gills_et_all-third_wave_feminism_a_critical_exploration

Ednie Kaeh Garrison 25
important role in cultural knowledge production of feminist consciousness
than feminist thinkers have acknowledged. While work has been done on
representations of women in the media and the contradictory uses of feminist
and sexist imagery in advertising to convince women to engage in certain
relations of consumption, not enough work has been done to examine how
representations of feminism (not only as entirely negative, unfeminine, strident,
self-indulgent, threatening to heteronormativity, but also as white,
middle-class, and straight) obfuscate forms of feminism, different feminist
constituencies, sites of feminist consciousness-raising and political activism,
its relevance to men, women and not so finitely gendered people, and the
ways feminism can enable us to work our ways out of the traps of racist,
capitalist, and patriarchal logics. Deborah Rhodes contends that for ‘those
interested in social movements in general and the women’s movement in
particular’ more attention must be given to the ways ‘the media choose to
present (or not to present) as news about women and how they characterise
(or caricature) the women’s movement’ (685). Citing Hall (340–342) on the
ideological effects of the media, as well as Gitlin (3–7) and Goffman (10–11)
on the effect on cultural perception of standard journalistic framing devices,
Rhodes makes the same argument as this chapter about the cultural significance
of the media as ‘increasingly responsible for supplying the information
and images through which we understand our lives’ and as a cultural institution
that ‘play[s] a crucial role in shaping public consciousness and public
policy’ (685). In the case of the production of third wave feminist meaning,
our inattentiveness to the power of the media as a source of knowledge and
meaning contributes to the relatively limited success of feminist revolution.
We fail to fully understand how the media operates to ideologically re/contain
the possible meanings attached to the object feminism.
Why the American mass media matters in the making
of meaning
One of the most expansive and interpolating of public-sphere sites in the
US, the media synthesizes a constellation of communications genres (e.g.
the tripartite ‘radio, magazines and television,’ video, film, Hollywood, newspapers,
books, Madison Avenue, billboards, advertising, the Internet) which
comprise a hegemonic and seductive public cultural institution dictated by
political, economic, and cultural ideologies. It also goes by other names: mainstream
media, mass media, consumer media, popular media, popular culture,
monopoly mass media, corporate media, and mass circulation press. This list
exposes who and what has power in producing the media. Rather than monolithically
blaming ‘them’ – those faceless, disembodied people in power – these
names offer ways to think about how we both collude with and attempt to
resist the discursive repertoires that recursively limit what counts as feminism
in the dominant and dominating – or mainstream – American culture.