the Female Body GOVERNING

“It’s Down To You” 35
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu are then used to link particular viewing
competences to identity positionings such as class and gender. There
is a clash between the empowering aims of audience research to fi nd
audiences who can resist media infl uence, alongside a commitment
to exploring social location and possible fi xity in different audience’s
consumption practices.
This work is in large part a reaction to the idea that audiences are
undifferentiated masses who for the most part are vulnerable and susceptible
to media infl uence (Blackman & Walkerdine, 2001). However,
as Stuart Hall (1996) himself argues, it is equally problematic to view
groups of people as homogenous, defi ned on the basis of their shared
affi liation and access to particular cultural codes. Hall and Du Gay
(1996) suggest, “identities are thus points of temporary attachment to
the subject positions which discursive formations construct for us” (p. 6).
The key question is how to explain and analyze audience investment
and subjective commitment without imposing structural understandings
of identity to read media consumption. This chapter has attempted to
reformulate this problematic by working through some examples from
a recent study of magazine culture.
The key focus of this work is how to understand the governing of
female bodies alongside arguments that suggest that women’s magazines
present an “unfi xing of femininity” (McRobbie, 1999). The theoretical
backdrop to these arguments comes from rhetorical psychology (Billig,
1997) and the later work of Michel Foucault (1990) who was concerned
with the kinds of relationships we develop with ourselves, what he termed
“processes of subjectifi cation.” He focused specifi cally on the kinds of
discourses, authoritative institutions, and explanatory structures that
govern these self-to-self relations. Although some examples I have given
from this study are based on what is evidently a textual form of analysis,
I argue that this work has important consequences for how we might
think about an individual’s own engagement with popular discourse
beyond discourses of choice, or their counterpart, the positing of the
mass-media as a duping apparatus, particularly in the lives of those who
through particular historical tropes of the mass-mind are considered
more vulnerable and susceptible to media infl uence (cf. Blackman &
Walkerdine, 2001).
Conclusion
The arguments presented in this chapter suggest fi rst that some of the
general accounts of new forms of selfhood made by sociologists such as
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2001) and Rose (1996) do not adequately