Working from the idea that Sociology and Cultural Studies have developed distinct and valuable toolkits for understanding culture, Harden and Carley have brought together a collection of essays that address the ways in which the cultures around race, sex, and gender are mediated through or intersect with politics, society, and economy.

Co-opting Culture: Culture and Power in Sociology and Cultural Studies represents a collection of new scholarship on culture from the social sciences and from work done under the rubric of 'cultural studies'. Working from the idea that Sociology and Cultural Studies have developed distinct and valuable toolkits for understanding culture, the editors have brought together a collection of essays that address the ways in which the cultures around race, sex, and gender are mediated through or intersect with politics, society, and economy. Some essays deal directly with the theoretical nature of this mediation, while others adopt these theoretical approaches to investigate specific cultural objects or communities. In doing so, these essays call attention to the particularities of form that constitute a kind of cultural logic around the objects under consideration.

Chapter 1 Forward
Part 2 Part 1: Theory
Chapter 3 Defrocking the "High Priest of Modernity": Giddens, Erickson, and Agency
Chapter 4 Power, Culture, and Hegemony: A Theoretical Exploration of Gesellschaft
Chapter 5 The Unicorn is Dead: Postmodernism, Consumption, and the Production of the "Self"
Chapter 6 Some Brief Notes Toward a Labor-Based Theory of Culture
Part 7 Part 2: Gender and Sexuality
Chapter 8 Gender Queer Productions and the Bridge of Cultural Legitimacy: "Realness" and "Identity" inParis is Burning
Chapter 9 Ambiguity Will Not Stand: An Exploratory Study of Transsexuality, and the Intimate Relationship between Sex, Race, Technology, Nature, and the "Nature" of Desire
Part 10 Part 3: Globalization
Chapter 11 Inter(sex)tions: Gender, Culture, and Globalization
Chapter 12 Between Neighborhoods and Power: The Mediation of Joy by Argentinean "TV Conductors"
Chapter 13 Modernity, Development, Hegemony: Social Change and Ethnic Assimilation in the Lower Rio Grande Valley
Chapter 14 "Like the Wildest Creation of a Dream": Dialectics, Visualization Technologies, and Aesthetics in the Writings of Francis Younghusband, George Mallory, and the Members of the 1999 Mallory & Irvine Research Expedition
Part 15 Part 4: Popular Culture
Chapter 16 Racial Determinism in the Narrative Setting of Dungeons and Dragons
Chapter 17 Heebsters: Community and Identity (Re)construction of Urban Jewish Hipsters
Chapter 18 In Blog We Trust: An Antiphon
Chapter 19 Conspicuous Charity