Page 110 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Gender and/in media consumption 101
THE PRISON HOUSE OF GENDER AND BEYOND

Recent poststructuralist feminist theory has powerfully questioned the essentialist and
reductionist view of sexual difference underlying the assumption of fixity of gender
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identity (male or female). Poststructuralism asserts first of all that subjectivity is non-
unitary, produced in and through the intersection of a multitude of social discourses and
practices which position the individual subject in heterogeneous, overlaying and
competing ways. A person’s subjectivity can thus be described in terms of the
multiplicity of subject positions taken up by the person in question. Moreover, post-
structuralism claims that an individual’s subjectivity is never finished, constantly in
reproduction as it were, as s/he lives out her/his day-to-day life and engages
herself/himself with a variety of discourses and practices encountering and positioning
her/him. In this sense, a female person cannot be presumed to have a pregiven and fixed
gender identity as a woman. Rather, an individual’s gendered subjectivity is constantly in
process of reproduction and transformation. Being a woman can mean many different
things, at different times and in different circumstances. The en-gendering of the subject,
in other words, goes on continuously through what Teresa de Lauretis has called ‘the
various technologies of gender […] and institutional discourses […] with power to
control the field of social meaning and thus produce, promote, and “implant”
representations of gender’ (1987:18).
To describe this process more concretely, we can make a distinction between gender
definitions, gender positionings and gender identifications. Gender definitions, produced
within specific social discourses and practices in which gender is made into a meaningful
category (what de Lauretis calls ‘technologies of gender’), articulate what is considered
to be feminine or masculine in culture and society. Different discourses produce different
definitions within specific contexts. For instance, Catholic religious discourse defines
woman as virgin, mother or whore. It is contradicted by radical feminist discourse that
defines women as oppressed human beings, victims of male exploitation. Such
discourses, and the gender definitions they produce, are never innocent; nor are they all
equally powerful, coexisting in a happy plurality. Rather, they often contradict and
compete with each other. In our societies, dominant gender discourses work to maintain
relations of power between males and females in that they assign different roles,
opportunities, ideals, duties and vulnerabilities to ‘men’ and ‘women’ that are classified
as normal and are very difficult to break out of. This, of course, relates to the concept of
gender positionings. It is at this level that work in textual analysis, as described in the
first section of this chapter, has made its valuable contribution. How and to what extent
discursively constructed gender-differentiated positions are taken up by concrete females
and males, however, depends on the gender identifications made by actual subjects. It
should be pointed out that this is not a mechanical and passive process: assuming this
would imply a discourse determinism analogous to the textual determinism criticized
above. How processes of gender identifications should be theorized and examined,
however, is one of the underdeveloped aspects of the poststructuralist theory of
subjectivity. When, how and why, in other words, do male and female persons keep
identifying with positions that are defined as properly masculine or feminine in dominant
discourses?