Page 113 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 104
illustrating that gender does not simply predetermine media consumption and use; on the
contrary, what they illuminate is that it is in and through the very practices of media
consumption—and the positionings and identifications they solicit—that gender identities
are recursively shaped, while those practices themselves in turn undergo a process of
gendering along the way.
This, then, is what we mean by the articulation of gender in practices of media
consumption. The concept of articulation refers to the process of ‘establishing a relation
among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice’
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985:105). In concrete terms, the concept can theorize how neither
gender nor media consumption has a necessary or inherent meaning; only through their
articulation or specific interlocking in particular situations do media con-sumption
practices acquire meanings that are gender-specific. Furthermore, the concept is more
accurate than ‘construction’ or ‘production’ because it connotes a dynamic process of
fixing or fitting together, which is, however, never total nor final. The concept of
articulation emphasizes the impossibility of fixing ultimate meanings (Laclau and Mouffe
1985; see also Hall 1986b).
To clarify the importance of seeing gender and media consumption in terms of their
articulations, let us give just one more example, derived from David Morley’s study of
the gendering of television viewing habits in a number of working-class families in
London. What sets Morley’s study apart from the examples above is that he takes as an
empirical unit of analyis not individual women (and men), but a structured relational
context, namely the modern nuclear family (see, also e.g., Lull 1988; Morley and
Silverstone 1990). One of the observations he makes is that there is nothing inherently
masculine about the wish to watch television with full concentration (as some of the men
he interviewed reported), and that there is nothing inherently feminine in the tendency of
the women in the study to watch distractedly. Instead, Morley interprets this empirical
gender difference as resulting from ‘the dominant model of gender relations within this
society’ which ‘is one in which the home is

primarily defined for men as a site of leisure—in distinction to the
‘industrial time’ of their employment—while the home is primarily
defined for women as a sphere of work (whether or not they also work
outside the home). [As a result] men are better placed to do [television
viewing] wholeheartedly, and […] women seem only to be able to do [it]
distractedly and guiltily, because of their continuing sense of their
domestic responsibilities.
(Morley 1986:147)

However, put this way Morley’s argument still sounds too mechanical, in that he tends to
collapse gender positionings and gender identifications together. After all, it is not likely
that the gendered pattern will be found in all (London working-class) families all the
time, despite the force of the dominant discourse. (To assume this would only reproduce
the objectification of working-class culture that we criticized above.) Thus, the
articulation of concentration/masculine and distraction/feminine in some family homes
only comes about in concrete situations, in which personal investments, social