the Female Body GOVERNING

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lisa blackman
and even psychoanalytic understandings, but fails to adequately engage
with how subjects are both made and make themselves into particular
kinds of subject. There has been a shift to sociological explanations
to explore individuals as socially and historically located, rather than
fixed in any way by preexisting psychological desires. This move is
extremely laudable and provides one way of engaging with the regulation
of individual and social bodies. However, there is a danger in
much of this work that the pregiven psychological individual is brought
in through the back door. As an example, in work exploring female
pleasure and soap opera, which is at pains to explore the active ways in
which female viewers invest in certain characters, such as the mother
figure (Geraghty, 1991), the relation between televisual reality and
pleasure is conceived through a social-learning perspective that is a
central psychological theory of socialization derived from the behaviorist
tradition (cf. Henriques et al., 1984, for a developed critique).
Although this model is not explicitly drawn on, assumptions are made
that women learn certain female competencies through their roles as
wives and mothers, which they see positively reflected back to them on
the screen. The valorizations of the kinds of skills, that is, relationship
skills, which women acquire through social learning are valued within
soap operas. The “realism” of these representations are what afford
women pleasure in viewing, and hence their active investment in these
televisual fictions and fantasies.
This body of work is important to begin to specify the particularity
of viewing practices and to question the view that women are culturally
duped through patriarchal fantasies of femininity. However these kinds
of approaches are still reliant on psychological assumptions about how
women are “made social,” and what processes of socialization enable in
terms of the basis of women’s identifi cations. Geraghty (1996) herself
is aware of the homogenization of women that underpin much of this
work, but remains unaware of a large body of work within critical
psychology, which may provide novel ways of thinking through audience
investment and subjective commitment. Cultural studies seems to be at
a crossroads with the danger of either inscribing the homogenization
of identity to explain the social and cultural locations through which
people consume media forms or invoking a voluntarist subject who can
ideally resist media infl uence. Again psychological assumptions are
made in this work although psychology is vehemently opposed (Morley,
1992). Audience research is heavily reliant on cognitive psychology
and the idea of subjects as code decipherers who bring to bear their
own interpretive structures on media texts (Morley, 1992). Structural
understandings of identity derived largely from the work of the French