Page 105 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 96
and vehemently rejected by most of the working-class women interviewees. Their
findings have led Seiter et al. to draw the following conclusion:

The ‘successful’ production of the (abstract and ‘ideal’) feminine subject
is restricted and altered by the contradictions of women’s own
experiences. Class, among other factors, plays a major role in how our
respondents make sense of the text. The experience of working-class
women clearly conflicts in substantial ways with the soap opera’s
representation of a woman’s problems, problems some women identified
as upper or middle-class. […] One of the problems with the spectator
position described by Modleski is that the ‘ideal mother’ implies a
specific social identity—that of a middle-class woman, most likely with a
husband who earns a family wage. This textual position is not easily
accessible to working-class women, who often formulate criticism of the
soap opera on these grounds.
(Seiter et al. 1989:241)

This insightful juxtaposition of textual analysis and reception analysis makes clear that
textually inscribed feminine subject positions are not uniformly and mechanistically
adopted by socially situated women viewers/ readers. Textual generalizations about ‘the
female spectator’ turn out to foreclose prematurely the possibility of empirical variation
and heterogeneity within actual women’s responses. Reception analysis makes clear,
however, that women audiences do indeed actively negotiate with textual constructions
and interpellations in such a way that the meanings given to texts—and consequently the
positions eventually taken up by viewers/ readers—are brought in accordance with the
women’s social and subjective experiences. As a result, differences in readings between
women with different social positions are brought to the surface.
In summary, then, feminist work addressing issues of gender and media consumption
has evolved considerably from the early emphasis on ‘unrealistic’ images of women and
their inevitably conservative effects on women audiences. The assumption of an a priori,
monolithic reproduction of sexism and patriarchy has gradually made way for a view in
which the media’s effectivity is seen as much more conditional, contingent upon
2
specific—and often contradictory—textual mechanisms and operations, on the one hand,
and upon the active and productive part played by female audiences in constructing
textual meanings and pleasures, on the other. The latter trend, especially, has solicited a
more optimistic stance towards women’s role as media consumers: they are no longer
seen as ‘cultural dupes’, as passive victims of inexorably sexist media; on the contrary,
media consumption can even be considered as empowering (although never
unproblematically), in so far as it offers audiences an opportunity for symbolic resistance
to dominant meanings and discourses and for implicit acknowledgement of their own
social subordination (cf. Brown 1990).
If early feminist criticism felt comfortable to speak authoritatively for the ‘silent
majority’ of women, the more recent work is characterized by an awareness of the
necessity to let ‘other’ women speak. If anything, this development signals a growing
awareness among feminists of the problematic relationship between feminism and
women (see chapter 6; also Brunsdon 1991). As a political discourse, feminism has