Texting the Subject: Women, Television, and Modern Self-Reflexivity

Abstract

Feminist audience research has often argued that the pleasures women find in watching certain popular television genres derive from their indulgence in “referential viewing”: relating their own subjective experience to television texts. But it has never been spelled out what this actually entails. This article, based upon research with women viewers of talk shows and morning magazine programs, suggests a specific methodology, “text in action,” to capture the specificities of the text/subject relationship. Findings arising from the use of this method suggest that accounts of the negotiation of subjectivity are induced through the text/subject interplay. Established explanations of “referential viewing” arrived at through traditional reception studies do not entirely account for the dialogic nature of these encounters. This article suggests that they can be more accurately explored through contemporary arguments about modern self-reflexivity where subjectivity can be seen to be discursively accomplishedthrough pragmatic actions across the broadcast encounter.

Notes

¹Utilizing Carol Gilligan's (1989) In a Different Voice.

²That is not always to say that older structures such as class are disappearing, but that a sense of collective consciousness of them is in favor of making more individual differentiations between self and others on the basis of issues such as taste, consumption practices, and lifestyle (Savage, 2000).

³For Giddens (1991) these are social-scientific knowledge and techniques of self therapy; for Beck (1992) they involve the dissemination of lay knowledge on science and the environment (Lash & Urry, 1994).

⁴See Jason Jacobs (2001) for a discussion of why the aesthetic production values of ER mean that it deserves to be considered as “quality” television.

⁵See Paddy Scannell (1991) for a discussion of the way in which the “text-reader” dynamic, derived from a literary structuralist emphasis in media and cultural studies, led scholars away from understanding broadcasting as communication. A group of researchers known as the “Ross Priory Broadcast Talk Research Group” work to redress this omission.

⁶Not unlike Valerie Walkerdine's (1986) setting out of scenes from Rocky alongside the actions of the family she was researching.

⁷Obviously, there is a methodological awkwardness in that I was there while the recording was happening and that at the same time the articulations are produced for me. But what sociological investigation can make a direct claim to “naturalness”? While these utterances may not have been verbally articulated, they may have been perceptually processed by the viewers, as the interviews cited above might lead us to believe.

⁸Alice is in her late forties and has four children between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three. She lives with her children and husband, an engineer, in their privately owned home on a housing estate in the Midlands. She is an active member of the local church “ladies guild” and also works part-time as a clerical assistant for the Child Protection Agency.

⁹For a fuller discussion of this argument see Wood (2001). There he argues for the deployment of a dialogic model for understanding media reception which utilizes Bakhtin and Volosinov, over the dominant structuralist encoding/decoding model descended from the legacy of Saussure.

¹⁰Bette was in her mid-sixties and retired at the time of the study, after a career working in the theatre. As an “aqua-belle” in the 1950s she was a minor local celebrity. She lived in a rented council house with her gay partner in an ex–mining town in the Midlands.

¹¹See Wood (2001) for examples of conversational patterns that viewers employ while watching talk programming. While I am present, it is arguable that I might be the primary addressee. In some instances in my research this may be occurring, although in this instance Bette begins her narrative by directing her response directly to the studio discourse. Other instances are more ambiguous, but if we consult Goffman's (1981) concept of a “participation framework” he breaks apart the notion of a unitary speaker/hearer dynamic in order to capture the more complex nature of interaction.