Page 166 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes 157
3 It should be noted that Radway’s discussion of the narrative discourse of romantic fiction is
very similar to the theory of the ‘classic realist text’ as developed in film theory by Colin
MacCabe and others.

7
GENDER AND/IN MEDIA CONSUMPTION
1 The hypodermic needle model of media effects assumes that the media directly ‘inject’ values,
ideas and information into a presumably passive audience. It assumes a mechanistic
stimulus-response relation between media and audiences.
2 For example, several authors have pointed to the fact that feminine subject positions
constructed in mass cultural texts do not simply reproduce patriarchial definitions of
femininity, but also offer Utopian opportunities for phantasmatic transgression. See, e.g.,
Modleski (1982); Light (1984); McRobbie (1985); Kaplan (1986). See also chapter 5.
3 This is not to say that generalizations as such should at all cost be avoided (indeed, this would
make the production of knowledge virtually impossible); it is merely to point to the
importance, in understanding social phenomena, of complementing the generalizing
tendency with an opposite, particularizing one. See Billig (1987) and Abu-Lughold (1991).
4 Frow’s (1987) criticism of Bourdieu comes despite the latter’s explicit rejection of objectivist
sociology and its ‘substantialist’ conception of reality, and his commitment to apply a
relational mode of thinking in his analysis of cultural differentiation. See e.g. Bourdieu
(1989).
5 See Potter and Wetherell (1987) for the importance of paying attention to inconsistency and
variation in discourse analysis.
6 It won’t come quite as a surprise that what we know about men and media consumption has
for a greater part been written by or about homosexual men (R.Dyer 1980; Easthope 1986;
Gross 1989).
7 For an introduction to poststructuralism and feminism, see Weedon (1987).
8 It is exactly these terms that were used by uses and gratifications researchers to describe
individuals’ media uses and consumption.
9 Personal communication of Joke Hermes with Ann Gray, July 1990.
10 In our view, this would be a viable way of theorizing the mechanisms of ‘routines’ and
‘regularities’ in everyday life.
11 Obviously, genres such as the news and travel literature, and certainly pornography, do
contain gendered subject positionings in the way they substantially and formally address
their spectators. But such positionings cannot be assumed to exhaust the textual effectivity of
these genres. Here, work in the field of textual analysis can offer us much more detailed
insight. For example, Charlotte Brunsdon (1987) has explored this issue in her analysis of
the British crime series Widows.
12 That such positions are often in the second instance articulated in gendered terms, for
example in the stereotyping of professional women as unfeminine or in the call for treating
male and female hostages differently (as, for example, in the Gulf crisis), is precisely the
result of the hegemonic work of patriarchal discourse. It is important for feminism to
disarticulate such discursive genderings.
13 For conceptualizations of ethnography as storytelling, see, e.g., Clifford and Marcus (1986);
Geertz (1988); van Maanen (1988).
14 Nicholson (1990) is an excellent collection of articles pro and contra the
feminism/postmodernism connection.