Page 118 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Gender and/in media consumption 109
As Jane Flax has noted, ‘[f]eminist theories, like other forms of postmodernism,
should encourage us to tolerate and interpret ambivalence, ambiguity, and multiplicity’
(1990:56). She even adds to this that ‘[i]f we do our work well, reality will appear even
more unstable, complex, and disorderly than it does now’ (ibid.: 56–7). In political terms,
this means that we can no longer afford to found a feminist practice upon the postulation
of some fixed figure of ‘women’ without risking being totalizing and excluding the
experiences and realities of some. Arguably, such unifying feminist politics will only be
ultimately unproductive: the fact that many women today refuse to call themselves
feminists is symptomatic of this. Another example would be the sharp contrast between
the critical feminist condemnation of Steven Spielberg’s film The Color Purple as a
white middleclass cooptation of Alice Walker’s novel, and the impressive positive
responses to the film from black women viewers (Bobo 1988; Stuart 1988). This example
also clarifies the political importance of local, contextualized ethnographic studies: the
production of ‘situated knowledges’ whose critical value lies in their enabling of power-
sensitive conversation and contestation through comparison rather than in
epistemological truth (Haraway 1988).
Indeed, any feminist standpoint will necessarily have to present itself as partial, based
upon the knowledge that while some women sometimes share some common interests
and face some common enemies, such commonalities are by no means universal.
Asserting that there can be no fixed and universal standards for ‘political correctness’
does not mean relativist political reticence nor submission to a pluralist free-for-all. On
the contrary, it is an acknowledgement of the fact that in order to confront ‘sexism in all
its endless variety and monotonous similarity’ (Fraser and Nicholson 1990:34), a flexible
and pragmatic form of criticism might be more effective than one based upon predefined
truths, feminist or otherwise. What is at stake here then is not relativism, but a politics of
location:

[L]ocation is about vulnerability; location resists the politics of closure,
finality, or […] ‘simplification in the last instance’. […] We seek
[knowledges] ruled by partial sight and limited voice—not partiality for
its own sake but, rather, for the sake of the connections and unexpected
openings situated knowledges make possible. […] The only way to find a
larger vision is to be somewhere in particular [and through] the joining of
partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that
promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living
within limits and contradictions—of views from somewhere.
(Haraway 1988:590)