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Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
Theoretical Framework of Cultural Studies
Contemporary Controversy: AI-Generated Art and the Politics of Creativity
Applying the Circuit of Culture to the AI Art Debate
Discourse, Power, and Ideological Control in AI Art
Media, Technology, and Public Discourse
Cultural Studies as a Method: Strengths and Limitations
Conclusion: Power, Identity, and Culture in the 21st Century
References
Name:- Rutvi Pal
Batch :- M.A. Sem 2 (2024-2026)
Enrollment Number :- 5108240025
E-mail Address :-rutvipal4@gmail.com
Roll Number :- 23
Topic : Cultural Studies as a Method: A Meta-Critical Analysis of Contemporary Controversy
Paper & subject code :- 205A: Cultural Studies - 22410
Submitted to :- Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar
Date of Submission :- 7 November 2025
Cultural Studies, since its emergence in postwar Britain, has offered scholars an interdisciplinary lens to examine how power, ideology, and identity circulate through everyday life. This paper performs a meta-critical analysis of Cultural Studies as a method by applying its frameworks to four contemporary controversies: the global and Indian debates on transgender rights, the rise of AI-generated art and authorship, the disputes over historical statues and collective memory, and the politics of data privacy under digital surveillance capitalism. Using the Circuit of Culture (du Gay et al.), the Foucauldian concept of discourse and power, and Stuart Hall’s theory of representation, the essay maps how each controversy functions as a site of negotiation between cultural production, media framing, ideology, and identity. By foregrounding Indian and Global South perspectives, it demonstrates that Cultural Studies must constantly adapt its critical tools to postcolonial and digital contexts, where power operates through new forms of visibility and control. The concluding section reflects on the strengths and limitations of Cultural Studies as a methodology—its ability to reveal ideological mechanisms and its struggle to theorize the algorithmic, corporate, and affective dimensions of contemporary culture.
Cultural Studies, Circuit of Culture, Discourse and Power, Media, Ideology, Transgender Rights, AI Art, Surveillance Capitalism, Global South
Cultural Studies emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a challenge to the elitist division between “high” and “low” culture, emphasizing that popular forms—television, advertising, social media, music—carry ideological significance equal to canonical literature. The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), led by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall, developed an interdisciplinary method combining sociology, semiotics, Marxism, feminism, and postcolonial theory. Hall’s insistence that culture is “the site where power relations are both established and contested” (Hall 64) remains central to its practice.
In the twenty-first century, controversies around gender, technology, and heritage exemplify how culture is no longer peripheral to politics but its very medium. Debates over transgender identities, AI-generated art, colonial statues, and digital surveillance are not merely social issues—they are cultural battlegrounds where meaning, representation, and authority are contested. This paper applies Cultural Studies as a meta-critical method to these controversies, examining how the Circuit of Culture, Foucauldian discourse, and ideological critique function across multiple contexts.
The Circuit of Culture, formulated by Paul du Gay and colleagues in Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (1997), identifies five interrelated moments: representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation. Cultural meaning circulates across these points, and understanding any artifact or controversy requires analyzing their interactions.
In parallel, Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse and power posits that power is not merely repressive but productive—it produces knowledge, subjectivity, and norms through discourse (Foucault 94). Stuart Hall integrated this insight into his encoding/decoding model, arguing that audiences actively interpret media messages within ideological frameworks (Hall 1980).
Cultural Studies thus rejects the neutrality of culture. Every artifact, law, or image participates in ideological control—whether through colonial narratives, capitalist production, or digital mediation. This essay uses these frameworks to interpret four live controversies that define the cultural politics of our time.
The global and Indian debates around transgender rights illustrate the entanglement of representation, identity, and regulation. In India, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act (2019) promised inclusion but paradoxically reinforced bureaucratic control, requiring state certification of gender identity. Activists such as Laxmi Narayan Tripathi and Grace Banu have critiqued this as a form of regulatory biopower (Foucault 137), where the state disciplines bodily autonomy under the guise of protection.
Mainstream Indian media has oscillated between exoticizing and pathologizing trans identities. Bollywood’s caricatured portrayals—such as Sadak (1991) or Singham Returns (2014)—reinforce stereotypes, whereas films like Super Deluxe (2019) and Paatal Lok (2020) offer more complex depictions. Cultural Studies interprets these shifts not as aesthetic improvements but as ideological negotiations within changing moral economies.
On social media platforms like Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), trans creators curate identities that subvert mainstream norms. Yet, these same platforms commercialize identity, converting visibility into algorithmic capital. Here, Foucault’s concept of subjectivation—the process through which individuals internalize norms—intersects with neoliberal consumption. The performance of authenticity becomes a commodified form of resistance.
The global discourse on “gender ideology,” driven by conservative groups, shows how trans visibility provokes moral panic. Cultural Studies identifies this as a hegemonic reaction—an attempt to reassert control over shifting gender signifiers. As Hall observes, “Cultural politics is the politics of signification” (Hall 48). Thus, the trans rights controversy exemplifies how identity and regulation are co-constituted through representation.
The rise of artificial intelligence in creative production—seen in AI-generated paintings, literature, and music—has reignited debates over authorship, creativity, and labor. In 2023, the controversy over AI tools like DALL·E and Midjourney intensified as artists accused corporations of training models on copyrighted works without consent.
In the Circuit of Culture, production and regulation become crucial. AI-generated art reflects a new mode of technocultural production, where machines simulate creativity using massive datasets. Ulrich Beck’s “risk society” thesis applies here—technological progress introduces new forms of cultural risk and ethical ambiguity (Beck 33). The regulation of AI remains minimal, reflecting corporate dominance over artistic labor.
From a Cultural Studies perspective, AI art destabilizes the Romantic notion of the artist-genius. The “death of the author” (Barthes) is literalized when machines produce art without human intention. Yet, as scholars like Nick Srnicek argue, this shift conceals capitalist appropriation of creative labor (Platform Capitalism 2017). AI art thus represents the ideological extension of late capitalism, where the aesthetic realm becomes datafied and commodified.
The viral spread of AI art on platforms like Reddit and Instagram reveals a cultural fascination with novelty and posthuman creativity. Consumers oscillate between awe and anxiety—between democratization of art and fear of obsolescence. In India, AI-generated religious and mythological imagery (e.g., “AI Ramayana” art) demonstrates how global technologies are indigenized within local aesthetic traditions, producing hybrid cultural forms.
The controversy over statues—from Confederate generals in the U.S. to British colonial figures like Edward Colston and Indian icons like Gandhi or Ambedkar—demonstrates how public memory is a battleground for identity and ideology.
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Statues are material representations of collective identity. When protestors toppled Colston’s statue in Bristol (2020), it symbolized resistance to racialized history. Similarly, debates in India over statues of Tipu Sultan or Savarkar reflect ongoing negotiations of national identity. Cultural Studies interprets such acts as struggles over cultural hegemony (Gramsci)—who defines the nation’s moral and historical narrative.
Statues are state-sponsored artifacts; their production and placement are political acts. As Nayar notes, “Every commemorative form is a negotiation between official history and popular memory” (Nayar 36). Regulation of memory—through curricula, heritage laws, and censorship—reveals how power institutionalizes meaning.
News and social media amplify such controversies, often polarizing them into binaries of nationalism versus iconoclasm. Foucault’s discourse analysis shows how “heritage” becomes a regulatory term that justifies the preservation of dominant power symbols. In India, digital campaigns such as #SaveOurStatues or #DecolonizeHistory illustrate how the public sphere has migrated online, transforming protest into a form of mediated citizenship.
The global scandal surrounding data privacy—from Cambridge Analytica to India’s Aadhaar project—exemplifies the intersection of technology, governance, and ideology.
In Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), digital corporations commodify personal data as “behavioral surplus.” India’s Aadhaar database, while framed as welfare infrastructure, enables unprecedented state surveillance. Cultural Studies reads these developments as new modalities of power—technological extensions of Foucault’s panopticism, where visibility becomes control.
Media representations of privacy debates are often technocratic, focusing on efficiency rather than autonomy. The ideological framing of “data for development” normalizes surveillance as progress. For instance, promotional campaigns for India’s Digital India initiative represent biometric tracking as empowerment, concealing its disciplinary potential.
Users “freely” provide data to platforms like Meta, Amazon, or Jio—an act of voluntary servitude embedded in neoliberal ideology. As Hall notes, ideology operates “not by coercion but by consent” (Hall 90). Surveillance capitalism exemplifies this consent-driven control, where consumers perform their subjection as participation.
The application of Cultural Studies to these controversies reveals its enduring methodological power. The Circuit of Culture enables scholars to move beyond textual analysis toward a holistic understanding of meaning as process. Foucault’s analytics of power and Hall’s decoding model expose the micro-politics of discourse within media and everyday life.
However, the very success of Cultural Studies as an adaptable method exposes its limitations. First, as Meaghan Morris argues, Cultural Studies risks becoming “too omnivorous,” applying its frameworks indiscriminately (Morris 21). In digital and posthuman contexts, where algorithmic systems generate meaning autonomously, the humanist basis of Cultural Studies struggles to keep pace.
Second, the discipline’s emphasis on resistance and identity politics may overlook structural economic forces. In the context of AI art or surveillance capitalism, the key agents are not cultural consumers but opaque corporate and algorithmic actors. Thus, a post-Cultural Studies paradigm may need to integrate political economy and media ecology more explicitly.
Third, while Cultural Studies emphasizes representation, it must account for affect and embodiment—dimensions crucial to transgender activism or the visceral reactions to statue-toppling. As Sara Ahmed reminds us, emotions are “cultural practices that align individuals with communities” (The Cultural Politics of Emotion 2004). Without engaging affect, Cultural Studies risks intellectual abstraction.
Finally, from a Global South perspective, the method must decolonize itself. Indian media, gender discourse, and technoculture operate under hybrid logics of tradition and modernity, not merely Western postmodernity. Scholars like Nayar and Spivak urge Cultural Studies to provincialize Europe and attend to subaltern modes of cultural production and resistance.
Through these four controversies—transgender rights, AI-generated art, statue politics, and digital surveillance—this essay demonstrates that culture remains the central terrain of political struggle in the 21st century. Power no longer resides solely in governments or capital but in discursive regimes, technological infrastructures, and mediated identities.
Cultural Studies, as a method, remains invaluable for revealing how ideology operates through everyday practices of watching, creating, protesting, and consuming. Yet its future depends on expanding its analytical reach—toward algorithmic governance, ecological crisis, and posthuman creativity—without abandoning its core commitment to justice, representation, and critique.
In this sense, the meta-critical function of Cultural Studies is double: it interprets culture while interrogating its own methods of interpretation. As long as culture remains the site where power is both lived and contested, Cultural Studies will remain not just relevant but necessary
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed., Edinburgh University Press, 2014. PDF e-book, https://pratiquesdhospitalite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/245435211-sara-ahmed-the-cultural-politics-of-emotion.pdf.
Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Sage Publications, 1992. e-book, http://www.riversimulator.org/Resources/Anthropology/RiskSociety/RiskSocietyTowardsAnewModernity1992Beck.pdf.
Du Gay, Paul, et al. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. SAGE Publications in association with The Open University, 1997. PDF file, https://clab.iat.sfu.ca/431/uploads/Site/DoingCulturalStudies.pdf.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage Books, 1990. PDF file, https://monoskop.org/images/4/40/Foucault_Michel_The_History_of_Sexuality_1_An_Introduction.pdf.
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, edited by Stuart Hall et al., Routledge, 1980, pp. 128–138. PDF file, https://ia801304.us.archive.org/6/items/ktoub2/02CHallEncodingDecoding.pdf.
Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to Cultural Studies. Viva Books, 2016.
Priya, M. Kanika. “Roland Barthes ‘The Death of the Author.’” GAP Interdisciplinarities: A Global Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. III, no. III, June–Aug. 2020, pp. 57–59. GAP Interdisciplinarities, https://www.gapinterdisciplinarities.org/res/articles/(57-59)%20ROLAND%20BARTHES%20%E2%80%9CTHE%20DEATH%20OF%20THE%20AUTHOR%E2%80%9D.pdf.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Macmillan, 1988.
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