Hegemony is a shifting power balance, never total victory or domination.

Evidence

What we are talking about is the struggle over cultural hegemony, which is these days waged as much in popular culture as anywhere else. That high/popular distinction is precisely what the global postmodern is displacing. Cultural hegemony is never about pure victory or pure domination (that’s not what the term means); it is never a zero-sum cultural game; it is always about shifting the balance of power in the relations of culture; it is always about changing the dispositions and the configurations of cultural power, not getting out of it. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 276

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definitional passage: hegemonies are about shifting the balance of cultural power, not zero-sum outcomes — central to the entire scaffolding toolkit.
• XREF: Gramscian hegemony concept that the Islamophobia field presupposes; also reads the popular-culture arena as where contemporary hegemony is fought.
• ADDENDUM: Aligns with the ‘On Sacrifice’ framing of how stratified systems get stabilized — both reject simplistic domination models.