Page 110 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

THE QUESTION OF CULTURAL GENDER

become, but at the same time, a compulsive engagement with this figure. The
position is often profoundly contradictory, involving both the repudiation and
defense of traditional femininity’ (Brunsdon 1997: 194).
Brunsdon puts forward the interesting argument that ‘well-intended’ femi-
nist research has arrested ‘woman’ into ‘tradition’. But here we can really see
how culture mediates not only gender, but academic discussions about it. The
question one must ask here is, therefore, into which tradition has ‘woman’ been
arrested by feminist research? I come from an environment, for example, where
the ‘ordinary woman’ is definitively not a ‘housewife’. And while women have
been studied specifically as media audiences, and almost entirely as audiences
for popular genres like soap operas, this intellectual history actually serves to
anchor ‘women’ more firmly than ever to Western traditions. Ever since
ancient Greece and early Christian times womanhood has been associated with
passivity and the status of audience, while manhood is thought of in terms of
activity and subjectivity.
Indeed, both these categories of ‘ordinary woman’ produced by feminist
research – the transparent and the hegemonic – have been and should be
criticized for their failure to take into account ethnic, sexual, cultural, and other
differences among women.
Brunsdon labels the third stage of how women have been theorized by
researchers as fragmented, ‘because it is founded on the possibility that there is no
necessary relationship between the first two categories’. At this stage, ‘woman
becomes a profoundly problematic category, and ironically “feminist” becomes
rather more stable’ (Brunsdon 1997: 196). The third stage is closely related to
the postmodern and anti-essentialist critique, which reminds us not only that
women are gendered but that other social and cultural di fferences among them
(such as class and ethnicity) may be more signi ficant. The critique stresses that
knowledge is always situated and partial. Although ‘a fragmented feminist iden-
tity’ undoes the ‘symbiotic’ relationship between ‘feminist’ and ‘woman’, it is
still threatened by a ‘potential solipsis’ (Brunsdon 1997: 198), referring to the
very impossibility of empirical research discussed earlier.
International feminist research of course is closely interwoven with the evo-
lution of the political feminist movement worldwide. But by creating the
‘right’ kind of view on womanhood, and in speaking up for the ‘ordinary
woman’, feminism has produced a link between ‘womanhood’ and ‘empirical
women’, and ultimately, through a critique of empirical research, has called
into question the very possibility of knowing women.

Towards better understanding gender and culture
In many recent discussions gender is associated with sexual desire and its
diverse objects, which is then represented by external symbols, especially by
dress, and by a modifiable body. In these discussions notions of style and per-
formativity are central. To extend the point somewhat, gendering easily appears

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