Page 102 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Gender and/in media consumption 93
This fascinating ethnographic account of the Meier family’s dealings with the weekend
sports coverage clarifies the thoroughly convoluted and circumstantial way in which
concrete practices of media consumption are related to gender. Mr Meier, the male
football fan, ends up not watching his favourite team’s game on television, while his
wife, who doesn’t care for sports, finds herself seating herself in front of the TV set the
very moment the sports programme is on. Gender is obviously not a reliable predictor of
viewing behaviour here. The scene illuminates the fact that media consumption is a
thoroughly precarious practice, structured not by psychological or sociological
predispositions of individual audience members but by the dynamic and contradictory
goings-on of everyday life. The way gender is implicated in this practice is consequently
equally undecided, at least outside of the context in which the practice takes concrete
shape.
How gender is related to media consumption is one of the most under-theorized
questions in mass communication research. In this chapter, we hope to offer some
theoretical clarification about this important question. As Liesbet van Zoonen (1991) has
pointed out, work in this area has until now almost exclusively concentrated on women,
not men, and media consumption. This bias unwittingly reflects a more general bias in
society, in which women are defined as the problematic sex (Coward 1983). This is a
pity, since not femininity but also masculinity has recently been the subject of increasing
critical inquiry (Kaufman 1987; Seidler 1989). More importantly, we will argue here that
limiting ourselves to women audiences as the empirical starting point for analysis would
risk reproducing static and essentialist conceptions of gender identity. While much work
in this area, most of it feministically inspired, has provided us with extremely useful
insights into women’s media uses and interpretations, we would argue that it is now time
to develop a mode of understanding that does more justice to variability and
precariousness in the ways in which gender identities—feminine and masculine
subjectivities—are constructed in the practices of everyday life in which media
consumption is subsumed. In our view, recent poststructuralist feminist theory can help
us conceptualize more properly how gender might be articulated in practices of media
consumption. In other words, this chapter’s main argument is that the subject of gender
and media consumption should be rephrased as gender in media consumption.

THE ACADEMIC EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN AUDIENCES

Feminist critics have displayed continuous concern about the relation of gender and
media consumption. The concern has often focused upon the supposedly detrimental
effects of popular media forms on women’s consciousness. More specifically, the
popularity among women of specifically ‘feminine’ genres such as soap operas and
romance novels has often been explained in terms of their ‘fit’ with women’s subordinate
position in society. Early feminist accounts of women’s media consumption are full of
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rendi-tions reminiscent of the crude hypodermic needle model of media effects. In The
Female Eunuch, for example, Germaine Greer bitingly criticizes romance novels for
reinforcing a kind of ‘false consciousness’ among their women readers: