Page 106 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Gender and/in media consumption 97
generally postulated an ideal of the feminist subject, fully committed to the cause of
social change and ‘women’s liberation’. However, in the face of the tenacious resistance
displayed by large groups of women against feminist politics (think only of the pro-life
movement in the United States) it is clear that feminism cannot presume to possess the
one and only truth about women. Indeed, as Angela McRobbie has pointed out, ‘to make
such a claim is to uncritically overload the potential of the women’s movement and to
underestimate the resources and capacities of “ordinary” women […] to participate in
their own struggles as women but quite autonomously’ (1982:52). It is recognition of this
that has led to the increasing popularity of validating—and sometimes celebrating—
‘ordinary’ women’s experiences through research, including their experiences as
audiences for media and popular culture.
We do not wish to enter into the debate over whether this move towards emphasis on
audience creativity, which has been a more general recent trend within contemporary
cultural studies, should be seen as ‘encouraging cultural democracy at work’ (Fiske
1987b:286) or as researchers’ wish fulfilment (Gitlin 1991; see also Morris 1988a).
Instead, we would like to take a step back and look more dispassionately at some of the
theoretical absences in the trajectory that work on gender and media consumption has
taken so far. In doing this, we do not aim to retreat from politics; rather, we intend to
complicate the political dilemma invoked here—a dilemma framed by van Zoonen
(1991) in terms of the dangers of relativism and populism—through a radical
denaturalization of the ways that ‘gender’ and ‘media consumption’ have commonly been
coupled together in research practice. We will come back to the political issue in our
postscript, in which we will defend our commitment to a radically postmodern approach
to (feminist) politics, and the role of particularistic ethnographic work therein.

THE DISPERSION OF ‘WOMEN’

Let us return, for the sake of argument, to Seiter et al.’s project on women soap opera
viewers. In this project, working-class women emerge as being more critical or resistant
to the preferred meanings proposed by soap opera narratives than middle-class women
(although they were found to express their criticisms in limited and apologetic ways, e.g.
in terms of lack of realism and escapism) (Seiter et al. 1989:241–2). In other words, the
project shows that at the empirical level, women cannot be considered as a homogeneous
category: class makes a difference.
However, one could cast doubt on the interpretive validity of the differentiations made
by Seiter et al., based as they are on macro-structural, sociological criteria (i.e. social
class). Although these authors are careful in not over-generalizing their data, there are
problems with their correlating different types of reading with the different class
backgrounds of their informants. For example, in another account of differences between
working-class and middle-class women watching soap operas, Andrea Press (1990)
seems to contradict Seiter et al.’s interpretations. Drawing her conclusions from
interviews with female viewers of the prime-time soap opera Dynasty, Press finds that it
is middle-class women who are the more critical viewers. While working-class women
speak very little of differences between the Dynasty characters and themselves—which in
Press’s view indicates their acceptance of the realism of the Dynasty text—middle-class