This article explores issues connected to popular culture and the English classroom, asking how students' social and critical responses can be mobilised as productive literacy practices.  With changing conceptualisations of literacy, popular texts are increasingly recognised as powerful resources through which varieties of forms of communicative competence are learned.  Through students' journals and interviews, I look closely at the connections between issues of identity and literacy and suggest ways that these could offer forms of pleasurable textual engagement, as well as dimensions of critical and reflective practice in the classroom.