Research Beyond the Pale: Whiteness in Audience Studies and Media Ethnography

Abstract

This article examines the role of whiteness as a structuring absence to ethnographic audience research. After ignoring whiteness altogether, media ethnographers have tended to essentialize whiteness within narratives of structural dominance or individual vulnerability. Using poststructuralist theories of language, whiteness, and hegemony, the author argues that these narratives for whiteness can be traced to experiences in the field that are shaped by historical and institutional forces outside of the field. Researchers both perform whiteness in the field, by claiming its privilege and hiding its visibility, and codify whiteness for others to identify outside the field. To illustrate, the author examines "narcissistic whiteness" and "defensive whiteness" as two articulations that are visible in her own field notes, interpreted through unifying narratives and rearticulated through an alternative reading of the notes.Despite long-standing and repeated calls for self-reflexivity in the ethnographic study of audiences, there has been little theoretical attention to how self-reflection occurs. Specifically, where and when does the ethnographer construct the "self" in relation to the audiences under study? We can see the manifest results of self-reflexive research in written accounts. In this article, I explore the latent aspects of a self-reflexive process, that is, the potential accounts of the self that do not appear in the ways we write ourselves into the work. By exploring one dimension of self-reflexivity-the articulation of whiteness in media audience research-I hope to identify spaces and times where self-reflection may occur in "fields of power," to borrow Pierre Bourdieu's phrase, and the process by which ethnographers then construct narratives of self that are powerful but incomplete in order to serve the reproduction of hegemony.Whiteness is an excellent place to begin this theoretical process because, historically, it has been the structuring absence to the articula-

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