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Meetings, Conferences, Workshops

1996 Sense-Making Workshop

Workshop Abstracts

by

Vickie Rutledge Shields
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, Ohio, USA
vshield@bgnet.bgsu.edu

 

COPYRIGHT AND CITATION INFORMATION:
© Shields, Vickie, 1996. Cite as: Shields, Vickie (1996). Sense-making's Potential for Enriching Critical Media Studies and Popular Culture Audience Research. Paper presented at International Communication Association annual meeting, Chicago, Illinois, May 23. Available at: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/meet/m96vshields.html

ESSENCE:
The essence of this on-going research project is to critically examine the relationship between highly pervasive and consistent idealized images of the female body as presented across the mass media and female and male reception of those images in the context of their everyday lives. More specifically, this research is seeking to better understand the ways in which images of the ideal female body--particularly in advertising--are implicated in on-going constructions, negotiations and/or maintainings of gender identities by females and males. The research attempts to problematize "difference" by suspending the assumption that the most insightful points of comparison of decoding idealized images will be between males and females--a gender comparison. By taking a situational approach as opposed to a demographic one, important differences within gender categories are allowed to emerge.

This research uses a type of abbreviated time-line interview. Brenda Dervin and I designed the interview protocol to allow for responses that could later speak to current theoretical debates at the intersections of these sometimes complimentary and sometimes contradictory literatures: critical social theory (centered on questions of structure/agency), feminist media studies, cultural studies theory (particularly Stuart Hall's theory of 'articulation'), and critical ethnography. In constructing the interview protocol we also attempted to take into account impending criticisms of Sense-Making from cultural studies scholars involved in "ethnographic media studies" and feminist research methodologies, incorporating insights from these scholars in portions of the interview protocol.

THE REASONS I TOOK THIS ROAD:
I knew from extensive research and my own personal experience that growing up and living daily with an idealized and extremely narrow prescription of femininity as perpetuated by all forms of mass media can have very powerful effects on girls'/women's sense of self-worth, body image, their relationship to one another and to men. Advertising, in particular, serves to prescribe very specific (in reality unattainable) constructions of gender identities for women and men in relation to women. Feminist media studies provide insightful textual analyses of how this is achieved through the positioning of viewers as gendered subjects of advertisements, film and television. Textual analyses (semiotic, structuralist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic) have offered important clues to the ways in which advertising images are implicated in the construction of gender identities in two ways. One has been to analyze the nature of the treatment of women in ads. The second has been to infer from text portrayal to injurious consequences on audiences. However, these analyses offer over-simplified versions of audience behaviors. Textual analyses often assume that the effect ads have on audience members' gender construction is uni-directional and top-down--implying a passive audience. Yet, audience reception analyses of other media (e. g., soap operas, romance fiction, television melodrama, Hollywood cinema) do not confirm that audiences are passive or effected in a uni-directional way. Instead, these audience reception studies suggest that there is a bewildering diversity in audience responses.

I wanted to gain insight into how these images can have such powerful effects on respondents' sense of gender identity. I wanted to know who are affected most and what accounted for the effects. I wanted to know how respondents described the relationship between these images and their own experiences. I believed that this phenomenon--idealized gender images affecting personal gender identities--was probably very process-oriented and unstable. I suspected that age of respondent (where they are at on their life-road) would be particularly important. I suspected that sexual orientation would make a difference in how one experiences the gendered gaze of mass mediated images. I strongly believed that those groups symbolically annihilated by the mass media--those overweight, dark-skinned African American women, Hispanics, Asian Americans, gays and lesbians, etc. would have compelling reactions to these images, although I could not predict the complexion of those responses.

Textual analysis alone cannot address these concerns, and I believe the methods currently used by critical media studies scholars to conduct reception analyses cannot begin to capture the process and situational nature of reception (decoding) of these types of images the way Sense-Making can(has).

THE BEST OF WHAT I HAVE ACHIEVED IS:
1) I have gained a greater insight into the processes and situational factors involved in female negotiations with idealized images in the media. My research has uncovered a life-history pattern that is similar amongst most female respondents. Equally exciting are the stories of women who have not suffered the direct effects of these images on their on-going constructions of gender identities. These women's stories have given me insight into how, where and when future interventions can be made in the lives of young girls to help give them "emotional armor," or gain "psychological distance," from these images, thus serving to dispel the power of the images.

2) My initial research suggests that those who are left out of idealized representations altogether, the symbolically annihilated, are not liberated by the omission, but instead feel particularly oppressed by it-- they see themselves as so far removed from society's ideal of beautiful that they could never be defined or define themselves as "attractive."

3) I have gained a disturbing yet compelling insight into the fate of young male viewers. A new generation of males have grown up with the objectified male body, especially in ads. My initial research suggests that many of the injurious consequences reserved for women in the past, such as eating disorders and negative body image, may be on the increase for young males. I plan to pursue future research specifically in this area.

PARTICULARLY HELPFUL:
The richness of the data collected allows for longevity as an on-going research agenda. Because the interview protocol allowed respondents to circle their realities, connecting the viewing experiences in their own way to their own life-road, the value of the patterns that continue to emerge is not diminishing with time. A structured, yet open-ended interview protocol allowed for comparison across interviews that an unstructured, open-ended interview would not.

HINDERED/STRUGGLED WITH:
The two consistent struggles for me have been:

1) Reconciling critical, cultural studies and feminist epistemologies with Sense-making as a theory and methodology. For most critical and cultural studies empirical work, the unit of analysis is the social group, consumer group or subculture. For most feminist empirical work the unit of analysis is groups of women or individual female experience. Most of these schools of thought are highly suspicious of any theory or methodology that has a cognitive emphasis.

2) A closely related struggle, then, is finding acceptance for Sense-Making by these audiences, especially in the Humanities--either for the purposes of funding or publishing.

WHAT WOULD HELP ME NOW:
1) I would be greatly helped by discussion of the relationship between structures of patriarchy and media and agency, especially in relations to individuals' experiences of gender, sexual orientation and race.

2) I would be greatly helped by a discussion of how to best present Sense-Making as a methodology when trying to publish in forums that may be unjustifiably antagonistic to the approach. Further, what is a helpful approach for presenting Sense-Making as a qualitative research methodology when applying for research grants.

ABSTRACT:
Paper in progress:
Advertising images increasingly pervade our everyday lives. It is this ubiquitous quality of advertising that is central to the study of advertising and gender. Images of idealized femininity are some of the most dominant and consistent messages produced by advertisers. Their pervasiveness has called forth popular and academic discourses about how these images are implicated in the on-going construction and maintenance of gender identities and social relationships between women and men. Intervening in debates about female spectatorship of the female body, the paper takes issue with the claim that Mulvey's "male gaze" be jettisoned. Rightly, the concept is criticized for asserting female spectators occupy only masculine subject positions. But to insist that female spectatorship is divorced from the male gaze, is also problematic. The author's reception analysis of 40 female and male responses to ideal female bodies in advertising, suggests that female spectatorship while not reducible to the male gaze, is nonetheless produced in/through/against it. Production of female viewing positions usually involves historically constituted subjects negotiating/resisting dominant gender codes in texts. The research problematizes "difference" by suspending the assumption that the most insightful points of comparison of decoding idealized images will be between males and females--a gender comparison. By taking a situational approach as opposed to a demographic one, important differences among women are allowed to emerge.