Interpellation is a concept introduced to Marxist theory by Louis Althusser as the mechanism through which pre-existing social structures "constitute" (or construct) individual human organisms as subjects (with consciousness and agency).
Althusser asked how people come voluntarily to live within class, gender, racial or other identities, and argued that this happens through "state apparatuses" (such as the family, mass media, schools, churches, the judicial system, police, government) continually telling individuals what they are from infancy.
Rather than situating their analysis heavily on the State, Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the mass media—the "culture industry"—also plays a role in the construction of passive subjects.
[5] So unlike the police officer in Althusser's example who reinforces the ideology of democracy and law, the mass media now plays a powerful complementary role in the creation of a passive consumer.
While RSAs are institutions that directly repress dissent and opposition (for example, the police and the military), ISAs (for example family, church, schools, the media and politics) reproduce capitalism through non-repressive ideological means.
Consequently, interpellation describes the process by which ideology, embodied in major social and political institutions (ISAs and RSAs), constitutes the very nature of individual subjects' identities.
[9] The feminist scholar and queer theorist Judith Butler critically applied a framework based on interpellation to highlight the social construction of gender identities.