We live in an age in which the new conservativism that has reigned in the United States for the last decade has consistently struggled to depoliticize politics while simultaneously attempting to politicize popular culture and the institutions that make up daily life. The depoliticizing of politics is evident, in part, in the ways in which the new conservative formations use the electronic technologies of image, sound, and text not only to alter traditional systems of time, space, and history, but also to displace serious political issues to the realm of the aesthetic and the personal. I In this context, discourses of style, form, and authenticity are employed to replace questions concerning how power is mobilized by diverse dominant groups to oppress, marginalize, and exploit large portions of the American population. Understood in ideological terms, the depoliticizing of politics is about the attempt to construct citizens who believe that they have little or no control over their lives: that issues of identity, culture, and agency bear no relationship to or “acknowledgment of mediations: material, historical, social, psychological, and ideological” (Solomon-Godeau, xxviii). Hence, the depoliticizing of the political represents a complex, though incomplete, effort by the new conservatism to secure a politics of representation that attempts to render the workings of its own ideology indiscernible. That is, dominant groups seize upon the dynamics of cultural power to secure their own interests while simultaneously attempting to make the political context and ideological sources of such power invisible.