Page 112 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

THE QUESTION OF CULTURAL GENDER

gender – such as culture-specific views on women’s mental endurance, their
special competencies and inabilities, their great moral responsibilities, and their
symbolic and social domains – could be more important indicators than the
typical focus on sexuality and desire.
David Chaney’s idea of ‘sensibility’ comes quite close to this. By sensibility
he means ‘a way of referring to a perceived a ffiliation for an identifiable group
with, for instance, certain ideas, or values, or tastes in music, food, or dress. A
shared sensibility is not mandatory for all members, and may . . . vary between
genders within a particular community so that sensibilities play across other
more established ways of life . . . The theme of sensibility is then another aspect
of delineating identities’ (Chaney 1996: 126).
Chaney refers to research reported by Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-
Halton (1981). When asked to nominate their most cherished objects, ‘Males
mention significantly more TV, stereo sets, sports equipment, vehicles, and
trophies. Females more often mention photographs, sculpture, plants, plates,
glass, and textiles’ (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton: 106). These
gendered domains of media, popular culture, and everyday life are clearly very
important in producing and maintaining gender traditions. Studies of cultural
behavior in Brazil (Tufte 1999), Sweden (Jansson 1999), China (Lull 1991),
and Finland (Liikkanen 1996b) all indicate that men tend to choose action, and
sports-oriented activities, while women prefer different media genres – drama
and music, for instance. Furthermore, it is easier for women to step over into
male cultural domains than it is for males to enter the female cultural spheres.

More cultural sensitivity

Deconstructing the history of feminist and gender research, and how gender
has been theorized, reveals its powerful contextualities and situatedness.
International debates about women have always reflected a very strong Anglo-
American bias, which in turn has influenced a great deal of theoretical and
empirical work outside the United Kingdom and the United States. Indeed, to
some extent Anglo-American feminist traditions have even colonized localities
inside the Western hemisphere. This is especially true of feminist-oriented
research undertaken in the fields of media and cultural studies.
However, as Angela McRobbie (1997) points out, major di fferences inside
the Anglo-American world have also arisen. In her own British intellectual
trajectory from the 1970s onward, the accent initially was on ‘feminist material-
ism’. McRobbie says that what is perhaps most relevant to later feminist cul-
tural studies, however, is the fact that research combined a culturalist and
materialist perspective, and was very much focused on ‘the history and culture
of working-class women and girls at home, in the community, in school, in
leisure, and at work’ (McRobbie 1997: 171). Comparing the various turns of
feminist research, McRobbie argues that ‘in the UK feminist intellectual work
has grown out of a more socialist tradition. There has been much less concern

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