Page 104 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Gender and/in media consumption 95
see ‘the large picture’ and extend her sympathy to both the sinner and the
victim. […] By constantly presenting her with the many-sidedness of any
question, by never reaching a permanent conclusion, soap operas
undermine her capacity to form unambiguous judgments.
(Modleski 1982:92–3)

Here, a much more intricate and complex analysis is given of the textual operations of a
popular genre such as the soap opera. Soap operas do not simply reflect already existing
stereotypical images of women, but actively produce a symbolic form of feminine
identity by inscribing a specific subject position—that of the ‘ideal mother’—in its
textual fabric. However, while such analyses of gendered spectatorship have provided us
with better insight into the way in which media texts address and interpellate their
viewers/ readers, they generally do not problematize the way in which concrete viewers
actually confront such interpellations. In fact, Modleski seems to imply that the ‘ideal
mother’ position is an inescapable point of identification for soap opera viewers in their
sensemaking of the genre. Indeed as Robert C.Allen has suggested, ‘although Modleski
seems to present the mother/reader as a textually inscribed position to be taken up by
whoever the actual reader happens to be, she comes close at times to conflating the two’
(1985:94). In other words, text-oriented feminist analyses have often run the risk of being
reductionist in their theoretical generalizations about gender and media consumption, a
reductionism that stems from insufficiently distinguishing semiological and sociological
levels of analysis. In the useful terminology of Annette Kuhn (1984), what is conflated
here is the analysis of spectatorship, conceived as a set of subject positions constructed in
and through texts, and the analysis of social audiences, understood as the empirical social
subjects actually engaged in watching television, filmgoing, reading novels and
magazines, and so on.
Janice Radway (1984) has been one of the first to recognize the pitfalls of textual
reductionism. In her well-known study Reading the Romance, she claims that ‘the
analytic focus must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social
event of reading […] in the context of […] ordinary life’ (1984:8). In her view, then,
textual analysis needs to be complemented by inquiry into how female audiences ‘read’
texts. In such a perspective, socially situated women are given some room for manoeuvre
in their dealings with media texts; their responses cannot be deduced from textual
positionings. ‘Reading’ is itself an active, though not free, process of construction of
meanings and pleasures, a ‘negotiation’ between texts and readers whose outcome cannot
be dictated by the text (Hall 1982; Gledhill 1988). This line of argument foregrounds the
relevance of ‘ethnographic’ work with and among empirical audiences.
A more extensive review of this ethnographic move in the study of media audiences is
given elsewhere in this book. In this context, it is sufficient to highlight the value of what
is now commonly called ‘reception analysis’ by pointing at a study by Ellen Seiter et al.
(1989). Through extensive interviews with female soap opera viewers in Oregon, Seiter
et al. have unearthed a much more ambiguous relationship of viewers with the position of
the ‘ideal mother’ which Modleski deems essential to the soap opera’s textual operations.
While the taking up of this position could indeed be recognized in the responses of some
of Seiter et al.’s middle-class, college-educated informants, it was consciously resisted