Sex And Money: Feminism and Political Economy in the Media

15. Gendering the Commodity Audience: Critical Media Research, Feminism, and Political Economy

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, media scholars sorted the field into the categories of “mainstream” versus “critical” research. These adjectives instantly communicated where one stood in terms of the root assumptions and valuations undergirding one’s work—as well as which side you rooted for at the staged debates where administrative researchers like Elihu Katz or Wilbur Schramm debated some representative of the opposition—perhaps James Carey, or Herbert Schiller, or Stuart Hall (Meehan 1999; see Poole and Schiller 1981). At the time, the administrative paradigm so dominated the field that its practitioners often assumed it was the only way to do research, rejecting other approaches as subjective, unsystematic, and impractical—as “armchair theorizing” little better than wishful thinking. Thus George Gerbner underplayed the intellectual hostility associated with the paradigmatic debates when he titled his special 1983 issue of the Journal of Communication “Ferment in the Field.” Glancing back, I am struck by the “mainstream” paradigm’s ability to unify its opposition—to place Carey, Schiller, and Hall on the same side. But I am also struck by the absence of feminist work in that benchmark publication, despite the Journal’s openness to feminist work under Gerbner’s editorship (e.g., Busby 1975; Cantor 1977, 1979; Lemon 1977; Poe 1976; Streicher 1974) as well as the tremendous outpouring of feminist research across media studies in the 1970s generally (e.g., Arnold 1976; Brabant 1976; Holly 1979; Janus 1978; Marzoff, Rush, and Stern 1974–1975; Morris 1973; Ogan and Weaver 1978–1979; St. John 1978; Tuchman et al. 1978). One decade later, in two issues of the same journal, Michael Gurevitch and Mark Levy published essays addressing “the future of the field,” which were republished under the title Defining Media Studies: Reflections on the Future of the Field (1994). The book organized its forty-eight contributions into seven categories (disciplinarity, new directions, influencing public policy, audiences and institutions, critical research, history of the field, and academic curriculum and legitimacy ). Administrative research dominated the volume and critical 209 15. Gendering the Commodity Audience: Critical Media Research, Feminism, and Political Economy Eileen R. Meehan scholarship was sprinkled across four of the categories. In the critical category, two essays focused on political economy (Meehan, Mosco, and Wasko 1994; Schiller 1994); the other two on cultural studies (Grossberg 1994; McChesney 1994). Overall, only one essay offered a feminist perspective: H. Leslie Steeves’s “Creating Imagined Communities : Development Communication and the Challenge of Feminism” (1994) in the public policy category. Yet, in describing the collection, Gurevitch and Levy state: The paradigmatic debate (or “dialogue”) that dominated communication scholarship in the ’70s and early ’80s has been replaced by new and different intellectual nudgings, by the injection into communication scholarship of recently emergent perspectives such as feminism, postmodernism , and neofunctionalism. (1994, 7, emphasis mine) As a political economist, trained during the period leading up to “Ferment,” and as a coauthor of an essay in Defining, I find this all rather disturbing, yet oddly unsurprising. That contradictory reaction motivates this essay. As a political economist, I have focused my research mainly on the internal structures of media-based corporations—which shape the form and content of cultural commodities (e.g., Meehan 1991)—and the external relationships between such corporations—which also shape cultural commodities and which construct media markets (e.g., Meehan 1990). Working at this level of abstraction generally has meant treating largescale , impersonal institutions as agents with little reference to the actions , struggles, or alliances of human beings. Much of the feminist scholarship in communications takes a less abstracted point of entry: women working in the industries (Martin 1991); women’s use of mediated artifacts (Radway 1984; Steeves et al. 1988); the fictional men and women offered as role models by the media (Byars 1991; Byars and Dell 1992); or some combination of these concerns (Andersen 1995; Stabile 1995). Connections between feminist lines of research and institutional lines of research may not be readily apparent. The conditions of people’s work and leisure, and the artifacts that they employ in each sphere, may seem fairly remote from the impact of transindustrial conglomeration on blockbuster films or the structure of markets in the broadcasting industry. Yet political economists and feminist scholars understand that patriarchy and capitalism have been historically intertwined in the United States from the nation’s founding. This suggests 210 / Eileen R. Meehan that important connections between patriarchy and...