Page 115 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 106
In this sense, we oppose Susan Bordo’s dismissal of the idea of gender neutrality as
purely ideological. ‘In a culture that is in fact constituted by gender duality […] one
cannot simply be “human”’, she states (Bordo 1990:152). But if we acknowledge that
culture is not a monolithic entity but a shifting set of diverse practices, we must assume
the partiality (or non-absoluteness) of gender as a structuring principle in culture.
Furthermore, the taking up of positions in which gender is not necessarily implicated—
for example, that of professional, hostage, teacher or citizen—always transcends the
‘simply human’; these are overdetermined social positions in which identities may—
12
temporarily—be articulated in non-gendered ways, dependent upon context. Indeed,
given the dominant culture’s insistence on the all-importance of sexual difference, we
might arguably want to cherish those rare moments that women manage to escape the
prison house of gender.

THE INSTABILITY OF GENDER IN MEDIA CONSUMPTION

Our theoretical explorations have led us to recognize the fundamental instability of the
role of gender in media consumption practices. We cannot presume a priori that in any
particular instance of media consumption gender will be a basic determining factor. In
other words, media consumption is not always a gendered practice, and even if it is a
gendered practice its modality and effectivity can only be understood by close
examination of the meanings that ‘male’ and ‘female’ and their interrelationships acquire
within a particular context.
What we have tried to clarify, then, is the importance of recognizing that there is no
prearticulated gender identity. Despite the force of hegemonic gender discourse, the
actual content of being a woman or a man and the rigidity of the dichotomy itself are
highly variable, not only across cultures and historical times, but also, at a more micro-
social and even psychological level, amongst and within women and men themselves.
Gender identity, in short, is both multiple and partial, ambiguous and incoherent,
permanently in process of being articulated, disarticulated and rearticulated.
The consequences of this particularist perspective for research into gender and media
consumption are not too difficult to spell out. In our view, the ethnographic turn in the
study of media audiences is, given its spirit of radical contextualism and methodological
situationalism (Ang 1991; see also chapter 4), well suited to take on board the challenge
of problematizing and investigating in which concrete situations which gender positions
are taken up by which men and women, with what identificatory investments and as a
result of which specific articulations. But in order to do this, the ethnographic project
needs to be radicalized even more, since not only gender but also media consumption
cannot be conceptualized in static terms. To be sure, with this claim we want to give this
chapter a final destabilizing twist.
The current emphasis on the social experiences of audience subjects as a starting point
for understanding practices of media consumption is ethnography’s major contribution to
audience studies. However, in their focus on women’s reception of women’s genres most
existing studies of gender and/ in media consumption have not pushed the ethnographic
thrust far enough. Since the main interest of these studies, as we have seen, has been in
text/ reader relationship, they tend to decontextualize the reception process from the