The limits of interpretation

A structural analysis of the racial oppositions in the television program Spenser: For Hire challenges the interpretivist media studies claim that popular culture texts are necessarily polysemic. The article argues that representations of racial difference, in particular, are not polysemic but are rather ambivalent within the structure of the racist stereotype. The character Hawk's oppositional stance and persona, though subject to contradictory critical evaluations, serve the needs of the dominant culture to depict blacks in stereotypical ways

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Character (mathematics · Epistemology · Humanities · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Persona · Racism · Sociology · Stereotype (UML · Subject (documents · Media Studies and Communication · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Social Media and Politics · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Social Psychology

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