Page 50 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

On the politics of empirical audience research 41
In Family Television, for example, Morley has chosen to foreground the pattern of
differences in viewing habits that are articulated with gender. What Morley emphasizes is
that men and women clearly relate in contrasting ways to television, not only as to
programme preferences, but also in, for example, viewing styles. The wives interviewed
by Morley tend to watch television less attentively, at the same time doing other things
such as talking or doing some housework. The husbands, in contrast, state a clear
preference for viewing attentively, in silence, without interruption, ‘in order not to miss
anything’ (Morley 1986: chapter 6). These differences are substantiated and highlighted
by Morley’s research as empirical facts, but he is careful to avoid considering these as
essential differences between men and women. As Charlotte Brunsdon has noted, it
seems possible

to differentiate a male—fixed, controlling, uninterrupted gaze—and a
female—distracted, obscured, already busy—manner of watching
television. There is some empirical truth in these characterizations, but to
take this empirical truth for explanation leads to a theoretical short-circuit.
(Brunsdon 1986:105)

Indeed, in mainstream sociological accounts, gender would probably be treated as a self-
evident pregiven factor that can be used as ‘independent variable’ to explain these
differences. Male and female modes of watching television would then be constituted as
two separate, discrete types of experience, clearly defined, fixed, static ‘objects’ in
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themselves as it were. Such an empiricist account not only essentializes gender
differences, but also fails to offer an understanding of how and why differentiations along
gender lines take the very forms they do.
In contrast to this, both Morley and Brunsdon start out to construct a tentative
interpretation which does not take the difference between male and female relations to
television as an empirical given. Neither do they take recourse to psychological notions
such as ‘needs’ or ‘socialization’—as is often done in accounts of gender differences, as
well as in uses and gratifications research—to try to understand why men and women
tend to watch and talk about television in the disparate ways they do. In their interpretive
work Morley and Brunsdon emphasize the structure of domestic power relations as
constitutive for the differences concerned. The home generally has different meanings for
men and women living in nuclear family arrangements: for husbands it is the site of
leisure, for wives it is the site of work. Therefore, television as a domestic cultural form
tends to be invested with different meanings for men and women. Television has for men
become a central symbol for relaxation; women’s relation to television, on the other
hand, is much more contradictory. Brunsdon has this to say on Morley’s research:

The social relations between men and women appear to work in such a
way that although the men feel ok about imposing their choice of viewing
on the whole of the family, the women do not. The women have
developed all sorts of strategies to cope with television viewing they don’t
particularly like. The men in most cases appear to feel it would be literally
unmanning for them to sit quiet during the women’s programmes.
However, the women in general seem to find it almost impossible to