The art of viewing off center: television and the intellectual enterprise

My mother’s 1995 Sony Trinitron is on the blink. If she watches her television sitting slightly off to one side and holding absolutely still everything is fine, but if she moves about or sits directly in front of the set the screen fills with static. With sixty-seven years of life experience, a real estate license, and concerns about the “kind of world her grandchildren are growing up in,” my mother understands the adjective “postmodern” as a referent to what appears to her to be the endlessly spiraling nature (invention/breakdown/invention/breakdown . . . ) of modern technological equipment. While she is, then, a female television viewer quite literally “positioned” for heightened awareness of her own postmodern condition, her ideas about what might lie between the covers of a book titled Re-Viewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture fall rather far afield from the contents of Lynne Joyrich’s recent book. My mother, in short, is no postmodernist.

Postmodernist or not, for an American studies reader, the title correctly indicates Joyrich’s subject as it suggests her alliances. Re-Viewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture is a feminist consideration of television’s reception among primarily postmodernist critics, an analysis of the intersection(s) of theories about television spectatorship and theories of gender construction, and “a ‘paused’ look at a number of fleeting texts” (ix) from television itself. In evaluating these sources, she argues that “gender affects the reception, not simply of particular programs, but of TV as a whole, defining not only viewer positioning but television’s own cultural location (its popular and cultural reception)” (10). Embracing the role of feminist critic as cultural radical, her consequent aim and explicit motivation for this book is her hope to “suggest new modes of intervention” into feminist and media politics by “delineat[ing] a criticism which goes beyond either the uncritical celebration of TV’s ‘femininity’ or the nostalgic call for a return to more traditional forms” (23). Whether or not she succeeds depends on the receptive position of her reader.

Joyrich positions herself in the first chapter as a critical studies intellectual and an “avid” television viewer. As such, she makes certain assumptions that are crucial to her argument and to the logic of her ensuing analyses of television texts: that television is “an occupation” employing its viewers’ time and attention; that femininity is also an occupation of commonly understood definition including passivity and overly-close involvements with consumer objects and images; and that all television viewers are, at bottom, passive receivers and hence have been configured as feminized. ¹ In the second chapter of Re-Viewing Reception, she traces the intellectual trends generating these assumptions, setting up her strategy of reading “the discourses of 1980s U.S. television against the simultaneous and intersecting discourses of television criticism” and particular consideration of “the ways in which critics have aligned TV with a ‘feminine logic’” (165).

Her genre-specific intermediary chapters fulfill her discursive intentions. Chapter three is a broad analysis of the genre of television melodrama or “soap opera.” ² Arguing that as melodrama responds “to a felt loss of meaning while providing its own grounds of reference,” she finds that the genre is “particularly appropriate to the . . . problems of both television and ‘the postmodern condition’” (166) and includes a useful discussion of the carryover of melodramatic conventions into other genres such as broadcast news and situation comedies. Joyrich references twenty-seven television series in this chapter, however, they are mostly parenthetical cites and only occasionally accompanied by abbreviated descriptions. By contrast, when discussing detective dramas and then family situation comedies in chapters four and five, Joyrich provides rich textual analyses of, respectively, Miami Vice and Moonlighting episodes and contextualizes her analysis in a review of the immediate socio-political environment for these programs.

In her readings of Miami Vice and Moonlighting, Joyrich finds “the presence of male fantasies of reproduction and . . . tensions surrounding technological...