Blackwell Reference Online

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The line separating culture and politics has become increasingly hard to draw. The recent culture wars are evidence that political struggles can be played out on the terrain of culture, and both cultural symbols and cultural institutions have long been integrated into political campaigns. Contemporary scholarship in the sociology of culture also encourages us to see the connections between the two domains, illuminating the cultural dimension of political discourse and action (this volume: Evans, chapter 25; Goldfarb, chapter 27; Lichterman, chapter 24) as well as the cultural basis of social stratification (this volume: Fraser, chapter 28; Kefalas, chapter 12; Lee, chapter 15). Yet the more culture is deployed in the pursuit of political ends, including progressive struggles for social equality, the more apparent its limitations as a form of politics have become. The decidedly ambivalent results of identity politics and the politics of recognition present us with a challenge – to think again about the distinctions between politics and culture. For how can we understand the intersections between social domains if we are not sufficiently clear about what makes them distinct?The conceptualization of culture as a distinct system, or set of systems, presented in this chapter is animated by this larger question about politics and culture. I will describe gender as one such system, paying ... log in or subscribe to read full text