(2013) Media, Gender and the Past: Qualitative Approaches To

JOSE´ RICARDO CARVALHEIRO (ORG.) Media, Gender and the Past Qualitative approaches to broadcast audiences and memories livros LABCOM books JOSÉ RICARDO CARVALHEIRO (ORG.) MEDIA, GENDER AND THE PAST QUALITATIVE APPROACHES TO BROADCAST AUDIENCES AND MEMORIES Livros LabCom Série: Pesquisas em Comunicação Direção: José Ricardo Carvalheiro Design de Capa: Cristina Lopes Paginação: Cristina Lopes Covilhã, UBI, LabCom, Livros LabCom ISBN: 978-989-654-119-4 Título: Media, Gender and the Past: Qualitative approaches to broadcast audiences and memories Autores: José Ricardo Carvalheiro (Org.) Ano: 2013 www.livroslabcom.ubi.pt Índice Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1 PART I - RECEPTION AND GENDER IN THE PAST .................................. 7 Chapter 1 - Behind Closed Doors – exploring the gender dynamics of media use ....................................................................................... 9 Ann Gray Chapter 2 - Media, audiences and the life-course �� 25 Verónica Policarpo Chapter 3 - The day women took over the tavern: harsh memories, hegemony and media reception ....................................................................... 61 José Ricardo Carvalheiro and Diana Gonçalves Tomás Chapter 4 - At the university: learning and researching on media and generations ................................................................................ 91 Cristina Ponte PART II - MEMORY, GENDER AND IDENTITY .................................... 123 Chapter 5 - Narrating Gender as Collective Memory in the 50th Anniversary Celebrations of RTP .................................................. 125 Cláudia Álvares Chapter 6 - Memory and life world on media reception: a phenomenological approach ....................................................................... 139 João Carlos Correia Chapter 7 - Gender differences and the influence of Emigration on the Memory of the first Television audiences in Spain ............................. 159 Juan Francisco Gutiérrez Lozano Chapter 8 - Postcolonial Memories of Media reception and construction of collective belongings: the case of Portuguese Muslim Women of Indian and Mozambican origins ................................................................ 179 Catarina Valdigem About the authors �� 223 Introduction Media in everyday life: looking back to see the ways Communication studies are today very focused on new technologies and the changing contexts of present audiences, trying to envisage future outcomes in media uses. However, a full understanding of our media landscape must be aware that it hosts several layers of once new technologies, practices and contexts. For example, early radio listening sets the question of multitasking inside the home, and later of media portability, which are conspicuous issues in communication research nowadays. The fact that gender dimensions framed multitasking and portability, in Portugal during the middle of the 20th century, draws our attention to how social relations have been decisive in the shaping of media reception practices. But also to how these relations have at the same time been shaped by those same practices because of the continuous negotiation of its modalities of use. When television became popular in Portugal, throughout the 1960’s, broadcast users already had specific habits and norms of behaviour, according to their different social roles and contexts. The transformations that occurred then have to be understood within a history of permanent social re-contextualisation of the media in the changing scenarios of everyday life. Questions such as housework, access to public spaces, religious practices, family routine practices, material consumption, neighbourhood relations, and cultural imaginaries show to be historically intertwined with gendered media uses. Examining feminine practices and memories of past reception can highlight the ways in which, among constraints and possibilities for agency, women have found and made their own condition. But it also sheds light on the diversity of experiences encompassed by the category of feminine audience according to social class, local context or biographic histories. Despite the promised richness, researching past reception has received less attention from scholars than other aspects of media history, such as the [Media, Gender and the Past: Qualitative approaches to broadcast audiences and memories, pp. 1 - 6] 2 retrospective study of media genres, organizations and technologies. This volume aims to contribute to a better knowledge of this neglected field, both by reflecting about theoretical questions and by presenting empirical data. Several contributions in this book use oral history and other qualitative techniques, but surely past audiences are not an easy field for empirical research, not least because it requires scholars to face complex questions about memory. Memory is a mediator in research about the historical past, but it is also an object of study, and a crucial one when the focus is symbolic activity around media texts, as it calls attention to the processes of meaning-making in which audiences engage through successive acts of re-appropriation and re-elaboration of media memories. It requires qualitative research methodologies to articulate the audiences’ interpretations of symbolic material with their personal and social identities, bearing in mind that present accounts are tied to biographic trajectories and to the roles agents play today. It calls attention, finally, to the ways memory is reworked by media producers when they offer the audiences preferred representations of the past. This volume emanates from a conference held in the University of Beira Interior, in February 2013, which aimed to gather a group of scholars who research about broadcast media, gender and the past – the reference to the past intending to encompass both history research and memory studies. Thus the book is organised into two parts. The first part, titled “Reception and gender in the past”, is devoted to articulate gender and media audiences under diachronic and historical perspectives, reflecting also on the processes of theorising and researching it empirically. Part two, under the generic title “Memory, gender and identity”, examines the dynamics of remembering, the reframing of representations, and its gender implications in terms of individual and collective identities. In the first chapter of the book, Ann Gray provides a reflection on the development of research in gender and broadcast reception, and addresses how (and why) feminist scholars placed the domestic use of media on the map of communication and cultural studies. Herself a pioneer in researching everyday practices of the audiences within British cultural studies, Gray begins by considering what elements shape the directions of intellectual enquiry, including responses to critical theoretical developments and wider political, social and Introduction 3 cultural transformations, but also researchers’ own positions, institutional locations, chance encounters and personal passions. These scientific trajectories allow us to understand how often for many researchers, and especially feminists, methodological explorations are at the heart of their projects. Gray then traces how new knowledge was sought through the employment of ethnographic methods that challenged the dominance of quantitative approaches and the anti-empiricist moves within film and cultural studies. By reflecting on feminist debates, the chapter examines how the use of techniques such as ‘life story’ interviews produced data which reveals the centrality of television in personal memory and in the construction of self-identity. But alongside the self- narratives came accounts of the coded constraints of media use within domestic spaces, thus suggesting conceptual understandings of public personal boundaries, the performance of gendered identity and the power relations inherent in the routine practices of everyday life. In chapter 2, Verónica Policarpo approaches the role played by media in the construction of the contemporary individual, namely in shaping gender identities in different historical contexts. For that, life-course theory is used as an analytical tool, enabling a better understanding of the inter-relations of individual time and societal time, focusing on the (re)making of personal and private life from a dynamic perspective. The text reflects on the ways audiences negotiate meanings of media contents, within an environment where media are profoundly (though historically differently) embedded in everyday life, and on how these meaning-making processes are shaped throughout the life-course. Considering methodological issues, namely in research about feminine audiences and their identities, Policarpo argues that the traditional emphasis upon qualitative techniques of data collection partially reproduces a bias of social research in general, which has for a long time privileged oral discourses over other sources, such as images or sounds. Thus, it is argued that new technologies offer wide potential to past audiences’ research and the reconstitution of memory, providing tools that might be explored in articulation with in-depth biographical interviews. Chapter 3 is devoted to a case study of broadcasting reception in a particular working class

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