Page 108 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Gender and/in media consumption 99
of fixed differences between working-class women and middle-class women, but also to
the projection of unity and coherence in the responses of the two groups (although neither
Seiter et al. nor Press makes any explicit gestures in this direction). In our view, this form
of social determinism implies a premature explanatory closure, which precludes
recognition of multiplicity and transgression in the way women belonging to both groups
can make sense of media. Thus, inconsistencies and variances within informants’
accounts—familiar to any researcher who has worked with depth-interview transcripts—
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remain unaccounted for, or are even actively repressed. But differences between women
are not so neatly categorizable as the sociological picture would suggest. On the contrary,
the closer we look, the more likely are we going to find complexity and contradiction in
any one response.
Again, our critique is not meant to imply a denial of the existence of class differences.
What we do want to question, however, is ‘our ability to decide ahead of time the
pertinence of such differences within the study of the effectivity of cultural practices’
(Grossberg 1988b:388). Thus, rather than treating class position as an isolatable
‘independent variable’ predetermining cultural responses, it could best be seen as a factor
(or vector) whose impact as a structuring principle for experience can only be
conceptualized within the concrete historical context in which it is articulated. Class
never fully contains a social subject’s identity. Otherwise we can never account for either
variety or change and disruption in the social experience and consciousness of people, as
well as for the possibility of experiences that cut across class-specific lines, in which
class is of secondary, if not negligible, relevance.
As for class (or, for that matter, race or ethnicity), so for gender. As we have noted
earlier, most research that sets out to examine gender and media consumption has
concentrated exclusively on women audiences. What is implicitly taken for granted here
is that gender is a given category, that people are always-already fully in possession of an
obvious gender identity: women are women and men are men. Even the tentative but
laudable attempts to do justice to differences between women (as in terms of class) do not
go as far as problematizing the category of ‘women’ itself. As a result, as Virginia
Nightingale has remarked, studies of women as audiences are undergirded by the basic
assumption of women as

objectifiable, somehow a unified whole, a group. The qualities that divide
women, like class, ethnicity, age, education, are always of less
significance than the unifying qualities attributed to women, such as the
inability to know or say what they want, the preoccupation with romance
and relationships, the ability to care for, to nurture, others.
(Nightingale 1990:25)

Or as Annette Kuhn has put it, ‘the notion of a female social audience […] presupposes a
group of individuals already formed as female’ (1984:24).
Such a presumption is troublesome for both political and theoretical reasons. Not only
does exclusive concentration on women as audiences unwittingly reproduce the
patriarchal treatment of Woman as the defined (and thus deviant) sex and Man as the
invisible (and thus normal) sex—in this sense Andrew Ross’s (1989) call for a properly
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audience-oriented study of pornography as a traditional ‘men’s genre’ is long overdue;