Resuscitating Feminist Audience Studies: Revisiting the Politics of Representation and Resistance

Abstract

number of minor ailments, ultimately leading the woman into a sick, weakened and passive state, to the drugged, shaved, and strapped down position of delivering mothers in the 1950s and 1960s, the definition of women as sick, required inactive acceptance of this state. In most cases, the cure was literally worse than the illness, creating greater sickness or physical difficulties among women than they would have had without medical intervention. As outlined by Barker-Benfield (1977), the medical establishment effectively seduced women into their pocket books using this tactic. The more doctors treated, published their ideas, dismembered women, and consigned them to lives of invalidism, the more dependent on the men in this specialty they became (Barker-Benfield, 1977). Furthermore, the more doctors defined women as sick, the more they were able to observe and categorize women, and the more often they were called on to cure women (Barker-Benfield, 1977). . ' Daly (1990) asserts that this -incessant definition of women as diseased causes preoccupation and anxiety spurned by frequent check-ups and a sense of medical dependency. The mass media, which allows for greater information dispersion, helps to demystify certain specialties, such as medicine. At the same time, studies indicate that certain types of information create an unrealistic paranoia and sense of danger in the audience. "In being aware of the public gaze, the individual unconsciously him-or herself exerts disciplinary power, both over others and over the self through self-regulation" (Lupton, 1994, p. 32). This is not to suggest that individuals should not seek preventive measures, screen for cancer, utilize technology for fertility control, etc. The difference is the degree to which the individual engages in active, self-determined, and informed decision-making regarding her/his body and its care. In order for an individual to live independently, she/he must be allowed personal control of their essence of self the body. Medical dependency and accompanying public visibility of that dependency may create a paranoid state leading to robotic acquiescence to medical control devoid of empowered decision-making. Therefore, investigating the way and degree to which men and women are depicted as patients may illumine control mechanisms functioning on the social, medical profession, and individual (through selfpol icing) levels. The Passive PatientTo control relies on coercion or the passive acquiesce of the controlled. The functionalist theory to medicine, applied by sociologist Talcott Parsons, delineated the traditional 'sick role' of the patient as one of passivity, compliance, and gratefulness compared to the powerful, paternal, and beneficent role of the physician (Lupton, 1984) was the standard mode of medical operation in the 1950s and 1960s. Even nurses, originally trained 1 1 8 1977). This medical bias has been transferred into the public view as well. In her historical analysis of cancer promotion, Leslie Reagan (1997) notes that cancer screening me...

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

“…4 This point has also been elucidated by media researchers of color, including Parameswaran (2003) and Shome (1999). In addition, it should also be pointed out the ways that this hegemony renders alternative articulations of whiteness outside the academy, for example, "White trash," as invisible.…”

Transnational Feminism and Communication Studies

“…Such moves have done much to revive the importance of audience studies at a time when it is often seen as passé in relation to the seeming importance of textual representation. Commenting on this tendency of media studies to ignore the audience, Parameswaran (2003b) astutely states that "it seems ironic that just as they [post-colonial feminist media researchers] have launched efforts to record non-western women audiences' response to popular culture, media studies is eager to "pack up" and herald the demise of the audience as an object of study (p. 315)."…”

“…A final and representative area of transnational feminist media scholarship that should also be mentioned is audience research-in particular how transnational practices of media consumption invite us to rethink 264 R. Shome notions such as "audience," "reception," and "spectatorship" (Durham, 2004;Ganguly, 1992;LaPastina, 2004;Maira, 2000Maira, , 2002Moorti, 2000;Parameswaran, 2003b;Sreberny, 2001;Valdivia, 2000Valdivia, , 2003Zacharias, 2003, among others). Influenced by trends in post-colonial theory and transnational cultural studies, in which the very notion of "the people" as a homogenous stable group, rooted firmly in a singular ethnicity, geography, nation, or imagination, has been widely challenged, transnational feminist scholars invite us to recognize how contemporary conditions of mobilities and immobilities, cultural flows and stasis, produce new hybrid spaces (and practices) of consumption that productively throw into crisis any notion of the audience as being a culturally stable and predictable object.…”

“…Transnational feminist media scholars have thus investigated issues such as how diasporic ethnic groups in the United States utilize media texts (Maira, 2002;Valdivia, 2003) to stage new hybrid visions of "community" and belonging that are complexly constituted by flows of the global and the local through which they negotiate their gendered/sexual identities (Durham, 2004;Maira, 2002); how western media texts circulate, are utilized, and interpreted in unpredictable ways by women in nonwestern cultures in which these texts serve both as sites of pleasure and resistance to traditional norms while also functioning as vehicles through which the West is "othered" and local/national values reshored (Parameswaran, 2003b); how transnational flows of sexually laden texts including those that centralize female desire and erotics are often framed, received, and given meaning through local politics around gender and sexuality (LaPastina, 2004;Moorti, 2000); and how the circulation of…”

Introduction From the New Editor

“…To this I would add that the quality of writing will be especially important to me as Editor—good (lively, muscular, persuasive, and theoretically informed) writing is the main vehicle to deliver qualitative research, so I request authors to pay close attention to their articles' writing (and proofreading) before they submit to the journal. Multisited transnational reception studies and fieldwork‐based research on audiences, consumers, and citizens in non‐Western contexts will be most welcome to fill the yawning gap in these areas of research that have been dominated by work in Western contexts (Parameswaran, , ). Authors of purely theoretical essays might want to consider submitting to such journals as the ICA journal Communication Theory where they may find a more receptive audience for their work.…”