Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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life is not self-evident or necessarily “given” in the programs themselves. Thus mass

culture is the objective repertoire from which people create subjective, popular

meanings—albeit meanings inevitably circumscribed in key ways by the repertoire itself.

This meaning-making not only acknowledges an active dimension to consumption, it

requires us to consider popular culture in a more local, personal and political sense. As

Hall insists, the making of popular culture involves an ongoing negotiation or struggle

between people’s needs and desires (what he calls the forces of resistance) and the needs

of the culture industries (what he calls the power bloc, or the forces of incorporation). O

course, this is hardly an equal struggle, for the power bloc by definition has

disproportionate clout in establishing the terms and limits of the cultural terrain in the

first place. Popular culture is contradictory in nature: both constraining and enabling;

limiting how we think about the world and offering opportunities for creative social and

personal expression within those limits.

Popular culture is therefore not a fixed set of objects and practices, nor a fixed

conceptual category but something constituted both through the act of consumption and

through the act of theoretical engagement. Scholars have focused on different aspects o

popular culture, some turning to texts (

romance,

television, film, pop music, etc.), others

examining lived culture such as holidays, hobbies, or fandoms. Different scholars have

employed distinct theoretical approaches, most of them “structuralist theories” that

generally claim that forms of popular culture—

food,

clothing, sports,

games,

rituals,

entertainment—help reveal the underlying rules, structures and values of a society. For

example, Marxists emphasize the relation between popular culture and the capitalist

mode of production, suggesting that popular culture reproduces class inequality by

generating enormous profits for those who control the culture industries while inculcating

in consumers the values and ideology necessary to justify this—and other—unjust social

arrangements. Psychoanalytic approaches tend to see popular culture as symptomatic

expressions of society’s “collective unconscious,” as articulating indirectly through the

symbolic language of entertainment our collective fears, anxieties, fantasies and desires.

Ethnographic approaches investigate how forms of popular culture are produced and

consumed in everyday life, what it means to people, how they contribute (or not) to the

formation of individual, group and community identities. What all approaches have in

common is the assumption that objects and practices taken to be part of popular culture

are “readable,” that they “speak” to us and that they tell us important (though not

necessarily positive) things about the society in which we live.

Further reading

Fiske, J. (1989)

Understanding Popular Culture,

Boston: Unwin Hyman.

Hall, S. (1981) “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” in Samuel, R. (ed.)

People’s

History and Socialist Theory,

London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Levine, L. (1988)

Highbrow Lowbrow,

Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Mukerji, C. and Schudson, M. (eds) (1991)

Rethinking Popular Culture,

Berkeley:

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 896

University of California.

Shiach, M. (1989)

Discourse on Popular Culture,

Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Storey J. (1993)

An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture,

Athens,

GA: University of Georgia.

LAURA GRINDSTAFF

pornography

Literally, “pornography” means “the writing of whores.” The term is generally taken to

mean “sexually explicit words and images whose sole purpose is sexual arousal.”

However, in the last quarter of the twentieth century in America, pornography was at the

center of a cultural, religious and political struggle. As such, pornography has been

defined variously, depending on the group discussing it.

Pornography (if we understand it as sexually explicit words and images), comes in

many forms in America. Justice Department figures from 1994 indicate that pornography

is a 110 billion per year industry. This business includes: pornographic

magazines;

movies and

videos

(both professionally and amateur-

roduced, which became widely

available for home rental with the advent of the

VCR

); and the ever-growing number o

Internet

sites devoted to pornographic images.

Pornographic magazines featuring nude and/or sexually explicit photographs became a

recogniz able feature of the American culture when Hugh Hefner began publishing

laybo

magazine in 1953.

Playboy,

with its nude but not sexually explicit photographs

of young women, was the groundbreaking pornographic magazine and today is still

America’s premiere magazine offering “entertainment for men” (

Playboy’s

description o

its role). Other major magazines in this genre include

Penthouse

and

Hustler,

as well as

laygirl,

which features nude photos of men.

Pornography, in the myriad forms in which it has made its way into American culture,

has elicited not only sexual response from those who purchase and view it, but political

and religious interest as well. In 1973 the President’s Commission on Obscenity and

Pornography, based on the fact that no scientific data have conclusively demonstrated a

link between criminal activity and exposure to obscene material, suggested legalization o

sexually oriented expression between consenting adults. However, just months later, the

United States

Supreme Court,

in the case of

Miller

California,

wrote that any

sexually oriented work could be banned unless it had “serious literary artistic, political or

scientific value.” Although the Supreme Court ruling spoke of obscenity not pornography

the two terms have frequently been linked by anti-pornography activists, and

Miller

California

has been used in many cases as a pretext to demand

censorship

of sexually

explicit material.

Since obscenity has come to be equated in many cases with pornography, the term

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“pornography” has come to be used since 1973 to describe whatever sexually oriented

expression a certain group dislikes or whatever sexual representation a dominant class or

group wishes to keep out of the hands of other, less dominant, classes or groups. For this

reason, pornography has acquired a social and political significance in America today

that goes far beyond the pages of a pornographic magazine or a scene in a pornographic

movie.

The most vehement opposition to pornography in America has come from the political

right wing (particularly the Religious Right and the Christian Coalition) and from the

pro-censorship/anti-

ornography feminist movement, the latter led by Catharine

MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. MacKinnon and Dworkin define pornography as

“sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words” (Dworkin,

1985:8). Beginning in the early 1990s, supporters of MacKinnon and Dworkin have

unsuccessfully attempted to introduce legislation in several US cities, which would ban

pornographic materials that they deem degrading or dehumanizing to women.

While attempts to censor pornography continue to be launched by political

conservatives and radical feminists alike, pornography as a form of expression continues

to be protected under the 1st Amendment. However, the question of child pornography

and what constitutes it is something of a gray area. In 1982 and 1990, the Supreme Court

upheld two state statutes prohibiting showing

children

engaging in sexual activity or in a

state of nudity. The issue of child pornography became a real focal point for anti-

ornography activists in the early 1990s. In one of the most visible battles, a series o

print advertisements for Calvin Klein underwear was attacked by anti-

ornography

activists because the models, who were clad only in underwear, and not engaged in any

sexual activity appeared to be adolescents and thus below the legal age of consent. No

charges were filed against Calvin Klein, but, in a similar, high-

rofile case in 1990, the

FBI

investigated photographer Jock Sturges. The investigation was begun after Sturges’

nude photographs of adolescents aroused the suspicions of a photography laboratory

employee. (At no point did the FBI claim the photos depicted sexual activity of any kind,

and, in 1991, a federal grand jury failed to indict Sturges.)

Thus, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with

Playboy

entering its second

half-century, the battle continues to be fought between those defending Americans’ right

to look at dirty pictures and those who wish to protect those same Americans from

sexually explicit images they find disturbing, demeaning or dangerous.

Further reading

Dworkin, A. (1985) “Against the Male Flood: Censorship, Pornography and Equality”

Harvard Women’s Law Journal

Kendrick, W. (1987)

The Secret Museum,

New York: Viking.

MacKinnon, C. (1993)

Only Words,

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Strossen, N. (1995)

Defending Pornography,

New York: Anchor Books.

SUSAN SCOTTO

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Portland and Salem, OR

Portland and Salem lie approximately 47 miles apart in Oregon

(Pacific Northwest)

Salem is the state capital. Portland, the largest city in the state, has become known as a

progressive center for its planning controls on urban sprawl and has also attracted high-

tech investment in computers and media. It also hosts the Portland Trailblazers

(

basketball

). Despite growth limits, this dual metropolis continues to grow rapidly, with

a projected metropolitan population in 2020 of 2.8 million (a 38 percent increase from

1995), challenging the natural landscapes and lifestyles that have fostered its

attractiveness for many.

KATE M.KENSKI

Portuguese Americans

Over 500,000 migrants from Portugal to the US span the complexities of Portuguese

history and society The earliest were Sephardic

Jews

fleeing from Brazil to New

Amsterdam (New York) (1624). Later, migrants from the islands of the Azores and Cape

Verdes became attached to

New England

coastal fishing towns and the codfish industry

Humberto Medeiros, a Portuguese American, later became Catholic Cardinal Archbishop

Boston

. Bishop C.R. “Daddy” Grace, a Cape Verdean, became a charismatic black

religious leader from the 1930s until his death in 1960. Portugal has also proven one o

the most active European nations in post-1965

immigration

GARY McDONOGH

postmodernism

Postmodernism is a loose term for a variety of movements that arose within the art world

and the university as separate responses to two different understandings of the term

“modern”: modernity and

modernism

. Modernity is the term used by philosophers and

historians to designate a historical period ranging from the Renaissance and extending to

the early part of the twentieth century It was marked by: a belief in the power of reason,

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as opposed to faith, for securing progress; the separation of science, morality and art into

their own autonomous spheres; and the search for a unifying foundational theory or

rinciple that would capture the universal aspects of existence. Modernism is a term

rimarily employed within the art world. The American modern movement ran from the

1870s to the late 1950s, and included the paintings of Jackson

Pollock,

the buildings o

Frank Lloyd

Wright,

the

poetry

of Walt Whitman and the choreography of Martha

Graham

. The movement centered around images of

nature

and machinery, explorations

of the myths and stories of American history, ambivalent feelings about urban versus

rural spaces and a desire to break with European dominance. Despite the different senses

of the term “modern,” American postmodernists in both the university and the art world

shared a number of common features. Leading postmodernist thinkers and artists resisted

attempts to classify or label their work as being postmodern or as being part of any type

of organized movement. In part this arose because of a skepticism about the possibility o

any transcendent, trans-historical, or transcultural truths that could provide a basis for a

unified allencompassing theory. As a result there rapidly developed a highly diverse set

of theories in the university (e.g. neo-pragmatism, deconstructionism, neo-Marxism,

critical legal studies) and in the art world (e.g.

pop art,

cyberpunk, avant pop,

minimalism

). Although they were all lumped under the general rubric “postmodernism,”

they had significant methodological and theoretical differences about how to replace their

redecessors. Both the intellectual and artistic versions of postmodernism began to

emerge in the late 1950s and early 1960s, both were influenced by European movements

(the artists were influenced by the British pop artists, while the intellectuals were

influenced by the French post-structuralists) and both quickly spread from their original

source (painting and literary theory) to other fields. Furthermore, both tended to collapse

or blur traditional boundaries: sometimes between genres, as in the music of John Zorn

and Terry Riley or the journalism of Hunter Thompson, Truman Capote and Tom

Wolfe

;

between academic disciplines as with Camila

Paglia

and Stanley Fish; or between media,

as in the performance art of Laurie Anderson or the

theater

pieces of Robert

Wilson

Both strains of postmodernism were fascinated with

popular culture

and its role in

society and both challenged the notion of any significant difference between high and

low art or between avant-garde and commercial artists.

RODGER JACKSON

potluck

Informal meal arrangement among friends or colleagues in which each contributes a dish,

generally within prescribed American

food

categories like appetizer, main dish or

casserole, salad, dessert, etc. The host/hostess provides the basic materials and setting—

in one variation, however, participants move from house to house, course by course. As

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 900

larger collective events, potlucks can be used to promote social relations in schools,

workplaces or churches as well as to raise money for

community

events. While

emphasizing solidarity they also permit competition in quality and display among

participants. To “just take potluck”—essentially whatever is left—suggests drawbacks o

the arrangement.

GARY McDONOGH

poverty

“underclass”; War on Poverty; homelessness

Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr.

b. 1908; d. 1972

Civil rights

leader and clergyman, elected to the House of Representatives for eleven

terms. In the late 1930s, while assisting his father in his pastorate at the Abyssinian

Baptist Church in

Harlem,

Powell began to organize anti-discrimination demonstrations

and campaigns for jobs in

New York

City. In 1941 he was elected to the New York city

council, and four years later was elected to

Congress

as a representative for Harlem.

While in Congress he spoke in support of the

sit-ins,

sponsored civil-rights legislation as

well as bills comprising part of Lyndon

Johnson’s

“War on Poverty.”

ROBERT GREGG

Powell, Colin

b. 1937

Awarded the Purple Heart, Bronze Star and other accolades for his service in Vietnam,

Powell entered the national spotlight as Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1991

under President

Bush

for his role in the

Gulf War

. The first

African American

and

youngest person to serve in that position, Powell retired in 1993. Considered a top

contender in the 1996 presidential election, Powell declined to run. His 1995

autobiography

My American Journey

was a bestseller. Dedicated to helping young

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people, he became the Chairperson of America’s Promise: The Alliance for Youth.

KATE M.KENSKI

POW/MIAs (Prisoners of War/ Missing in

Action)

Part of the lingering nightmare of Vietnam in American consciousness has been the

silence and uncertainty about those who were imprisoned and those who did not return.

While every global war has resulted in these missing friends and loved ones (hence, the

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier), a general sense of a lack of resolution kept alive beliefs

of Americans left behind in Southeast Asia decades after formal withdrawal, and made

this a major political issue in 1990s campaigns. This was exacerbated by

mass media

portrayals like

Rambo II

(1985) and continual rumors of secret POW camps. Government

investigations and technological cooperation with the Vietnamese government, anxious

for increased recognition and investment, have generally alleviated the intense anxiety

and distrust this issue once aroused. Pete Peterson, the first American ambassador to a

united Vietnam, is himself a former POW; his office has worked actively with the

Vietnamese government to find and repatriate the remains of roughly five servicemen

every other month.

GARY McDONOGH

Presbyterians

Presbyterians constitute approximately 2 percent of the American population. The

Presbyterian denomination of the Protestant Church traces its roots to the sixteenth

century when John Calvin in Geneva and John Knox in Scotland shaped its basic

theology and governance. The Westminster Confession of Faith, the creed o

Presbyterianism for more than 300 years, was drafted in the mid-seventeenth century in

England.

Scottish immigrants who espoused the Presbyterian way came to the Americas in the

seventeenth century. They started churches in the Middle Colonies, and in 1706 the first

resbytery was organized. A presbytery is a representative body formed of lay leaders, or

elders, and pastors. Collectively they govern the church in a given area. Throughout the

rest of the century and into the next, Presbyterians played significant roles in the

Evangelical Awakening in Colonial America, in the Revolutionary War and in the

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eginning of the world missionary movement that grew out of the second Evangelical

Awakening at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The 1967 Confession of Faith and the 1990 Brief Statement of Faith affirm the

continuity of the Reformed Confessional tradition and are found in the

Book o

Confessions

Presbyterians have historically taken their faith so seriously that disagreements over

theology or the application of faith in society have led to church splits in each of the last

three centuries. Equally Presbyterians have been committed so strongly to the basic unity

of the church universal that they have worked for reunification within the Presbyterian

family on the one hand, and they have been at the forefront of such ecumenical

movements as the World Council of Churches and the World Alliance of Reformed

Churches, on the other.

Currently there are nine Presbyterian denominations in the United States with an

aggregate membership of 3.2 million. The largest body is the Presbyterian Church

(USA), with slightly less than 2.6 million members. It was formed in 1983 as a merger o

the United Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Presbyterian Church (US), two bodies that

had been separate since the American Civil War.

Other significant Presbyterian denominations include the Cumberland Presbyterian

Church and the mostly

African American

Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America.

The former, with about 90,000 members, arose in the early 1800s out of disagreements

over the doctrines of election and reprobation as taught in the Westminster Confession o

Faith. The latter, with about 15,000 members, was established by African Americans to

give themselves a place for leadership in Presbyterian churches.

The Presbyterian Church in America, founded in 1973 as a split-off movement from

the Presbyterian Church (US), was joined in 1982 by the Reformed Presbyterian Church,

Evangelical Synod. The church’s membership today is approximately 300,000. The

Evangelical Presbyterian Church formed out of churches dissatisfied with the United

Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1978. Its membership is about 60,000.

While most Presbyterians in the United States are

white,

increasing numbers of Korean

immigrants are changing the face of the various Presbyterian denominations. Having

received the gospel from (mostly Presbyterian) missionaries, Koreans are doing mission

work of their own in the United States. The Presbyterian Church (USA), for example, has

over 300

Korean American

congregations, and a separate Korean Presbyterian Church

in America has several hundred congregations.

Further reading

Ellwood, R. and Partin, H.B. (1988)

Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America,

Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Gallup, G., Jr. and Castelli, J. (1989)

The People’s Religion,

New York: MacMillan

Publishing Company.

Lindner, E.W. (ed.) (1998)

Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches 1998,

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Nashville: Abingdon Press.

Melton, J.G. (1997)

Encyclopedia of American Religions,

Gale: Detroit.

GAIL RITCHIE HENSON

JEFFERSON I.RITCHIE

presidency

The president of the United States is one of the most powerful political figures in the

nation and the world. As the leader of the United States, he or she is expected to create

and implement new legislation and involve the United States in the affairs of other

countries. Yet little power is invested in the office of the president itself. A president

cannot enact legislation on his or her own (though he or she can sometimes affect how it

is implemented). The president’s official power is limited to the very bare outlines of the

Constitution; furthermore, the informal power that usually comes of being head of a

party

is unavailable to him or her because

Congress

is often controlled by members o

another party and, even if the presidency and Congress are held by the same party

discipline in American political parties is weak. The president, then, must rely on other

sources of power in carrying out the tasks he or she is expected to handle.

The official powers of the president are enumerated in Article II of the US

Constitution. They include the power to pardon criminals, the power to make treaties

(with the approval of two-thirds of the Senate) and the office of Commander in Chief o

the armed forces. The president is also responsible for reporting to Congress on the state

of the union and making recommendations to Congress. The president’s legislative power

is limited to the ability to veto legislation approved by Congress.

It is clear that the president’s role extends beyond the completion of the duties

enumerated in the Constitution. The president has become a prominent and powerful

political figure. Domes-tically, he or she presents a budget to Congress every year,

creates and introduces legislation to Congress and tries to direct the economic affairs o

the nation; yet the official powers of the president have not changed since the

Constitution was created more than 200 years ago. There is a great deal of debate over

how it is that the president manages to acquire this power. There are those who argue that

the president’s power is highly personal; powerful presidents have the ability to persuade

Congress to go along with what they want. Others claim that presidents can get Congress

to implement particular policies by increasing public support for those policies,

increasing fears that members of Congress will not be re-elected if they do not vote for

olicies the public wants. Still others argue that the amount of power a president wields is

determined by the president’s place in time; personal qualities and actions have little to

do with what a president can accomplish. There are also those that believe that a

president’s power depends entirely on whether Congress and the president are of the

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 904

same party.

Efforts have been made in recent years to increase the president’s legislative power.

The creation of a line-item veto, which would allow the president to veto certain parts o

a bill without vetoing it in its entirety, was heavily debated in the early 1990s. Congress

passed legislation giving the president the power of line-item veto over budget bills; this

legislation came into effect on January 1, 1997. However, a year later the

Supreme

Court

declared the line-item veto unconstitutional.

In foreign affairs, the president has considerably more constitutional power. The

president’s position as Commander in Chief of the armed forces has allowed him to take

actions that were not endorsed by Congress, frequently using this power to involve the

country in military conflicts. The

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,

passed in August of 1964

at the request of President

Johnson,

granted the president the power to use military force

to “repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further

aggression.” This allowed presidents Johnson and

Nixon

to begin and continue the

Vietnam War

without any declaration of

war

. This large grant of power was limited by

Congress when they passed the War Powers Resolution of 1973; however, many

residents have refused to abide by the resolution. For instance, the initial deployment o

troops into Iraq by President

Bush

was not endorsed by Congress (although Congress

later voted to support these actions and allow the president to take any others he felt

necessary), and Bush continued to insist that he did not need congressional approval at

all.

The only way to remove a president from office is through the process o

impeachment

. A president can be impeached if he commits bribery treason, or “high

crimes and misdemeanors.” While the definitions of bribery and treason are clear, the

definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors” is not; it is under this category of crimes

that claims of impeachable offenses are usually made. The impeachment procedure has

two stages: in the first, the House of Representatives votes on articles of impeachment. I

the House decides that formal charges are relevant and significant, an official trial is held

in the Senate. Two presidents have been impeached: in 1868 Andrew Johnson narrowly

escaped being stripped of his office by one vote in the Senate; in 1999 Bill

Clinton

was

saved by a party-line vote also falling short of the necessary two-thirds majority. But, in

1974, a House committee recommended that members of the House of Representatives

vote “yes” on articles of impeachment for Richard

Nixon,

leading the president to resign

before the issue was voted on.

Further reading

Kernell, S. (1986)

Going Public,

Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press.

Nelson, M. (ed.) (1995)

The Presidency and the Political System,

Washington, DC:

Congressional Quarterly Press.

Neustadt, R. (1990)

Presidential Power and the Modern President,

New York: The Free

Press.

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