Page 87 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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PLEASURE, FANTASY AND THE NEGOTIATION OF
FEMININITY

One could assert that melodramatic heroines like Sue Ellen should be evaluated
negatively because they attest to an outlook on life that stresses resignation and despair.
Isn’t the melodramatic imagination a particularly damaging way of making sense of life
because it affirms tendencies of individualistic fatalism and pessimism? And isn’t such an
impact especially harmful for women as it reinforces and legitimizes masochistic feelings
of powerlessness? Wouldn’t it be much better for women and girls to choose
identification figures that represent strong, powerful and independent women who are
able and determined to change and improve their lives, such as Christine Cagney?
Such concerns are, of course, often heard in feminist accounts of popular fiction, but it
is important to note here that they are often based upon a theoretical approach—what
could be called a role/image approach, or, more conventionally, ‘images of women’
approach—which analyses images of women in the media and in fiction by setting them
against ‘real’ women. Fictional female heroines are then seen as images of women
functioning as role models for female audiences (Moi 1985; Rakow 1986). From such a
perspective, it is only logical to claim that one should strive to offer positive role models
by supplying positive images of women. And from this perspective, feminist
commonsense would undoubtedly ascribe the Sue Ellen character to the realm of negative
images, reflecting a traditional, stereotyped or trivialized model of womanhood.
However, this approach contains both theoretical and political problems. Most
importantly here, because it implies a rationalistic view of the relationship between image
and viewer (whereby it is assumed that the image is seen by the viewer as a more or less
adequate model of reality), it can only account for the popularity of soap operas among
women as something irrational. In other words, what the role/image approach tends to
overlook is the large emotional involvement which is invested in identification with
characters of popular fiction.
To counteract this attitude, we first of all need to acknowledge that these characters
are products of fiction, and that fiction is not a mere set of images to be read referentially,
but an ensemble of textual devices for engaging the viewer at the level of fantasy
(Walkerdine 1983; see also Cowie 1984; Kaplan 1986). As a result, female fictional
characters such as Sue Ellen Ewing or Christine Cagney cannot be conceptualized as
‘realistic’ images of women, but must be approached as textual constructions of possible
modes of femininity: as embodying versions of gendered subjectivity endowed with
specific forms of psychical and emotional satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and specific
ways of dealing with conflicts and dilemmas. In relation to this, they do not function as
role models but are symbolic realizations of feminine subject positions with which
viewers can identify in fantasy.
Fantasy is central here. In line with psychoanalytic theory, fantasy should not be seen
as mere illusion, an unreality, but as a reality in itself, a fundamental aspect of human
existence: a necessary and unerasable dimension of psychical reality. Fantasy is an
imagined scene in which the fantasizing subject is the protagonist, and in which
alternative, imaginary scenarios for the subject’s real life are evoked. Fantasizing