Culture jamming as a means of resisting consumerism. We theorize how culture jamming as practiced operates as critical public pedagogy, through the ways in which it (1) fosters participatory, resistant cultural production; (2) engages learners corporeally; (3) creates a (poetic) community politic; and (4) opens tran sitional spaces through detournement (a "turning around"). We propose that when viewed as critical public pedagogy, culture jamming holds potential to connect learners with one another and to connect individual lives to social issues?both in and beyond the classroom 
problems. We also discuss how culture jamming may in fact at times hinder critical learning by imposing a rigid presence on the viewer-learner that limits creativity and transgression, and how it risks becoming co-opted by the very market forces of capitalism it opposes. 
We view these various "culture jamming" activities as examples of "anoma lous pedagogies" (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 5) and critical public pedagogies. In this article we explore how community activist groups and others brought together by a shared vision of a more just society enact cultural resistance through the tactics of "culture jamming 

Culture jamming is activity that counters "the continuous, recombinant barrage of capitalist laden messages fed through the mass media" (Handel man, 1999, p. 399). The term was coined in 1984 by the San Francisco based eletronica band Negitivland in reference to the illegal interruption of the signals of ham radio (Carducci, 2006; Darts, 2004). 

And Atkinson (2003) explains that culture jamming is based on the idea of resisting the dominant ideology of consumerism and re-creating commer cial culture in order to transform society. Culture jamming includes such activities as billboard "liberation," the creation and dissemination of anti advertising "subvertisements," and participation in DIY (do-it-yourself) political theater and "shopping interventions." 

This perspective conceptualizes popular culture as an active process, where cultural commodities and experiences are not simply passively consumed, but are the raw materials people use to create popular culture, within various contexts of power relations (Storey, 1999, 2006). From this view, popular culture is a promi nent sphere in which inequalities of class, gender, race, and sexuality are made meaningful or brought to consciousness; it is also an arena for power struggles between dominant and subordinate social groups?a terrain on which hegemony, or consent, is fought for and resisted (Hartley, 2002; Storey, 2006) 

However, much of the public pedagogy literature emphasizes how popular culture perpetuates dominant values such as racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, machismo, and violence (Mayo, 2002), rather than its counterhegemonic possibilities. 

myths and perpetuate hegemonic relations (Ellsworth, 1988, p. 298). Moreover, while art education scholars have examined how culture jamming may be used in schools to promote civic engagement with images, society, and identities (Tavin etal., 2003), much of this work is new, remains largely theorized, and is not widely implemented in general or art education contexts. 

To Ellsworth, public pedagogy is most powerful when it creates "transitional spaces"?when it connects our inner selves to people, objects, and places outside of ourselves.

Finally, we focus on culture jamming groups specifically addressing issues of consumerism and overconsumption, following Reynolds's (2004) recent call for curriculum scholars to explore work that resists "the brand name corporate order" (p. 32). 

Duncombe (2002) explains that when analyzing cultural resistance, one must examine four aspects: the content of the resistance, the form it takes, the ways it is interpreted, and the activities of its creation. 

To further understand culture jamming as curriculum, we also drew upon ethnographic or qualitative media analysis (Altheide, 1987,1996), which focuses on the ethnography of cultural texts and consists of the "reflexive movement between concept development, sampling, data collection, data coding, data analysis, and interpretation" (Altheide, 1987, p. 65). Altheide (1987) further explains that this type of analysis is embedded in constant discovery and constant comparison, but seeks to go beyond description of the content of texts, to arrive at understanding of broader social discourses created by and reflected in the texts. 

The content of Adbusters focuses on two main themes? how marketing and mass media colonize space, and how global capitalism and rampant consumption are destroying natural environments (Rumbo, 2002).
Adbusters encourages people to interact with others and become involved in community activism). 

Given the nature of our data? which focuses primarily on the activities of the jammers themselves, and much less on audience members' reactions?

posit that culture jamming operates as potentially powerful pedagogy through the ways in which it seeks to foster participatory cultural production, engages with the learner and the "teacher" corporeally, and aims to foster the creation of a community politic. We further argue that culture jamming's "pedagogical hinge" lies in the ways it aims to produce a sense of "detournement" in audience members, which can operate as a form of "transitional space."

One aspect of culture jamming's potential power as critical peda gogy, then, lies in how it seeks to foster participatory cultural production. In our current condition of hypercapitalism (Graham, 2006) grounded in consumption, it is a defiant notion that individuals are capable of and should be responsible for their own entertainment (Duncombe, 1997)..

As evidenced by the varied Buy Nothing Day actions and the other explications of culture jamming described at the beginning of this article, culture jamming is enacted in many forms, all of which rely on creative cultural production and ultimately seek to challenge and change dominant discourses and practices of multinational corporations (Harold, 2004). Duncombe (2002) explains that cultural resisters shift from being consum ers to being creators; indeed, this is what drove the genesis of Adbusters. 

As a form of cultural resistance, then, culture jamming is a "free space" where artists and activists can "experiment with new ways of seeing and being" and where they can "develop tools and resources for resistance" (Duncombe, 2002, p. 5). Adbusters 

Culture jamming is embraced by groups and individuals who seek to critique and (re)form how culture is created and enacted in our daily lives.

Lasn (1999), founder of Adbusters Media Foundation, explains that culture jamming is a metaphor for stopping the flow of consumer-culture-saturated media. 

Adbusters uses user submissions. These submissions range from "fake ads" (sub vertisements); to critical musings on politics, the environment, fashion, culture, and nutrition; to visual artwork and poetry; to more journalistic or academic articles on a variety of topics (recent issues have featured articles on true cost economics, the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, and the effects of Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War). During 

We posit that culture jammers thus hope to turn typically passive activities into active ones in which they create culture rather than simply consume it. In doing so, they aim to redefine themselves and their relationships with consumption, and to redefine possibilities for the future. 

they alter and give new, resistant meanings to popular cultural symbols. Culture jammers interrupt how public spaces are typically used and under stood "in ways that hold the potential for education to be contemporaneous with social change and identities in the making" (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 58).

Adbusters, through its "subvertisements," plays with and gives new meaning to the "memes" of popular culture, including the iconography associated with multinational corporations such as McDonald's, Nike, Absolut Vodka, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, and numerous others. Memes are media viruses that spread throughout society?for example, advertisingjingles, quotes from movies and situation comedies, advertising slogans, and the like that "work their way into every day conversations" (Duncombe, 2002, p. 369). A 

power of already-existing memes that are part of consumer consciousness. However, through subvertisements, Adbusters "jams" or disrupts dominant memes in ways that expose negative social, environmental, cultural, or ethical consequences of the practices of multinational corporations; in so doing, Adbusters lures viewers into interactions "with 'alternative' subject matter which poses as a 'dominant' media deployment" (Tietchen, 2001, p. 117). 

For example, Figure 3 appropriates the memes originally created and circulated by Calvin Klein's Obsession perfume advertising campaign. However, this subvertisement shows not a runway model which a reader might, at first glance, believe she/he is seeing, but instead an emaciated woman leaning over a toilet presumably to vomit. The subvertisement gives new meaning to the media-produced ideal of "thinness" and to the Calvin Klein brand by clearly associating it with eating disorders, and through pointing out the ethical and health consequences of too many young woman being influenced by the powerful fashion industry and its unreal istic standards of beauty

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jennifer_Sandlin/publication/227618190/viewer/AS:195348720873472@1423586172329/background/11.png 

We argue that part of the potential power of culture jamming's pedagogy, then, lies in how it attempts to engage the whole person - including the body and emotions - in a process of "becoming."

Culture jammers also attempt to engage emotions when enacting culture jamming. society.

We believe emotion plays important roles in the responses or reactions culture jammers try to elicit in the spectators who experience their jams. 

Culture jamming as critical public pedagogy pushes participants to (re) consider their understandings of themselves, their relationships with others, and the interaction of their subjectivities within society for the purposes of questioning and challenging the current political and social milieu. This is accomplished through "rewriting" hege monic discourses of societal symbols and challenging viewer-learners to "move beyond modes of passive spectatorship and towards more active and expressive forms of communication with and in the world around them" (Darts, 2004, p. 325). 

The community culture jammers seek to create is not just any kind of community, however?it is a community drawn together with a sense of political purpose and a community that engages in what Brookfield (2005, p. 31) calls "political learning."

Critical consciousness thus forms in groups? communities?as people learn about their common situations and the need for collective political action. Culture jamming, however, hopes to create political community through a very different kind of political engagement than traditional party politics or traditional social movement activism. 

Culture Jamming's Pedagogical Hinge: Opening Transitional Spaces Through Detournement 
We believe an important pedagogical moment?culture jamming's pedagogical hinge?occurs when audience members as learners experience detournement (literally, a "turning around"). All of the peda gogical tactics used in culture jamming attempt to lead the learner to a moment of detournement, where she is no longer who she used to be, but rather is caught off guard by the possibility of becoming someone or something different. Lasn (1999) argues that culture jamming helps provide a new way of looking at the world, and describes this detournement as "a perspective^arring turnabout in your everyday life" (p. xvii). 

Further, we believe that this moment of detournement has the potential to operate as a form of transitional space. "

2001). The work of both Reverend Billy and Adbusters is aimed at engaging detournement through helping expose the connections between individual actions and global social, economic, and environmental issues. For instance, by incorporating information about the harsh working conditions in Nike sweatshop facto ries into what otherwise looks like it should be an inspirational or uplifting Nike advertisement, the Adbusters Nike subvertisement presented above turns the original ad's message on its head and exposes the labor politics behind the Nike corporation; this is done in order to assist readers to rethink just how "cool" it is to wear Nikes and to support that multinational corporation. 

Some audience members, upon experiencing a culture jam, react with anger not at consumerism but at the culture jammers themselves.

I HATE Adbusters. Why? Because they have this preachy holier-than-thou attitude. In the same way that MADD public service announcements make me want a double Maker's Mark on the rocks, and "Smoking Is Really, Really Bad For The Children" ads make me want a big fucking cigar, Adbusters make me want to do nothing more than rent a Ford Excursion and drive straight to McDonald's. And I doubt I'm the only one who feels that way. (Sulli, 2002) 

In these examples, it is evident that rather than (re) considering their own subject position or participation in what culture jammers would deem the social and political hegemony of popular culture, the viewer-learner views the jammers (and their actions) as offensive, judgmental, and oppressive. This "holier than-thou" attitude comes across in Adbusters magazine, as contributors and editors define for readers how they are supposed to think and live, and sometimes rant against what they perceive as "consumer sheep. 

Culture jammers must, then, strive to revel more in possible, playful spaces, where the " learning selfof the experience of the learning self is invented in and through its engagement with pedagogy's force" (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 7). 

We also want to note, however, that while our research focuses on two culture jamming groups operating outside the formal classroom, there is still much to be garnered from such an exploration by those working within traditional school buildings. As Darts (2004) writes, "Although it may not, for instance, be desirable to instruct students in the art of jamming billboards, educators can still meaningfully engage their classes in forms of creative and critical production inspired by culture jamming" (p. 324). 

We view culture jamming as a form of resistance that is potentially aligned with resistance theories within critical curriculum studies. Within the notion of resistance lies a celebration of the power of human agency, and a recognition that individuals are not merely passive dupes or victims of powerful social structures (Solorzano 8c Delgado Bernal, 2001). 

However, while we see the potential of culture jamming to foster critical learning, as a form of cultural resistance and critical public pedagogy it is not a panacea; it is not without contradictions and potential problems. As we explored, when culture jamming insists on the "right answer," culture jamming can also work against critical learning and close down rather than open transitional spaces. Similar to Ellsworth's (1988) experience in developing a critical curriculum in her classroom, culture jamming may in fact reinforce repressive myths by attempting to dictate who people should be and what they should think, rather than allowing for the open "talking back" - the "defiant speech that is constructed within communities of resistance" (p. 310). 

Indeed, we posit that the work of culture jammers is most powerful when it demonstrates the pedagogical force of not dictating "the final correct answer" (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 76). 

Culture jamming has been critiqued because of how it "hijacks" dominant culture, and essentially makes the medium of mainstream commercial culture voice counterhege monic messages. 

Giroux and others call for learners to learn how to create their own culture?to become cultural producers building new, more democratic cul tural realities and spheres. We contend that critical researchers need to continue to move past simply critiquing and deconstructing current hege monic and oppressive cultural narratives, and look to social movements as activism-as-curriculum that are seeking to actively produce new, resistant pedagogy using popular culture. 

shedding light on prospects for counter hegemonic action against oppressive feminine beauty standards

since the 1970s have critiqued oppressive beauty standards that repress women’s freedom, inhibit personal power and self-acceptance, and promote a destructive relationship with the body.

However, the emphasis on feminine beauty and the body as a site of individual meaning and empowering play is prone to a naive self-determinism that assumes that women act completely voluntarily, thus minimizing corporate domination and the “normalizing power of cultural images” (Bordo 1993, 21, 275; see also Jeffreys 2005, 5). 

Dove’s approach, which we term feminist consumerism, encourages women to channel dissent and practice self-care by engaging with corporate marketing campaigns and purchasing beauty products.

Most significantly, this critique obscures the contradictory desires underlying the Dove campaign: to condemn beauty standards while promoting conformity to these same standards—like, for example, promoting firming and anti aging creams. 

internalized hatred of fat bodies persists despite willful individual resistance, and this is documented within the fat-acceptance movement (Gimlin 2002, 136). 

The concept of ideology particularly draws our attention to the role of corporations as key actors in the production and reproduction of beauty ideology. This industry perpetuates and institutionalizes gender inequality by placing an inordinate emphasis on the personal appearance of women, (re)producing largely unattainable aesthetic standards (Hartley 2001, 64), and perpetuating misogynist and harmful cultural practices (e.g., labiaplasty and breast augmentation) (Jeffreys 2005). Feminist political economy (Katz 2001; Mitchell, Marston, and Katz 2003) suggests the importance of investigating the centralization of cultural power in transnational corporations, arguably the most significant actor in globalized political economies (Korten 1995; Bakan 2004) but curiously neglected in cultural studies (Gordon 1995). 
The Conquest of Cool (1997), describes the ability of corporations to ap-propriate countercultural disenchantment with industrial society and transform it into marketing opportunities (see also Frank and Weiland 1997; Heath and Potter 2004). 
Feminist scholars drawing on Michel Foucault have em-phasized how “a society’s imposition of discipline upon bodies depends on those bodies learning to regulate themselves,” making the hatred of fat, nonconforming bodies a deeply internalized phenomenon (Hartley 2001, 62; emphasis added). 

theorists remind us that ideology is a complex creature; women are not simply tricked into seeking beauty. Beauty ideals operate ideologically when they are internalized, rationalized, and socially legitimized: to compensate for the hierarchical nature of beauty ideals, the ideology of beauty suggests that every woman can, and should, feel beautiful, presenting beauty as a democratic gender good, akin to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness 
Women are penalized for not being beautiful and at the same time are stigmatized, even pathologized, for not feeling beautiful, for having low self-esteem, for engaging in behaviors like dieting and excessive exercising, or for having eating disorders. 

Women’s acceptance of their bodies as beautiful is demanded, rather than recognized as an inherently complex, fraught, and contradictory endeavo
Dove campaign also allows them to participate in a critique of narrow beauty norms while encouraging women to “make peace with beauty” by channeling negative energy into self-acceptance, self-worth, and self-care via Dove products. 
In addition, psychological and philosophical research on perceptions of beauty suggest that the male gaze is a strong determinant of the extent to which beauty ideals are prioritized; both straight women and gay men experience the comparative pressure of narrow beauty ideals more profoundly (Bordo 1993, 102; Etcoff 1999, 61). 
in the Dove campaign, both pain and anger are avoided, suggesting a more limited model of consciousness-raising, a greater focus on building positive associations that can be converted to brand loyalty, and an explicit connection between self-love and self-care through commodity consumption 
Women featured on the Dove Web site and the advertisements convey that they have been unhappy with different aspects of their bodies and appearances, but any emotional pain such self reflection caused is sanitized and appears easy to overcome. Consciousness-raising in the Dove campaign is presented as a happy awakening by casting off limited notions of attractiveness and working with what one has to accentuate inner and outer beauty. 
Dove’s emotional register erases shame, fear, and anger, making personal pride and social change appear painless, simple achievements—as simple as shopping itself. 
Most significantly, this critique obscures the contradictory desires underlying the Dove campaign: to condemn beauty standards while promoting conformity to these same standards—like, for example, promoting firming and antiaging creams. 

Concludes with feminist consumerism prioritizes commodity purchases above more ambitious goals such as decentering the role of beauty in women’s lives, processing negative emotions, or challenging men’s relationship with feminine beauty. As such, feminist consumerism tends to obscure and minimize both structural and institutionalized gender inequalities that are difficult to resolve and that might cause negative emotional associations with brands. 
Dove’s approach, which we term feminist consumerism, encourages women to channel dissent and practice self-care by engaging with corporate marketing campaigns and purchasing beauty products.

Dove’s profit imperative helps explain the campaign’s reproduction of hegemonic beauty ideologies and its place within a larger hegemonic culture-ideology of consumerism.
Because the Dove campaign was framed in a market context that prioritizes profits and corporate growth, the critique of hegemonic beauty standards could not incorporate a critique of consumerism as an avenue to selfacceptance or meaningfully address the class and racial inequalities linked with beauty ideals in late capitalist societies. 

Next, I read "Decoding Femininity: Advertisements and Their Teenage Readers."

I picked this source because the study was conducted with magazines, so it is primarily visual. It provided me with a good idea for how I want to conduct my research for my thesis. 

girls claimed that they read magazines primarily for entertainment. However, reading for entertainment did not preclude reading to learn about the social world; in fact, the girls repeatedly maintained that their magazines are useful sources of knowledge.

The author interviewed teenaged girls in Canada about their consumption of teen fashion magazines. She concluded that the girls read the magazines for two main reasons: entertainment, and as a reference point for finding useful information. 

it talks about many of the cultural theorists I have studied over the course of my university experience. For example, the author cites Stuart Hall's critical social theory. Valverde cites the work of Stuart Hall as an example of theorizing that directs attention to the ways in which social subjectivity is formed, internalized, contested, and re-formed through the struggles of competing accounts of "the social.

For example, the author cites Stuart Hall's critical social theory as an example of theorizing that directs attention to the ways in which social subjectivity is formed, internalized, contested, and re-formed through the struggles of competing accounts of "the social. As Hall (1977, 325) notes as common sense does not require thought because it is spontaneously available, thoroughly recognizable, widely shared: It feels as if it has always been there. 

In conclusion, I reconsider the notion of subjectivity as an effect of social texts. With culture becoming redefined as the "new" women's oppression/liberation, urgency surrounds this question of how women through social texts that operate as vehicles 
Because of their ability to shape consensual images and definitions of women's magazines exert "cultural leadership" in struggles surrounding means "to be a woman" (McCracken 1993). This attribution of leadership on the seemingly self-evident claim that these magazines "shape both view of herself, and society's view of her" (Ferguson 1983, 1). Ferguson that "the fact that they exist at all makes a statement about the position in society as one which requires special consideration and distinctive treatment." 
mass media.
Taken at face value, sentations in women's magazines seem to imply that we become women through domestic and sexual 
feminists identified ideological constructions that work to define women's standings of their experiences in ways that guarantee the reproduction of definitions of the social world (Winship 
McRobbie - construction, is given meaning and made comprehensible through magazine topics such as "problems," "romance," and "jealousy 
Through the 1980s, feminist sociologists characterized the advertisements, feature articles, and stories appearing in women's magazines as vehicles of women's socialization into subordinate roles. Following sex role theory, much of this work takes the view that women, as readers of social texts, internalize messages that represent the "scripts" of femininity 
Giddens (1983, 65) argues that this thesis, widespread in sociology, obscures the knowledgeability of social actors: The taken-for-granted cannot be equated with the accepted as legitimate.
patriarchal oppression. For Radway (1984) found that the everyday practice of romance reading challenges the patriarchal proscription for women to give primacy to others. In her study, reading romance novels was one way in which women time in their domestic schedules for an activity that put their own needs those of others. Moreover, Radway claims that by selecting as well specific texts, readers are actively taking emotional benefits for themselves: at least partly reclaim the patriarchal form of romance for their own 184). In the final analysis, because Radway (1984) identifies both potential as well as dangers of romance reading, she is reluctant to definitively (hetero)romance 

a number of feminist cultural critics confessed that they personally found magazine reading highly pleasurable, despite their acknowledged "dangers." Within this context, pleasure became "the new catchword" of cultural theory that posits a liberatory potential for magazine reading (Walters 1995, 89). 

Winship maintains: [W]e frequently luxuriate in the advertising without ever a thought of the product.... I've gained enormous pleasure from [ads, even though] I have no intention of buying the product. Indeed, I am hard put even to remember what it is the image is advertising. We recognize and relish the vocabulary of dreams in which ads deal; we become involved in the fictions they create; but we know full well that those commodities will not elicit the promised fictions. (1987, 55-56

I also share McRobbie's (1991 b) worry that the celebration of consumption can transform political movements into "life styles." She observes that the pleasure, connected to consumerism, 

These problems concern the absence of "real" women, relationships, and of politics (there 
consciousness, "femininity" can be studied practices of embodied women, practices that phenomenologically display of individual choices and personal preferences

support patriarchal and capitalist interests subordination of 

"Teen, I don't know, it's just more to my liking. It just seems more realistic. I think it deals more with the problems that people actually have" (16-year-old Euro Canadian)

Dyer (1982, 86) claims that pictures such prominent in advertisements have more impact than words because they for readers to understand,

ads readers uncritically drew on ideological knowledge of romance and motherhood to arrive at unambiguous meanings. 

As Hall (1977, 325) notes as common sense does not require thought because it is spontaneously available, thoroughly recognizable, widely shared: It feels as if it has always been there. 
e, images of adult femininity cannot be negotiated on the basis of "direct" experience. 
Clearly, these types of decisions are not made on the level of denotation but rather through connotation. 

act of breast-feeding. by these rejections is the possibility that the ad is "too realistic," in that it the stark physicality of mothering, rather than the emotionality of ideological motherhood. 

claims. Accepted as "realistic" images of femininity, readers expressed consider- able pleasure reading ideologically charged representations of "what it means to be a woman." 

Second, can we claim reading pleasure as resistance? 

teenzines are important: These magazines are among few social texts that address young readers, as "teenagers" but also as "women." These texts create a space, outside of school and beyond parental supervision, topics of relevance to young women are given serious consideration. For this alone, these texts deserve scholarly in 

lescence. Because these texts ground descriptions of White, middle-class ity in the realm of "the natural," one corollary of magazine discourse naturalization of White supremacy

This is not to say that these readers "mistake" the text world; rather, it means that they actively negotiate which individual "realistic." In doing so they blur the boundaries of the discursive and world 

it. As we have seen here, it is not simply that ideology provides a mistaken or distorted representation of reality but is constitutive of everyday reality. As noted above, the ideological dimension of women's magazines implicates them in the everyday reconstitution of the ruling apparatus.
 
While I do not view the girls in this study as simply "cultural dupes," I disagree that these readers have the "power" to subvert patriarchy or capitalism simply through alternative readings of fashion magazines. I merely point out that while the readings and discussions in this article illustrate fairly well Beauvoir's claim that we make ourselves as women-including through the ways we describe ourselves-they also illustrate that the conditions in which we do so are not of our making. 

"An Interview with the Guerrilla Girls, Dyke Action Machine (DAM!), and the Toxic Titties" provides excellent quotes and sources for my study because it gives information about these feminist cultural resistance groups, how they use the practice of culture jamming, and what they produce with these specific tactics and strategies. It provides me with actual quotes from interviews on the specific topic of my studies. Lastly, it even offers a solution to the problem, or rather what we as humans can do to continue to point out the problem and improve our society. 

Contested Images of Femininity: An Analysis of Cultural Gatekeepers' Struggles with the"Real Girl" Critique
Provides me with quotes from actal editors from fashion magazines for teenage girls. This shows the struggle they face as cultural gatekeepers and the potential resaons for the sexist images, distorted bodies, and ultimately extreme version of feminity. They go into the possible reasons for sexist ads: pressure from advertisers and fashion photographers. The article concludes with no real soltions, but just says this is something we as females must contend with.
To meaningfully examine media power, researchers should examine symbols, audiences, or forms of media; this allows the processes of making meanings to be more clearly articulated (van Zoonen 1994). For this study, duction of images of femininity in girls' magazines is the site of analysis. eral reasons, this is an important, theoretically meaningful choice.