Caps 5- Duck Dynasty

Caps 5 - Duck Dynasty

This chapter focuses on Popular culture and how many cultures are influenced by different cultural texts primarily from the United States.  The text book describes cultural texts as, “television shows, movies, advertisements, or other widely disseminated messages” (364 Martin, Nakayama).   These different outlets all deliver messages about what “life is like” or how we live as a culture whether true or false other cultures view these cultural texts and based on what they decode from the messages they make an assessment of our culture.   From the cultural texts, people create stereotypes about what they see.  This weeks assignment was to watch a television show for a week and relate it to popular culture and the text.

I typically do not watch television, but for the assignment I watched a few episodes of Ducky Dynasty on A&E.  I’m not sure if they were reruns or not but whatever the case they definitely reinforced the idea of stereotyping.  The idea behind the show is to film a family of white Americans or as the stereotype calls them “rednecks” and to show what goes on a daily basis with the family and friends.  The only ethnic group portrayed in the shows that I watched were white Caucasian and in one episode the characters visited a Mexican restaurant where they encountered Hispanic workers.  None the less it was mostly just the family on the show.  In the show Willie and Jace, brothers, are constantly arguing and fighting which is the good vs. bad role.  This positive vs. negative is what gives the show its humor along with the crazy uncle who is usually sandwiched in between the two brothers and their arguing.  The women in the show were the men’s wives.  Their role was to give advice and to keep the men in line.  They showed stability and seemed very motherly to their friends and family.  They were constantly planning get together for the family where the could cook and spend time with their kids.  Based on the actions of the men and their daily habits, one could conclude that they fit under the stereotype of rednecks but at the same time the high class of the women offsets the redneck of the men and the show creates a new stereotype, a “high class redneck”.

As you can see through the cultural context of television, examples of stereotypes can be found.   I feel that if a book was written about these men on Duck Dynasty the same stereotype would be present to people reading the book or watching the show.