Social Critique and Pleasure: Critical Media Literacy with Popular Culture Texts

This article addresses the importance of opening space for young people to engage in critical media literacy learning using popular culture texts. Children’s background knowledge includes a wide-variety of texts that are often ignored or excluded from school curriculum. The author shows how popular music, for example, can offer powerful opportunities for dialogically teachable moments and engagement in literacy learning that is critical but does not come at the expense of children’s pleasure in such texts. The author introduces the concept of a pleasure-critique nexus to demonstrate how social critique and pleasurable experiences are not at odds with each other. Furthermore, in this conceptual space pleasure can be derived from engaging in social critique.