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Chapter 12. Conclusion: Swimming with the Tide
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Chapter 12 Conclusion: Swimming with the Tide In listening to the voices of 36 girls and young women as they laughed, cringed, guessed, and criticized in an excited, vital community built around Beverly Hills, 90210, I arrived at some dismaying conclusions. Gathering and analyzing empirical evidence of the ways the microprocesses of hegemony play out in talk about the show have led me to conclude that such talk is implicated-for better or worse-in the reproduction of dominant notions of female identity. I have encapsulated this finding in the metaphor of swimming with the tide: Viewers were active and engaged, but instead of fighting the current they were moving with it. They were not just enjoying its power to carry them along, but they were also enthusiastically stroking and kicking to accelerate their progress. Even learning one's own culture can be hard work; these viewers actively grappled with the subtleties involved in being female in the late twentieth century. And their strategy is completely understandable in a world that encourages our young people to learn our culture and find their places in it. But it is disturbing when they cheerfully absorb the disadvantaging aspects of Western culture along with the liberating ones. Discourse analysis helps uncover this process, which goes on powerfully but invisibly (like movement of the tide) - probably in many aspects of the transmission of culture but quite evidently in the case of impressionable young viewers of 90210. A media text offers an identity (sometimes along with an alternative). But it is in the discussion, the amateur punditry, the lighthearted talk of a support group of viewers that the identity (or a variation of it) is reified. In discourse, viewers reinstantiate the idea, take ownership of it, even feel as if they are its authors. And the identities I heard 90210 fans latch onto and perpetuate in discourse were that a woman should be pretty and nice and defined by a male. Although I saw behavior similar to that documented by other cultural studies researchers, who celebrated viewers' activity and resistance to cultural norms, I interpret my data differently. Unlike some of my col- 236 Chapter 12 leagues, I have suggested that talk about this television show played an important role as viewers actively constructed, reified, and perpetuated dominant notions of female identity that were not necessarily in their best interests. For example, the endlessly fascinated discussions of female appearance seemed empirically to confirm Fiske's (1987) theory of a polysemic text with which empowered viewers make multiple meanings. This talk also generated the pleasurable community seen by, for example, Ang (1985) and Brown (1994), support groups that these researchers said empowered the viewers. However, I suggest that resonating under this lively variety of communal responses ran a single meaning-the ominous pedal point of a narrow and restrictive female identity. Moreover, the way this talk reified and perpetuated that identity was concealed by the ubiquitous authorial voice, the "expert" viewer who positioned herself as the source of her meanings. This voice delightedly concealed the role of the television text in offering the identities that viewers eagerly and actively appropriated for themselves. Similarly, talk about characterizations and plots could be seen to confirm other researchers' findings that viewers were active and resistant, although, using the tools of discourse analysis, I interpret these data another way. As Fiske (1987) suggested, the young viewers did not look like passive dupes of the text; rather, they made multiple meaningsDonna is smart or stupid; Lucinda is admirably strong or too fOIWard, "a piece of work"; the '60s episode was simply an anomaly, or it signaled that Donna and ~avid will have sex. I can comfortably echo Morley's (1980) analysis that the viewer, not wholly the text, determined the reading. At the same time, however, I argue that this talk worked to construct a community with the characters that inevitably, and hegemonically, intertwined with ways viewers attended to their own lives. Viewers created a community with Kelly, Brenda, Donna, and Andrea (and sometimes Steve, David, Brandon, and Dylan) and pleasurably linked the fictional narratives with their own self-narratives. Even as they attended to the show in the context of their own lives, they also attended to their own lives on the show's terms-terms largely dictated by the less-thanaltruistic constraints of prime-time network television. Like Hobson's (1980) viewers of Crossroads, fans of 90210 took cultural possession of the program; like Ang's (1985) viewers of...