MH Cultural Studies 3

Question 1

Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'cultural capital' refers to:

Accepted Answer

Non-financial social assets such as education, knowledge, and cultural tastes that confer social status

Answer

Bourdieu defined cultural capital as the accumulation of knowledge, behaviors, and skills that confer advantages in social fields, helping to reproduce class hierarchies beyond purely economic means.

Question 2

Which term describes the process by which a subculture's symbols and styles are absorbed and commodified by mainstream commercial culture?

Accepted Answer

Incorporation

Answer

Incorporation (or recuperation) describes how mainstream culture neutralizes the resistant potential of subcultural styles by absorbing, repackaging, and selling them as fashionable commodities.

Question 3

In feminist cultural studies, the concept of the 'male gaze' was introduced to describe how:

Accepted Answer

Visual media is structured around a masculine subject position that objectifies women

Answer

Laura Mulvey introduced the male gaze in her 1975 essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' arguing that mainstream Hollywood structures visual pleasure around a heterosexual masculine point of view that objectifies female characters.

Question 4

What does 'articulation theory' in cultural studies, as developed by Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau, primarily address?

Accepted Answer

The contingent linking of cultural elements into temporary, historically specific formations

Answer

Articulation theory examines how cultural elements (ideologies, practices, identities) are linked together in contingent, non-necessary ways that can be disarticulated and rearticulated differently under changed historical conditions.

Question 5

The concept of 'whiteness studies' in cultural theory emerged to examine:

Accepted Answer

How whiteness functions as an unmarked, normative racial category that confers privilege

Answer

Whiteness studies examines how whiteness operates as an invisible norm in racial hierarchies, conferring privileges that remain largely unexamined precisely because whiteness is treated as the default, unmarked racial identity.

MH - Master of Humanities Practice Test

MH - Master of Humanities Practice Test

MH Cultural Studies 3