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Glossary Cross-references to other entries appear in boldface. Agency This study uses the feminist definition of agency as a challenge of the status quo, specifically a discursive challenge of the patriarchy. Defined by Webster's New World Dictionary, Third College Edition, as "that by which something is done; means; instrumentality," agency has come to be a somewhat embattled term in postmodern and poststructural theory. As discussed in the entry under subject, those of us raised in Western post-Enlightenment society are used to talking and thinking about ourselves as the origin of our motives and desires (for a much more sophisticated discussion, cf., for example, Deetz 1992). In common parlance, then, we think of ourselves as agents when we initiate an activity. However, feminist writers in particular have pointed out that we are not necessarily the authors of our motives and desires; our choice to go on a diet, for example, or to get a haircut is organically linked with our culture's norms for what is attractive and appropriate for females. While it may seem to us that we have a choice of haircuts or body weights, in reality our options are circumscribed and given meaning by what is available and/or acceptable in our culture. And options are important; numerous authors have emphasized that agency only has meaning in the context of choices. As Giddens (1979/90) put it, "It is a necessary feature of action that, at any point in time, the agent 'could have acted otherwise'" (p. 56). And, he added, "The sense of 'could have done otherwise' is obviously a difficult and complex one" (p. 56). Agency, then, is seen "not an attribute or trait inhering in the will of autonomous individual subjects, but as a discursive effect" (Benhabib, 1992, p. 221); it has been called "an instituted practice in a field of enabling constraints" (Haraway, 1991, p. 135). As described in Chapter 4, Weeden (1987) called this process gaining access to multiple subject positions, or ways of being in the world-Le., having a choice in the matter , for example, of what counts as attractive or important for females: 252 Glossary "Knowledge of more than one discourse and the recognition that meaning is plural allows for a measure of choice on the part of the individual" (p. 106). In these terms, an active working to reinstantiate and perpetuate a disadvantageous female identity does not count as agency. Rather, feminist authors suggest that the recognition that gender identity, for example , is socially and discursively constructed must precede any agency in changing the meaning of that identity. Cultural studies This school of media and cultural research, formalized in England in the 1950s, emphasized using qualitative methods to study media users in the busy, messy environments in which they live. Cultural studies is now the topic of numerous books and articles. Most definitions strive to retain a relatively amorphous and free-floating identity for this school. As Nelson, Treichler, and Grossberg (1992) put it, "cultural studies is not merely interdisciplinary; it is often, as others have written, actively and aggressively anti-disciplinary- a characteristic that more or less ensures a permanently uncomfortable relation to academic disciplines" (p. 2). However, most authors agree, in During's (1993) words, that cultural studies is united by its "study of culture in relation to individual lives, breaking with social scientific positivism or 'objectivism'" and its understanding that "societies are structured unequally , that individuals are not born with the same access to education, money, health-care, etc." Most authors emphasize cultural studies' commitment to working "in the interests of those who have fewest resources" (During 1993, pp. 1-2). The school trail-blazed a move to audiencebased , rather than text-based, media research, studying television viewers , for example, in the real-life contexts of their viewing experiences, rather than bringing them solemnly into a laboratory. In the process, cultural studies researchers sometimes ended up glorifying the power of the audiences to make their own meanings in ways this study has questio ~ed; however, that move was at least in part a crucial counterbalance to the power granted to the text by, for example, literary criticism. Discourse analysis This study uses discourse analysis to focus, not on what is said per se, on the conditions and unspoken assumptions that give statements meaning. Discourse has numerous common and academic meanings, but it was importantly inflected by Foucault (1972), although his theories are too complex and sophisticated to be summarized here. I would simply...

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