ABSTRACT
In the context of a textbook discussing serious, ‘life and death’ issues – war, human rights, genocide – a chapter on popular culture sounds somewhat trivial, even frivolous. Popular culture is ostensibly everything that world politics isn’t: fi ction, entertainment, amusement, illusion, distraction. It’s not that popular culture isn’t valued as an object of academic study – there are scholars (and disciplines) of cultural studies, fi lm studies, media and communication studies – but the division of academia into discrete disciplines permits IR scholars to ignore popular culture and claim that it is not relevant to the study of world politics. The (gendered) distinctions that many IR scholars make, explicitly or implicitly, between ‘fact’ and ‘fi ction’, between domestic and international, between high (politics) and low (culture) underpin this rejection of popular culture as relevant to IR. However, if we are interested in analysing the gendered dynamics of world politics, popular culture is (or should be) of paramount importance to IR scholars as well (Hooper 2001; Weber 2005a; Weldes 2006; Hansen 2006).
