Page 107 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 98
viewers ‘consciously refuse to be taken in by the conventions of realism which
characterize this, like virtually all, prime-time television shows’ (ibid.: 178). Although
Press too is reluctant to over-generalize, she does in her conclusions emphasize ‘the
difference between middle-class women, who invoke [ideologies of femininity and the
family] in order to criticize the show’s characters in their discussions, and working-class
women, who invoke them only to affirm the depictions they view’ (ibid.: 179–80). This
conclusion is at odds with Seiter et al.’s, who, on the contrary, found their working-class
informants to be very critical of the discrepancy between textual representation and their
personal experience.
In this context, it is impossible to explain satisfactorily the apparently contradictory
conclusions of these two research projects, although several considerations present
themselves as possible factors: differences in operationalization of social class;
differences in locality (Press conducted her interviews in the San Francisco Bay Area),
representational differences between day-time and prime-time soap operas, differences in
interview guidelines, differences in theoretical preoccupations in interpreting the
transcripts, and so on.
At the very least, however, the contradiction highlights the liability of too easily
connecting particular instances of meaning attribution to texts with socio-demographic
background variables. Particular accounts as dug up in reception analysis are typically
produced through researchers’ staged conversations with a limited number of informants,
each of them marked by idiosyncratic life histories and personal experiences. Filtering
their responses—the transcripts of what they said during the interviews—through the
pregiven categories of ‘working-class’ or ‘middle-class’ would necessarily mean a
reductionist abstraction from the undoubtedly much more complex and contradictory
nature of these women’s reception of soap operas. An abstraction which is produced by
the sociologizing perspective of the researchers, for whom sociological categorizations
such as working-class and middle-class serve as facilitating devices for handling the
enormous amount of interview material this kind of research generally generates.
What we are objecting to here is not the lack of generalizability that is so often
levelled at qualitative empirical research conducted with small samples. If anything, the
richness of data produced in this kind of research only clarifies the difficulty, if not
senselessness, of the search for generalizations that has long been an absolute dogma in
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positivist social research. Nor do we object to these researchers’ endeavours to
understand the way in which class position inflects women’s reception of media texts. On
the contrary, we greatly welcome such attempts to place practices of media consumption
firmly within their complex and contradictory social contexts (we will return to this issue
below).
What we do want to point to, however, is the creeping essentialism that lurks behind
the classificatory move in interpreting certain types of response as originating from either
working-class or middle-class experience. Such a move runs the danger of reifying and
absolutizing the differences found, resulting—in the long run—in the construction of a
simple opposition between two discrete class and cultural formations. Consequently, as
John Frow (1987) has commented in relation to Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) important
contribution to the sociology of taste distinctions, class experience comes to be
considered as ‘inevitably and inexorably entrapped within the cultural limits imposed on
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it’ (Frow 1987:71). Pushed to its logical extreme, this would lead not only to the positing