Page 114 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Gender and/in media consumption 105
circumstances and available discourses are interconnected in specific ways within the
families concerned. Articulations, in other words, are inexorably contextual.
Moreover, such articulations have to be made again and again, day after day, and the
fact that the same articulations are so often repeated—and thus lead to the successful
reproduction of established gender meanings, gender relations and gender identities—is
not a matter of course; it is, rather, a matter of active re-production, continual re-
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articulation. But in each family, there may be moments in which the woman becomes a
much more involved television viewer, whereas her husband would lose interest in the
set. No articulation is ever definitive or absolute. Under certain conditions, existing
articulations can be disarticulated, leading to altered patterns of media consumption, in
which women and men take up very different positions. For example, experiences such as
illness, children leaving the home, extramarital affairs, political upheavals, and so on,
may disrupt daily life in such a way to break down existing patterns. This is how change
comes about.
The concept of articulation, then, can account for what Laclau and Mouffe call ‘the
presence of the contingent in the necessary’ (1985:114). Moreover, the unfinished and
overdetermined nature of articulations also helps to explain what Riley calls ‘the
temporality and malleability of gendered existence’ (1988:103). She points out, rather
ironically, that it’s not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate
awareness of one’s sex, which is another way of saying that women are only sometimes
‘women’, female persons steeped in an overwhelming feminine subjectivity. In other
words, even though, according to de Lauretis, the social subject is ‘constituted in gender’
(1987:2), in everyday life gender is not always relevant to what one experiences, how one
feels, chooses to act or not to act. Since a subject is always multiply positioned in relation
to a whole range of discourses, many of which do not concern gender, women do not
always live in the prison house of gender.
Indeed, the currency of non-gendered or gender-neutral identifications should
emphatically be kept in mind in our search for understanding the variability and diversity
of media consumption practices, both among and within women and men. How,
otherwise, is one to understand women who like watching the weekend sports
programme, the news or hard-boiled detectives, men reading women’s magazines or
watching Cagney and Lacey, couples watching pornography or reading travel guides
together, and so on? Indeed, it is questionable whether we should always foreground the
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articulation of masculinity and femininity in analysing media consumption practices.
For example, in his analysis of the cross-cultural reception of Dynasty, Kim Schrøder
(1988) concludes that the pleasure of regularly watching Dynasty, for his male and
female interviewees alike, has to do with the pleasure of solving narrative enigmas, what
he calls ‘the weekly reconstruction of self-confidence’. Similarly, we might ask whether
the pleasure of watching sports is really in all its aspects that different for men and for
women; we might consider that discourses of nation and nationalism may play a more
significant role in sports viewing than discourses of gender (Poynton and Hartley 1990).
Of course, this doesn’t mean that gender positionings are totally absent from either
Dynasty or sports programmes; what we do want to point out, however, is that non-
gendered identifications may sometimes take on a higher priority than gendered ones,
allowing for a much more complex and dynamic theorization of the way media
consumption is related to gender.