America on Film. Sean Griffin
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that means the same thing in different eras and in different situations. Rather, the hegemonic struggle of patriarchy to maintain power is a fluid and dynamic thing that allows for its ongoing maintenance but also the possibility of its alteration. For example, specific early twentieth‐century patriarchal ideologies were challenged and changed when women won the right to vote in 1920, but that did not destroy the hegemony of American patriarchy.
Thus, the dominant ideology of a culture is always open to change and revision via the ebb and flow of hegemonic negotiation, the processes whereby various social groups exert pressure on the dominant hegemony. In another example, over the last fifty years, American civil rights groups have worked to expose and overturn the entrenched system of prejudice that has oppressed their communities for generations. Often, these fights include attempts to instill pride and self‐worth in the minority groups that have been traditionally disparaged. In the process, the ideological biases of racial superiority are being challenged, but the basic assumption that individuals can be grouped according to their race is not. While these efforts attempt to disrupt one level of assumptions, a more basic ideological belief is kept intact. In this case the dominant hegemonic concept of racial difference as a valuable social marker remains untouched, even as the individual ideologies of white supremacy are challenged. (More recent cultural theorists have begun to challenge the very notion of such rigid categorizations, a topic explored more fully in future chapters. For example, the obvious fact of biracial or multiracial individuals inherently challenges the idea that race is some sort of stable category.)
Ideological struggle is therefore an ongoing political process that surrounds us constantly, bombarding individuals at every moment with messages about how the world should and could function. Such struggles can be both obvious and subtle. One obvious way of disseminating and maintaining social control is through oppressive and violent means, through institutions such as armies, wars, police forces, terrorism, and torture – institutions known as repressive state apparatuses (RSAs). Violent, repressive discrimination is part of American history, as evidenced by terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, political assassinations, police brutality, and the continued presence of hate crimes. More subtly, the state can also enforce ideological assumptions through legal discrimination. For example, the so‐called Jim Crow Laws of the American South during the first half of the twentieth century legally inscribed African Americans as second‐class citizens. Current examples would be the lack of federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation; in fact, “religious freedom” laws are an attempt to enact statutes that would expressly protect such discrimination. Legal discrimination tacitly helps maintain occupational discrimination. What these few examples also show is that discrimination and bias are systemic problems as well as individualized ones. Just as a single person can be a bigot, those same biases can be incorporated into the very structures of our “free” nation: this is known as institutionalized discrimination.
While institutionalized discrimination and other oppressive measures overtly attempt to impose certain ideologies upon a society, there are still more subtle means of doing so that often do not even feel or look like social control. Winning over the “hearts and minds” of a society with what are called ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) usually proves more effective than more oppressive measures, since the population acquiesces to those in power frequently without even being aware that it is doing so. ISAs include various non‐violent social formations such as schools, the family, the church, and the media institutions – including film and television – that shape and represent our culture in certain ways. They spread ideology not through intimidation and oppression, but by example and education. In schools, students learn skills such as reading and math, but they are also taught to believe certain things about America, and how to be productive, law‐abiding citizens. The enormously popular Dick and Jane books taught many American youngsters not only how to read, but also how boys and girls were supposed to behave (and most importantly, that boys and girls behave differently). Institutionalized religion is also an ideological state apparatus, in which theological beliefs help sustain ideological imperatives. Many Christian denominations during the country’s first century used the Bible to justify slavery and segregation of the races. Some faiths still demonize homosexuality and argue that women should subjugate themselves to men. Historically, people have considered children born with differing physical abilities as signs of sin or evil; it was not that long ago when left‐handed children were forced to use their right hand, because the left hand was considered sinister or Satanic. Even the structure of the family itself is an ISA, in which sons and daughters are taught ideological concepts by their parents. In the United States, families have traditionally been idealized as patriarchal, with the father as the leader.
All of this points to how ideologies function through what cultural theorists call overdetermination, which means that any given ideology is disseminated through culture via multiple cultural institutions. Patriarchal masculinity, for example, is pervasive. It is upheld in many religions, foregrounded in much media, taught in schools (see Dick and Jane above), celebrated through sports, honored through warfare, rewarded through capitalism, and thought to be the bedrock of both the nuclear family and society itself. This is one of things that makes challenging (let alone changing) dominant ideologies so difficult. Our cultural institutions’ ideologies are deeply intertwined; they support and implicitly value and validate one another. For example, take the #MeToo movement, which has rocked Hollywood by calling attention to the sexist behaviors of powerful men in the media industries. The #MeToo movement is but one front on the struggle to undermine patriarchal attitudes and sexist behaviors towards women. #MeToo may be slowly spreading (or not) to churches and the military and the sports industries and the US government itself, but it remains to be seen how successful it will be in checking male abuses. Ideally, the movement will have some lasting effect as hegemonic negotiation responds to it. Some men’s behaviors may change, even while other men‐behaving‐badly will continue to use their wealth and power to buy off accusers and shield their misdeeds.
As these various examples hopefully demonstrate, ideology functions most smoothly when it is so embedded in everyday life that more overt oppressive measures become unnecessary. In fact, the use of oppression usually indicates that large sections of a society are beginning to diverge from the dominant ideology. At their most successful, ISAs act as reinforcements for individuals who have already been inculcated into dominant ideology. Such individuals are said to have internalized ideology, or to have adopted socially constructed ideological assumptions into their own senses of self. Such internalizing can have significant effects on people, especially members of minority groups. No matter what social group one might identify with, we all are constantly bombarded by images, ideas, and ideologies of straight white male superiority and centrality, and these constructs are consciously and unconsciously internalized by everyone. For straight white men, those images can reinforce feelings of superiority. For everyone else, those images and ideas can produce mild to severe self‐hatred or create a psychological state in which individuals limit their own potential. In effect, we might allow the dominant ideology to tell us what we are or are not capable of – that women are not good at math, that African Americans can only excel at sports, that people from the lower classes must remain uneducated, that someone in a wheelchair cannot be an elected official, or that being homosexual is a shameful thing. Possibly the least noticeable but potentially most damaging, this type of internalized discrimination is sometimes termed ego‐destructive, because it actively works against an individual’s sense of psychological well‐being. Such ego‐destructive ideologies may be especially harmful because they are often fostered by those groups and individuals who allegedly love and nurture us: rejection from families and religions is still a common occurrence for many people who are considered different from the “norm.”
The strength and tenacity of such internalized ideology within an efficiently working hegemonic system allow people to consider their society open and free, since it appears that no one is forcing anyone else to live a certain way, or keeping them from reaching their highest possible levels of achievement. Yet the subtlety of ideological state apparatuses and the subconscious impact of ego‐destructive discrimination severely undercut and problematize the avowed principles of liberty