Co-opting Culture

Book excerpt: Co-opting Culture: Culture and Power in Sociology and Cultural Studies represents a collection of new scholarship on culture from the social sciences and from work done under the rubric of 'cultural studies'. Working from the idea that Sociology and Cultural Studies have developed distinct and valuable toolkits for understanding culture, the editors have brought together a collection of essays that address the ways in which the cultures around race, sex, and gender are mediated through or intersect with politics, society, and economy. Some essays deal directly with the theoretical nature of this mediation, while others adopt these theoretical approaches to investigate specific cultural objects or communities. In doing so, these essays call attention to the particularities of form that constitute a kind of cultural logic around the objects under consideration.