CLASS DIFFERENCE AND INDIFFERENCE IN FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES

This essay argues that the alliance between feminist media studies and cultural studies has encouraged many feminists to keep a critical dis tance from the important area of political-economic critique of cultur e. In addressing issues of social class, feminist media scholars have tended to treat the category as an irrelevant addendum to the gender-r ace-class trilogy, to undertheorise class, or to treat it as synonymou s with social status. This essay contends that indifference to class a nd 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 re lationship of antagonism between different classes at the site of forc es 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 produc tion.