No longer is it sufficient to read onto popular culture the ideological tendencies and tropes of capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity and other systems of power (though this work remains critically important). Nor is it sufficient to feign surprise when the researcher "finds" agency, creativity and "resistance" where, allegedly, none was expected. Rather, we must look to the extremely complicated ways popular culture shapes the dialogic relationship between structure and agency, between value and imagination, towards the perpetuation of durable systems of exploitation and inequality in financialized times.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 384