Kitsch! ─ Cultural Politics and Taste

From bottle gardens, the bachelor pad and Batman to designer gnomes and monogamy spray, this book uses a diverse range of objects to explore the changing significance of kitsch. With its unique approach to its subject, Kitsch! Cultural Politics and Taste promises to advance debates in cultural studies and sociology around taste, while providing an invaluable introduction for students and interested readers.

Kitsch! examines how the idea of kitsch is mobilized – progressively, as bad taste, as camp and as cool – to inform notions of identity and sensibility. Where most studies proceed from the kitsch object, this book takes the moment of aesthetic judgment as its starting point and attempts to identify the ideological work performed by the category itself. The book poses the strongest challenge to those who argue that taste is democratized in contemporary culture, offering ample evidence that judgments of taste have shifted ground rather than relaxed.

Ruth Holliday is Professor of Gender and Culture in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds.

Tracey Potts is Lecturer in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham.