Class Difference and Indifference in Feminist Media Studies

AbstractThis essay argues that the alliance between feminist media studies and cultural studies has encouraged many feminists to keep a critical distance from the important area of political-economic critique of culture. In addressing issues of social class, feminist media scholars have tended to treat the category as an irrelevant addendum to the gender-race-class trilogy, to undertheorise class, or to treat it as synonymous with social status. This essay contends that indifference to class and the treatment of class as a category that can be read off of a text or an audience fails to realise that class is only meaningful as a relationship of antagonism between different classes at the site of forces and relations of production. The result is that little attention is paid to how forms of patriarchy, Women’s lives and cultural practices are incorporated into and structured by the capitalist mode of production.