Studies of popular culture have enjoyed increasing privilege in recent scholarship. The kinds of texts considered relevant and appropriate to scholarly inquiry has expanded significantly, and increased attention has been paid to diversity in readership and consumption.

The stakes of such a radical expansion in scholarly fields within the humanities and social sciences are, perhaps, just as interesting as the new kinds of knowledges that have unfolded in the past several years. Theoretical strategies for discussing popular culture have involved intensely complex issues. How does one avoid naive, celebratory gushing while discussing the potentially radical politics of widely disseminated cultural experiences; or value judgments which remain trapped in modern paradigms of aesthetics, ethics, and social worth? If anything, trajectories in cultural studies imply a shift in theoretical application in order not only to work within alternative, other-disciplinary paradigms, but also to create new ones.

The essays in this section offer readings of unconventional texts with an attentiveness to the audiences of those texts. In "Trashy or Transgressive? 'Reality TV' and the Politics of Policing," Laura Grindstaff examines the controversy over "reality TV" and the gendered evaluation of its worth. In "Imagined Virtual Reality Systems in Marvel Comics' Nikki Doyle: Wild Thing," Julie Palsmeier takes as its object of study the representations of the Teen Age in a comic book series. Both of these essays approach popular culture texts from innovative theoretical frameworks.

One of the authors' important contributions involves reconceptualizing the previously binarized relationships between fantasy and reality. Unlike early works in studies of popular culture, these authors refuse to dismiss fantasy as an inarticulated space of idiosyncratic personal experience. Rather, they invite us to consider the interpenetration of the realms of fantasy and reality as well as the significance of these fluid relationships to studies of popular culture.