Page 112 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Gender and/in media consumption 103
how some female persons inadvertently reproduce their gendered subjectivity through all
sorts of positions they take up and identify with in the course of their lives. Radway
concluded that the women she interviewed used the act of reading romances as a
‘declaration of independence’ from one position accorded them by dominant patriarchal
discourse: the position of ever-available and nurturing housewife and mother. At the
same time, however, they submit to patriarchal discourse in their very reading, by
investing so much energy in the imaginary (and wishful) reconstruction of masculinity as
they interpret romances as stories about male transformation from hard and insensitive
machos to loving and caring human beings. Such an analysis highlights how one and the
same practice—reading romances—can contain contradictory positionings and
investments, although ultimately ending up, in Radway’s analysis, in reproducing a
woman’s gendered subjectivity.
However, there is still a sense of overgeneralization in Radway’s interpretation, in that
she has not sufficiently specified the social circumstances in which her informants
performed their romance reading. (For a further discussion of Radway’s interpretive
strategies, see chapter 6.) In this sense James Curran is right in his observation that
‘Radway’s tour de force offers an account of romance addicts’ relationship to patriarchy
but not to their flesh and blood husbands’ (1990:154). This does not invalidate Radway’s
analysis, since patriarchal discourses are effective in more encompassing ways than
solely through direct face to face encounters, but her account does acquire a somewhat
functionalist, adynamic quality the moment she transposes the analysis of how gender
identifications are implicated in romance reading (a practice) to an explanation of
individual romance readers (concrete historical subjects).
Ann Gray (1987, 1992), who studied how women relate to television and popular
culture in the home, has pointed to similar contradictions in women’s gender
identifications, but she places them more concretely in their particular life histories. Not
having had many opportunities in education and the job market, the women of Gray’s
study got married in order to leave their parents’ homes and get settled on their own. By
the time their children had grown up and they had a little more room to reflect on their
lives, the patterns had been etched in. Marriage and motherhood seemed an escape at first
but turned out to be a trap that was inescapable for most, despite their awareness of
inequalities between men and women. The books and television programmes they prefer
are tailored to female escapism and this, according to Gray, is how these women use
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them. Gray’s account makes clear how the apparent inevitability of the reproduction of
femininity is in fact a result of the sedimented history of previous positionings and
identifications in which these women find themselves caught, although they keep
struggling against it through new investments that are available to them, such as
consuming ‘feminine’ media genres and using the VCR to tape their favourite soap
operas in order to be able to watch alone or with their women friends, thereby evading
the derogatory comments of their husbands (Gray 1987).
One can also account for many women’s gendered use of the telephone—for
maintaining household activities, maintaining family relationships, for ‘gossip’ and
‘chatter’—along these lines (Rakow 1988). Sherry Turkle’s (1988) analysis of the
‘masculinization’ of the computer and the concomitant ‘computer reticence’ among some
of the girls she studied provides another example. Although all these studies did limit
themselves empirically to women’s responses, they can most usefully be seen as