| Abstract: | This study explores connections between popular culture and family interaction. Multiadic interview data were collected from families who enacted purity pledges. Using contrapuntal analysis, results indicate how competing familial discourses about popular culture serve as both centrifugal and centripetal forces. Fathers rejected many sexual values in popular culture texts, but they also appreciated that popular culture makes purity rings intelligible to others. Mothers expressed frustration at portrayals of teenage pregnancy on television. Children indicated that their parents did not understand how they saw popular culture, in competition with the aforementioned parental discourses, but appreciated that their parents cared. They also articulated parental disapproval of a current generation's popular culture choices as ongoing ritual, thus allowing the competing discourses to operate in a centripetal fashion. Overall, it is apparent that distal popular culture discourses inform proximal, constitutive family discourses about sex and sexuality. |
