Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
feminist, holiday maker, anti-abortionist, blood donor, birdwatcher, film
buff, rock climber, or (in my case) Englishman. Selves are ensembles and
they are actively reproduced day in and day out. What it means, in the
detail, to occupy these myriad positions depends entirely on the particular
mixture of discourses, norms and experiences that any given individual has
been exposed to or seeks out. But clearly there are broad patterns among
otherwise different individuals depending on when and where they live - if
this were not the case, any given 'society' could scarcely reproduce itself over
tant to note that subject-positions have physical effects on our bodies if they
produce habits commensurate with those positions. They're not 'merely'
mental. A graphic example is provided by food. As the 2012 BBC television
series
The men who made us fat
showed, food marketing professionals are now
expert at interpellating ostensibly 'healthy eaters' who are conscious about
their inner health and outer appearance. The adverts for and packaging of
things like organic food are designed to reproduce a particular set of positive
self-conceptions among a class of consumers.
8
BOX 3.2
One way to think about subject-formation and subject-positions is in
terms of the audiences, both real and imagined, presupposed by vari-
ous different epistemic communities, institutions and their associated
discourses when they address us. For over 30 years, researchers in the
fields of media studies and cultural studies have examined how various
audiences are, in effect, brought into being by their myriad addressees
(indeed, there's now an interdisciplinary sub-field called 'audience
studies'). The term
audiencing
describes this process: in short, audi-
ences do not exist until 'called forth', more or less successfully, by
those who wish to address them. A simple example is a road-users'
map, which you might consult when driving a car. We know how to
read the map, and indeed to trust it, because a very large commu-
nity of cartographers and teachers inculcate each new generation into
the 'right' way to understand maps. In this sense,
socialisation
and
various routinised acts of audiencing are closely connected. In most
cases, audiences are apparently 'free' in two senses: they are free to
read/watch/listen/participate (i.e they can choose
not
to), and they are
free to respond to or interpret what they see/hear/do in a range of
different ways.
However, this suggests that in our various 'audience roles' - as high
school students in a classroom, television watchers or church goers,
