Individualism, choice, and empowerment: Zoonen and Gill

Lisbet Van Zoonen brings up a wonderful point in arguing about who should define objective reality media. Perspective configures the realistic rendering and interpretation of a text, be it print or web. Audience expectations vary wildly from one end of a spectrum to another, but to approach each created and viewed text with awareness is the first step in the right direction. “’Reception,” Zoonen notes, “implies two related sets of audience practices: use and interpretation” (35). Perhaps being aware of not only the social implications of what we are reading and watching, but also the ways in which we are receiving information, enables us, as audience members, to construct expressions of gendered identity. Awareness begins, I believe, in living rooms with people actively engaging, questioning, and challenging what they watch, asking why they find their favorite TV shows particularly relevant in their lives. The audience has a responsibility to look for ways they see mediated representations filtered into their own habits and social performances. As much as creators hold accountability for the media they contribute to society, so too does the audience bear a certain level of responsibility in absorbing it and reiterating it.

This is particularly interesting when considering Rosalind Gill’s theorization about the “sexualization of culture.” In presenting women as “active, desiring sexual subjects who choose to present themselves in a seemingly objectified manner because it suits their liberated interests,” the argument comes full circle; a masculine gaze dictates the representation (139). When once the angel of the house stereotype was the predominant representation, now “the whore stereotype” reigns supreme. Worse, still, is the notion that by their own choice women have recreated themselves as subjects in a hyper-sexualized culture. As subjects, still, women are objects—discussed, studied, and negotiated—rather than agents actively discussing the terms of their performances. Do outside forces, suggestively constructed into women’s understanding of their liberation, keep them subjugated, however willingly they seek to be subjects?