the value and importance of popular culture narratives and representations within the body politic.