Page 111 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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As must have become clear from our summary of developments in the field above, it
is especially the passage from gender positionings to gender identifications that is
theoretically relevant for work on gender and media consumption. To comprehend better
the mechanisms of this process, it is useful to take up the suggestion made by Henriques
et al. (1984; see also Hollway 1989) that there must be an ‘investment’, loosely speaking,
an emotional commitment, involved in the taking up of certain subject positions by
concrete subjects. As Henriques et al. put it:

By claiming that people have investments […] in taking up certain
positions in discourses, and consequently in relation to each other, I mean
that there will be some satisfaction or pay-off or reward (these terms
involve the same problems) for that person. The satisfaction may well be
in contradiction with other resultant feelings. It is not necessarily
conscious or rational. But there is a reason. […] I theorize the reason for
this investment in terms of power and the way it is—historically inserted
into individuals’ subjectivity.
(Henriques et al. 1984:238)

The term ‘investment’, which Henriques et al. derived from the Freudian term Besetzung
(cathexis), is adequate because it avoids both biological or psychological connotations
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such as ‘motivation’ or ‘need’, and rationalistic ones such as ‘choice’. The term also
gives some depth to the notion of ‘negotiation’ that was put forward earlier to
conceptualize text/reader relationships. Investment suggests that people have an—often
unconscious—stake in identifying with certain subject positions, including gender
positions, and that the stake in these investments, and it should be stressed that each
individual subject makes many such, sometimes conflicting investments all the time,
should be sought in the management of social relations. People invest in positions which
confer on them relative power, although an empowering position in one context (say, in
the family) can be quite disempowering in another (say, in the workplace), while in any
one context a person can take up both empowering and disempowering positions at the
same time.
Furthermore, given the social dominance of gender discourses based upon the
naturalness of sexual difference, there is considerable social and cultural pressure on
female and male persons to invest in feminine and masculine subject positions,
respectively. This leads to what Hollway (1989) calls the recursive production of social
relations between men and women, which is not the same as mechanical reproduction
because successful gender identifications are not automatic nor free of conflicts,
dependent as they are on the life histories of individual people and the concrete practices
they enter into, such as practices of media consumption. In other words, what this
theoretical perspective suggests is that the construction of gender identity and gender
relations is a constant achievement in which subjects themselves are complicit. In the
words of de Lauretis ‘[t]he construction of gender is the product and the process of both
representation and self-representation’ (1987:9).
A number of audience studies that have focused on the issue of gender and media
consumption can usefully be recounted in the light of this theoretical perspective. For
example, Radway’s (1984) interpretation of romance reading provides a good example of