NCJ Number
151685
Date Published
1994
Length
30 pages
Annotation
Mass media representations of violence, particularly television programs, are narratively and ideologically commodified with increasing frequency in advanced capitalist societies, yet little is known about women's experience with complex signification processes that reify victimhood as feminine; the current study investigated the nexus of social location, experiential knowledge, and mediated ideology in relation to women's decoding of televised depictions of violence against women.
Abstract
The audience-centered study focused primarily on decoding moments of a sociohistorically situated text, the television movie "Moment of Truth: Stalking Back." The study used an interpretive analytical approach devised from feminist cultural studies, developmental psychology, and communication of trauma research. After viewing the movie, focus groups discussed their perceptions of violence and violence against women (both mediated and real) and assessed competing educational functions and entertainment values. Consideration was given to the ways in which race, ethnicity, class, sexual preference, and having experienced gender-based and/or sexual violence were decoding factors among female viewers. Study participants decoded as women in terms of their resistance and outright opposition to the decontextualization of emotional embeddedness and negotiated the textual encoding of the ideology of violence as a private assault on the nuclear family. In particular, survivors of violent trauma collectively redefined violence as an embedded subjective experience, as one point in a relational continuum. Decoding strategies were thus founded on discourses used to make sense of materialistic conditions. The movie gave female audiences a legitimate language to name and define violence and violence against women. The study questionnaire used to elicit female views of the movie is included. 86 references