Page 88 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Melodramatic identifications: television fiction and women's fantasy 79
obviously affords the subject pleasure, which, according to the psychoanalysts, has to do
with the fulfilment of a conscious or unconscious wish. More generally, I want to suggest
that the pleasure of fantasy lies in its offering the subject an opportunity to take up
positions which she could not assume in real life: through fantasy she can move beyond
the structural constraints of everyday life and explore other, more desirable situations,
identities, lives. In this respect, it is unimportant whether these imaginary scenarios are
‘realistic’ or not: the appeal of fantasy lies precisely in that it can create imagined worlds
which can take us beyond what is possible or acceptable in the ‘real’ world. As Lesley
Stern has remarked, ‘gratification is to be achieved not through acting out the fantasies,
but through the activity of fantasising itself’ (1982:56).
Fantasies, and the act of fantasizing, are usually a private practice in which we can
engage at any time and the content of which we generally keep to ourselves. Fictions, on
the other hand, are collective and public fantasies; they are textual elaborations, in
narrative form, of fantastic scenarios which, being mass-produced, are offered ready-
made to audiences. We are not the originators of the public fantasies offered to us in
fiction. This explains, of course, why we are not attracted to all the fictions available to
us: most of them are irrelevant to our personal concerns and therefore not appealing.
Despite this, the pleasure of consuming fictions that do attract us may still relate to that of
fantasy: that is, it still involves the imaginary occupation of other subject positions which
are outside the scope of our everyday social and cultural identities.
Implicit in the theoretical perspective I have outlined so far is a post-structuralist
theory on subjectivity (see Weedon 1987). Central to this is the idea that subjectivity is
not the essence or the source from which the individual acts and thinks and feels; on the
contrary, subjectivity should be seen as a product of the society and culture in which we
live: it is through the meaning systems or discourses circulating in society and culture
that subjectivity is constituted and individual identities are formed. Each individual is the
site of a multiplicity of subject positions proposed to her by the discourses with which
she is confronted; her identity is the precarious and contradictory result of the specific set
of subject positions she inhabits at any moment in history.
Just as the fictional character is not a unitary image of womanhood, then, so is the
individual viewer not a person whose identity is something static and coherent. If a
woman is a social subject whose identity is at least partially marked out by her being a
person of a certain sex, it is by no means certain that she will always inhabit the same
mode of feminine subjectivity. On the contrary, many different and sometimes
contradictory sets of femininities or feminine subject positions (ways of being a woman)
are in principle available to her, although it is likely that she will be drawn to adopt some
of those more than others. Certain modes of femininity are culturally more legitimate
than others; and every woman knows subject positions she is best able to handle. This
does not mean, however, that her identity as a woman is something determined once and
for all in the process of socialization. On the contrary, the adoption of a feminine
subjectivity is never definitive but always partial and shaky: in other words, being a
woman implies a neverending process of becoming a feminine subject—no one subject
position can ever cover satisfactorily all the problems and desires an individual woman
encounters.
All too often women (and men too, of course, but their relationship to constructions of
masculinity is not at issue here) have to negotiate in all sorts of situations in their lives—