Does anyone still read this stuff?
So are cultural studies theorists still theorizing about how to study culture today? The Birmingham Centre, once a thriving paradise for cutting-edge study, was shut down in 2002 and absorbed into the sociology department—was that the end?!
Nah. It meant that by that point cultural studies had expanded beyond Birmingham, beyond the UK, and beyond the confines of any one department.
As it stands, there are numerous cultural studies associations across the globe, and the subject has become a popular area of academic study. So much for its punky non-conformism! What has changed, though, is that the early political sentiment has fallen by the wayside, and cultural studies now tends to be less hostile toward mass culture. Modern scholars also generally think of the public as being a bit more savvy than previously imagined.
This doesn't always mean embracing mass-produced texts in themselves: it's more about exploring ways in which people engage with texts and the extent to which it's possible to read against the grain.
The 1992 collection Cultural Studies (edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler) gives a good flavor of the sort of work being undertaken in cultural studies: the essays explore popular music, colonial texts, crime fiction, Hustler magazine, and action movies such as Rambo. This cornucopia of topics demonstrates the breadth of cultural studies these days: what binds these diverse subjects is an interest in the cultural significance of texts and art in all forms. This means that, as well as analyzing the texts themselves, cultural studies focuses on the contexts in which texts are produced and received.
As far as politics goes, cultural studies nowadays pays closest attention to identity politics and how factors such as gender, sexuality, and ethnicity are treated in cultural texts. The Cultural Studies collection, for example, includes essays on Chicana feminism, ethnic absolutism (the idea of ethnicity being a fixed identity), and cultural dialogues surrounding AIDS. Quite the range!
Cultural theorists also explore ways that certain texts or genres have been embraced by cultural subgroups. The producers of the material may not even intend that sort of reaction, and other readers or viewers may not perceive things the way the subgroup does (like, a Chicana feminist will see the stereotype of Mexican women as housekeepers as slightly more offensive than, for example, the housekeeper's employers). Again, it's about what readers or groups of readers take away from texts based on their own cultural position.
For better or worse, then, it looks like the political project of early cultural studies is a thing of the past. Rather than criticizing pop culture, cultural studies now emphasizes the pleasures of consumption and the creation of personal meaning from cultural texts, even if they're mass-produced.
Still, it would be wrong to think that cultural studies has been transformed beyond recognition: it still concerns itself with texts and theories of all varieties rather than keeping to a narrow pathway, and, even though it has a greater institutional presence, it's hardly part of the beard-strokers of the academic elite—some of the snobbier beards even refer to it as a "Mickey Mouse degree."
What's clear, though, even with the controversy around a theory wearing mouse ears, is that cultural studies has stood the test of time in one form or another. This in itself is a relevant point—cultural studies could easily have ended up a flash in the pan, yet it's still going strong today.