Page 109 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 100
more fundamentally, the a priori assumption that there is a continuous field of experience
shared by all women and only by women tends to naturalize sexual difference and to
universalize culturally constructed and historically specific definitions of femininity and
masculinity.
The commonsense equation that women are women because they are women is in fact
an empiricist illusion. As Denise Riley has forcefully argued:

‘[W]omen’ is historically, discursively constructed, and always relatively
to other categories which themselves change; ‘women’ is a volatile
collection in which female persons can be very differently positioned, so
that the apparent continuity of the subject of ‘women’ isn’t to be relied on;
‘women’ is both synchronically and diachronically erratic as a
collectivity, while for the individual, ‘being a woman’ is also inconstant,
and can’t provide an ontological foundation.
(Riley 1988:1–2)

The pertinence of this argument asserts itself rather exemplarily in the continuing trouble
posed by the category of ‘women’ for marketers, those whose business it is to address,
reach and ‘catch’ women as consumers. It is well known that any marketing strategy
aimed at women is less than perfect; marketers have learned to live with the fact that the
dream of guaranteed successful communication—which amounts to knowing exactly
how to identify ‘women’—can never be fulfilled. Indeed, as one commentator has
observed, ‘marketers lurch from one stereotype to another as they try to focus in on the
elusive female consumer’ (Canape 1984:38). Market researchers’ ongoing attempts
notwithstanding to come up with new categorial typifications of women—happy
housewife, superwoman, romantic feminist—‘women’ remains a ‘moving target’ for
marketers and advertisers (cf. Bartos 1982).
What we can learn from the pragmatic wisdom of marketers is that we cannot afford
taking ‘women’ as a straightforward, natural collectivity with a constant identity, its
meaning inherent in the (biological) category of the female sex. In social and cultural
terms, ‘women’, as much as ‘class’, is not an immutable fact, but an inescapably
indeterminate, ever-shifting category (Haraway 1985; Riley 1988; J.K.Scott 1988; Butler
1990).
Against this background, we would argue against a continued research emphasis on
women’s experience, women’s culture, women’s media consumption as if these were
self-contained entities, no matter how internally differentiated. This is not to deny that
there are gender differences or gender-specific experiences and practices; it is, however,
to suggest that their meanings are always relative to particular constructions in specified
contexts. For example, in examining the consumption of a ubiquitous genre such as
women’s magazines, we should not only attend to both female and male self-identified
readers (and arguably non-readers as well), but also pay attention to the multiple feminine
and masculine identifications involved. We would argue, then, that the theoretical
question that should guide our research practice is how gender—along with other major
social axes such as class and ethnicity—is articulated in concrete practices of media
consumption. We will elaborate on this question in the next section.