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Introduction
- University of Minnesota Press
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Controversies over gender and economics have produced some remarkable sights in the past twenty years: antiabortion fundamentalists joining with prochoice feminists to picket movie theaters showing pornographic films; fundamentalist Republicans calling for federal intervention in the private lives of gay Republicans; fiscal conservatives decrying public funding of abortions for poor women and female soldiers , yet arguing passionately that their own rights to abortion be protected ; white, middle-class men attacking affirmative action for giving jobs to white, middle-class women. These are but a few examples in which allegiances that seem easy become difficult, in which oppositions that appear unchangeable shift dramatically. At root, we believe, is the participants’ answer to this question: should social hierarchy be built on gender or on economic status? If gender is selected, then an issue is seen in terms of gendered privilege. If economic status, then the question is seen as a matter of money. Consider how our understanding of pornography changes when concerns about graphic sexual acts, objectification of women, and role models are replaced by a concern about profits and pay scales, about the working conditions and health benefits of sex workers appearing in films. Each lens brings different elements of an issue into sharp focus. By using both lenses, thus metaphorically approximating stereoscopic vision, we see that pornography as a phenomenon is rooted in both sex and money, that is, in the intertwining hierarchy of patriarchy and capitalism. This book explores how gendered and moneyed privilege play out in media-saturated, industrialized countries grappling with the effects of corporate and governmental policies that promote the convergence of the media, computing, and telecommunications industries. The project began, however, with a simple question about employment in an academic specialty. Our field is communications research, particularly media studies, and, like most people, we have a tendency to “talk shop” during otherwise social occasions. In 1996, over dinner, we were chatting about the divide between scholars who study media texts and those who study ix Introduction Ellen Riordan and Eileen R. Meehan media corporations. We could easily assemble long lists of feminist textual scholars or of political economists, but we struggled to do the same for feminist political economists. Something that began as a question—“Where are all the women?”—now comes full circle in this book. We emerge with many answers to that question, posed by feminist political economists both male and female. As this collection illustrates , feminist scholars do research the political economy of communications and political economists of communications do take a feminist perspective. Perhaps this accounts for our relative invisibility, at least in the United States, where the academy marginalizes both feminist and political-economic research. Sex and Money serves as one corrective to this double marginalization. Underneath their disparate research foci, feminist scholars and political economists share an interest in power: what social group controls the greatest portion of a society’s resources and how does that group justify its privileges? Feminism focuses on the gendered system of privilege, political economy on privilege rooted in economic control. For the United States and the emerging global economy, sex plus money equals power. Addressing this equation in media studies requires the integration of feminism and political economy. This integrative approach is not simply a matter of adding one to the other. Rather, we argue that all media structures, agents, processes, and expressions find their raison d’être in relationships shaped by sex and money. We have three goals for this edited collection. First, we want to encourage a rethinking of ontological and epistemological assumptions by feminists and political economists in order to understand communication at the personal, experiential, institutional, and structural levels . Next we want to break down the dichotomy between public and private by examining how women’s obligations in the private sphere and societal assumptions about women’s domestic obligations shape employment opportunities, work patterns, policy debates, and legislation regarding women in the workplace. Last, we wish to dismantle the notion that time spent using media or shopping for goods is a matter of leisure, of personal whimsy and individual taste. Just as gender roles shape one’s work life, so too do vested economic interests shape one’s leisure and personal identity. Under the pressures of patriarchy and capitalism, the barrier between one’s private life and public life dissolves. To achieve these goals, the collection begins with Ellen Riordan setting the framework for a feminist political economy in communication x / Ellen Riordan and...