Page 89 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 80
home, at work, in relationships, in larger social settings. In this women are constantly
confronted with the cultural task of finding out what it means to be a woman, of marking
out the boundaries between the feminine and the unfeminine. This task is not a simple
one, especially in the case of modern societies where cultural rules and roles are no
longer imposed authoritatively, but allow individualistic notions such as autonomy,
personal choice, will, responsibility and rationality. In this context, a framework of living
has been created in which every individual woman is faced with the task of actively
reinventing and redefining her femininity as required. The emergence of the modern
feminist movement has intensified this situation: now women have become much more
conscious about their position in society, and consequently are encouraged to take control
over their own lives by rejecting the traditional dictum that anatomy is destiny. Being a
woman, in other words, can now mean the adoption of many different identities,
composed of a whole range of subject positions, not predetermined by immutable
definitions of femininity. It would stretch beyond the purpose of this chapter to explore
and explain in more detail how women construct and reconstruct their feminine identities
in everyday life. What is important to conclude at this point, then, is that being a woman
involves work, work of constant self-(re)construction. (The ever-growing range of
different women’s magazines is a case in point: in all of them the central problematic is
‘how to be a true woman’, while the meanings of ‘true’ are subject to constant
negotiation.) At the same time, however, the energy women must put in this fundamental
work of self-(re)construction is suppressed: women are expected to find the right identity
effortlessly. (Women’s magazines usually assume an enthusiastic, ‘you-can do-it!’ mode
of address: work is represented as pleasure.)
It is in this constellation that fantasy and fiction can play a distinctive role. They offer
a private and unconstrained space in which socially impossible or unacceptable subject
positions, or those which are in some way too dangerous or too risky to be acted out in
real life, can be adopted. In real life, the choice for this or that subject position is never
without consequences. Contrary to what women’s magazines tell us, it is often not easy to
know what it means to be a ‘true’ woman. For example, the social display of forms of
traditional femininity—dependence, passivity, submissiveness— can have quite
detrimental and self-destructive consequences for women when strength, independence or
decisiveness are called for. In fantasy and fiction, however, there is no punishment for
whatever identity one takes up, no matter how headstrong or destructive: there will be no
retribution, no defeat will ensue. Fantasy and fiction, then, are the safe spaces of excess
in the interstices of ordered social life where one has to keep oneself strategically under
control.
From this perspective identification with melodramatic heroines can be viewed in a
new way. The position ascribed to Sue Ellen by those identifying with her is one of
masochism and powerlessness: a self-destructive mode of femininity which, in social and
political terms, could only be rejected as regressive and unproductive. But rather than
condemn this identification, it is possible to observe the gratification such imaginary
subject positions provide for the women concerned. What can be so pleasurable in
imagining a fantastic scenario in which one is a self-destructive and frustrated bitch?
In the context of the discussion above, I can suggest two meanings of melodramatic
identifications. On the one hand, sentimental and melancholic feelings of masochism and
powerlessness, which are the core of the melodramatic imagination, are an implicit