ABSTRACT
Popular culture represents a use of leisure, largely in the home, in which pleasure and consumption have to be central analytical categories. There is no shortage of claims that modern, mass, popular culture in its various forms is ideological and that audiences appropriate it as ideology. This chapter argues that to establish the truth conditions of the proposition that popular culture is ideological one had to distinguish three aspects, textual ideology, ideology setting and ideological effect. In considering the relationship between popular culture and dominant ideology, there are two important aspects of textual ideology, coherence and dominance. Narrative realism is a textual convention frequently employed in popular culture. A crude dominant ideology thesis as applied to popular culture would suggest that audiences are relatively passive, absorbing the ideological content of television, film, or popular music without reflection. In most of the literature audience passivity has been discarded in favour of audience activity.
