Sun Ho's questions - Week 7

3/2 Subcultures, Audiences & Media Consumption

Q1-3. Hall identifies three different hypothetical codes or positions of reading strategies: dominant-hegemonic code, negotiated code, and oppositional code. And he suggests that "these need to be empirically tested and refined" (p 171), but (a) how do we find the "preferred reading" or the dominant ideology inscribed in a media text? How can we define a "preferred reading" more clearly? (b) Can we find an actual example of a "preferred reading" in a media text? (c) And how do we know we didn't intentionally divide them into those categories?

Q4. Ang suggests that "critical audience studies should not strive and pretend to tell the truth about the audience" (p 183) as their "answers are to be constructed, in the form of interpretations" (p 185). Then she adds in her conclusion, "what matters is not the certainty of knowledge about audiences, but an ongoing critical and intellectual engagement with the multifarious ways in which we constitute ourselves through media consumption" (p 189). But how do we make sense of our findings and place them in a theoretical framework if our assumption, "the reliability and accuracy of the methodologies being used" will somehow reduce our responsibility of that "interpretive moment," is rejected?

Q5. Parameswaran's “Journalism and feminist cultural studies: Retrieving the missing citizen lost in the female audience” provides a good overview of feminist cultural studies. One question about the terminology used: what makes someone a scholar in "feminist" cultural studies? What's the difference between someone who studies gender representation in the media vs a feminist media scholar? The distinction between the two seemed more obvious in the past, but does it remain the same today?