Women and Popular Culture : Search Tips

There are many ways you can search for resources about women and popular culture. The list below shows different subject headings that may help retrieve what you are looking for.

• Black women AND media
• Pop culture
• Feminism AND pop culture
• Visual culture
• Gender AND pop culture
• Masculinity
• Femininity
• Bisexuality AND stereotypes
• Body image AND pop culture

Be careful when picking a topic for research. While information about any topic may be found, there is no guarantee that these resources are scholarly or academic. 

Some research suggestions:

• Representations of aging or older women
• Bullies and "Mean Girls"
• Tough women in action movies
• Images of (insert chosen race or religion) in popular culture
• Youth, sexuality and "good girls"
• Women and eating disorders
• Models and body ideals
• Working women
• Violent or criminal women in popular culture
• Women and "deviancy" or the "bad girl"
• Lesbianism in popular culture
• The "man hating" feminist
• Women in high paying positions or wage inequality
• Social stigma of women's promiscuity
• Cheerleader, princess and Barbie stereotypes
• Sexual objectification
• Ethnic or racial objectification (see also: exotification)
• Victim blaming
• Misogyny in various media
• "Daddy's" girl
• Wealthy, but "frigid" and child-free
• Evil step mothers
• "Myth" of female orgasm
• Women in (insert religion) culture
• The "dumb blonde" or undesirable "intellectual brunette"
• The black widower or gold digger
• Women soldiers or military rape
• Midwives or midwifery 
• Social contempt for women who remain child-free by choice
• The "crazy ex" girlfriend
• Women sex workers
• Women and "virginity"
• Sexualization of girls
• Women villains (and their downfall)
• Woman-on-Woman violence/hate
• Supernatural or Goddess stereotypes

Click here for an even longer list of popular culture tropes.

In women-focused databases, such as GenderWatch or Women's Studies International there’s usually no need to put “women” into your search, except where “women” is already part of the term.

In other databases such as Academic Search Premier or ProQuest Research Library, that are not women-focused, try to search for women (OR girls, if relevant) as one concept.  Add AND to include your specific concept, such as hip hop, promiscuity, or childbirth. You don’t need to put in “women” if your concept already contains a “women word” (ex: chick flicks, mothers, lipstick lesbians, or a celebrity name.)

To search for synonyms or words that are connected in meaning and relevant to your search use OR. (ex: patriarchy or androcentrism or sexism; consumers or marketing or selling or product)

Put an asterisk at the end of an incomplete term to search for word stems (this is called truncation). This means any ending of the stem word will be found. (ex: Typing consum*  will find consume, consumer, consumption, etc.)

Whenever possible narrow your search results to include only scholarly or peer reviewed sources. This can usually be done in an Advanced Search or on a sidebar after the initial search. 

*Peer Reviewed and Scholarly Journals are usually more credible sources.

If you find a book or article that relates to your topic take a look at the controlled vocabulary, subject and index terms or tags. Use these exact terms in your next search to find other articles that have been similarly cited.

For example take a look at this image from the library catalog. I searched "feminism AND popular culture" and found this book. If I want to find more like it I'll look at the "subject" terms (can also be labeled as controlled vocabulary, index terms or tags depending on the database).

So, based on these subject terms, it might be beneficial to adjust my next search to "feminist theory AND popular culture".

This is helpful because often we search for a term that is linguistically different and therefore does not provide many results. Switching to these "official" controlled vocabularies, subject and index terms or tags will help the database sort and find materials relevant to your topic.