Page 117 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 108
historically specific continuities and discontinuities explicit, thereby lifting them out of
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their naturalized day-do-day flow.
This brings us back to the hazardous episode of daily life in the Meier family with
which we opened this chapter. In unexpectedly ending up watching the sports
programme, Mrs Meier simultaneously places herself outside the gendered discourse of
‘televised football is for men’, and reproduces the traditional definition of femininity in
terms of emotional caretaking by using the viewing of the game as a means of making
contact with her son. It is not impossible that such accidental events will lead Mrs Meier
to eventually like football on television, thereby creating a gender-neutral zone within the
family’s life with the media. After having finished doing the dishes while watching a
favourite soap opera on a small black and white TV set in the kitchen, she might watch
the sports programme in the sitting room because she and her husband have become
involved in a debate over the technical qualities of United’s new goalkeeper (thereby
developing a ‘masculine’ interest in sports). Or else, she might watch the game for human
interest reasons (which would be a ‘feminine’ subject position). At the same time,
whether she takes up a masculine, feminine or gender-neutral position in relation to TV
football, this very development would only reinforce Mr Meier’s investment in a
discourse which sees masculine preferences as natural.

POSTSCRIPT: ON FEMINIST CRITIQUE

It is clear that our exposition of the instability of gender/media consumption articulations
draws a great deal from postmodern theory, energized as it is by a wariness of
generalized absolutes and its observance of the irreducible complexity and relentless
heterogeneity of social life (see also Corner 1991). However, doesn’t this stance make
theory and politics impossible? Doesn’t postmodern particularism inevitably lead to the
resignation that all there is left viable are descriptions of particular events at particular
points in time? And doesn’t radical endorsement of particularity and difference only
serve to intensify an escalating individualism? If we declare ‘women’ to be an
indeterminate category, how can a feminist politics still assert itself?
These questions are certainly valid and understandable, although we think they need
not have to remain unanswered. For one thing, we believe that the dangers of easy
categorization and generalization, so characteristic of mainstream traditions in the social
sciences (including mass communication theory and research), are greater than the
benefits of a consistent particularism. The earlier feminist tendency to speak for and
behalf of ‘women’ as if this were a unified category with a uniform identity has already
been eroded by a gradual acknowledgement of differences between different sorts of
women, positioned in different relations of class, ethnicity, generation, sexual orientation
and regionality. But postmodern feminism, building up a poststructuralist theory of
subjectivity, goes further than this sociological differentiating move by adopting a more
profound sense of gender scepticism, thereby eradicating any pregiven guarantee for
female unity. In this sense, postmodern feminism is itself a critical reaction to the
normative and moralist absolutism in earlier feminisms: ‘[A] critical vision consequent
upon a critical positioning in un-homogeneous gendered social space’ (Haraway
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1988:589).