Images of the Modern Woman in Asia

Global Media, Local Meanings

Shoma Munshi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136120664
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In examining the links between gender and the media, this volume asks questions involving the relationship between global media flows, gender and modernity in the region.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

SHOMA MUNSHI

This book is about women and the media in certain Asian contexts. The chapters presented here examine some of the relationships between gender and the fluctuations of power by concentrating on the reach of global media and its reworking(s) in local contexts. In examining the links between gender and the media, the contributors discuss questions involving the relationship between global media flows, gender and modernity in the region.

As the title of the book suggests, this volume intervenes into the current debates in the field of media and cultural studies, global/local and the transnational, feminist scholarship, Eurocentrism and multiculturalism. One of the ideas driving this volume is how media texts and the politics of consumption construct versions of a ‘modern’ woman in Asian contexts. Second, the book attempts to examine how this is a highly charged and contested terrain across which individuals, social groups and political ideologies struggle for expression through the images and discourses which the media provides. In other words, studying media representations of the ‘modern’ woman's identity in Asia (or anywhere else for that matter) is not rewarding in its own right, but gains further substance when contextualised within a broader framework of the characteristics of contemporary culture. In a world which is becoming seamless due to transnational media flows, theories of media and the construction of an identity of a ‘modern’ woman are best developed through specific case studies of concrete phenomena. Third, and perhaps most importantly, how do we define and interpret the feminine as understood in an Asian context?

Our attempt here is to ‘cross borders’ of disciplines, methods and approaches and build bridges, in examining how the ‘modern Asian woman’ is represented and understood in various forms of media today. We begin by examining the dynamics of global media and its inevitable interaction with the local. The global-local nexus as mutually interactive and interdependent lays the context for the empirical analyses which follow. In this context, by bringing together a number of case studies located in certain Asian contexts, we ask how does media represent women in the countries under study? What does gender, as exemplified by the ‘modern’ woman, signify in these contexts? How do women respond to particular images of themselves? Whose voice speaks for whom, and from which space? Does Western theorising on women and media culture make contributions to understandings of ‘Asian’ identities? Do our analyses of the ‘modern woman in Asia’ further develop or challenge this theorising developed (at least in the beginning) in Western academia?

GLOBAL MEDIA

First, and inevitably, the papers raise questions about the role that global communications media play in constructing ideas about the world today, and in particular the complex nature of cultural identities in Asian contexts. The globalisation of media and communications industries – including not just television, films, advertising radio and newspapers, but very importantly today, the Internet, have led to a situation in which communication networks, rather than physical, geographical limits have become the new permeable boundaries of our times. These will help create what Marshall McLuhan thought of in the 1960s as the ‘global village.’

Robertson has defined globalisation as ‘the concrete structuration of the world as a whole’ (1990:20), whereby the world becomes one united place. The image that this evokes is a multi-levelled interaction of social forces leading to an all-encompassing sweep of global political, economic and cultural interdependency (cf. King ed 1991). One of the areas where this process of globalisation finds its most potent expression is in the information and communications media. Due to its rapidly evolving mechanisms and speed of transmission, especially of electronic media, notions of the linear chronology of time have been disrupted. Witness the death and funeral of Princess Diana in 1997. It was estimated that her funeral was watched by over a billion people worldwide. It was impossible not to feel the public outpouring of grief, to be a participant. No matter where one was, one felt as though one was there, amongst the millions who had poured into London to pay their last respects. Globally disseminated details of the accident and the funeral cut across multiple time zones as the whole world watched the events simultaneously.

The global movements of peoples, cultures, ideas, goods, products and information are all pointers to the fact that one must think more and more in terms of networks of communication as providing the ail-importantly linking, yet penetrable boundaries of the times. In the context of global capitalism today, the foundations have been laid for a new global media order, in which mega corporations like Sony, CNN, Time Warner, STAR, and others battle it out for supremacy. Their professed, publicly stated goal may well be that of a closer knit world community. In truth, the driving logic is of course to reach an ever increasing audience worldwide, and consequently, increased profits. ‘Driven now by the logic of profit and competition, the overriding objective of the new media corporations is to get their product to the largest number of consumers. There is, then, an expansionist tendency at work, pushing ceaselessly towards the construction of enlarged audiovisual spaces and markets … audiovisual geographies are thus becoming … realigned on the basis of the more ‘universal’ principles of international consumer culture’ (Morley and Robins 1995:11).

In this context, Schiller has rightly argued that in today's atmosphere of globalisation, ‘transnational corporate cultural domination’ is seeking to create a world in which ‘private giant economic enterprises pursue … historical capitalist objectives of profit making and capital accumulation, in continuously changing market and geopolitical conditions’ (1991:20). Morley and Robins illustrate this point and put forth a compelling argument about the logic of the new global media order. They write, ‘What we are seeing is the construction of the media order through the entrepreneurial devices of a comparatively small number of global players, the likes of Time Warner, Sony, Matsushita, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company … we have now the proliferation of generic channels (sport, news, music, movies) … Global corporations are presently manoeuvring for world supremacy’ (1995:13).

As early as the 1980s, Theodore Levitt's arguments towards an increased global outlook were being used by transnational corporations in strategising for positioning and marketing their products worldwide. Levitt supported his thesis by saying that ‘the global corporation looks to the nations of the world not for how they are different but for how they are alike … it seeks constantly in every way to standardise everything into a common global mode ….’ Such marketing strategies which are deployed by the transnational corporations ‘are not denials or contradictions of global homogenisation, but rather its confirmation … globalisation does not mean the end of segments. It means, instead, their expansion to worldwide proportions’ (1983:28–31).

The range and sweep of global flows of mass mediated culture, especially the visual image industries, is not something which can be easily controlled. But this does not imply that it has a global, homogenising effect on particular local situations which respond in their own culturally diverse ways. In this respect, Featherstone's view (1990) is that one should view globalisation in terms of complex processes of global integration rather than in polarised terms of global and local, by which ‘what becomes increasingly ‘globalized’ is not so much concrete cultural contents … but, more importantly and more structurally, the parameters and infrastructure which determine the conditions for the existence of local cultures’ (Ang 1996:153). In other words, this complex process can best be understood as the distribution and spread of certain economic, political and ideological imperatives which determine the ways in which media, production, circulation and consumption are organised throughout the world today.

Transnationalisation of media flows is by now well under way. For its supporters, such global media flows offer the expansion of ‘good’ ideas such as democracy to a wider public and an escape from restrictive tendencies of nation-states. But their implications still remain a homogenising one. We argue that it remains firmly centred in the West (the threat of Americanisation is a very real one even in the countries of the European Union, notably France for example). Thus, while global media culture acknowledges differences and diversity at one level, its primary task lies in the absorption of distinctiveness to produce a kind of stratified homogeneity (Hall 1991). Which is why we question such a totalising view of global media flows and ask whether such systems, however powerful they may be, really fuse national cultures or overlay them with a new ‘cosmopolitan’ culture. As Smith argues, ‘it is not enough to imagine the global community; new and wider forms of political association and different types of cultural community will first have to emerge. It is likely to be a piecemeal movement, disjointed and largely unplanned’ (1991:160). Appadurai has argued that models of global culture which look at a simple centre-periphery tension are analytically inadequate, and he proposes instead a more sophisticated framework of five dimensions of global cultural flows – ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes – which ‘are not objectively given relations but deeply perspectival constructs, inflected very much by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as sub-national groupings and movements … the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe’ (1990:296–7).

THE GLOBAL/LOCAL NEXUS

How do forces of globalisation however, fare, when they encounter the real world of different social formations and cultures? It is here that the homogenising, unifying tendency of globalisation start to unravel as one faces the inescapable fact that ‘the spatial matrix of contemporary capitalism is one that, in fact, combines and articulates tendencies towards both globalisation and localisation’ (Morley and Robins 1995:30). What needs to be carefully considered then is the complex relationship between global media and local meanings, their connections as well as their disjunctions (cf. Appadurai 1990; Morley 1992; Martin-Barbero 1993, Garcia Canclini, cited in Lull 1995). All these scholars, in one form or another, theorise that there can be no trend towards a linear, homogenising development. Such a trend is always, and necessarily upset by opposing forces of differences and social and cultural discontinuities.

Keeping the issue of the transnational media system as crucial to our argument here, we acknowledge (like others before us) that the global and the local therefore cannot be understood in terms of dichotomised, binary oppositions. Nor can it be said that the global tends to erode local cultures while the latter tries to maintain its authenticity. Rather, the global/local nexus has to be understood in relational and relative terms, i.e., how one relates to the other relatively, and interacts with the other. On the one hand, technological and market shifts are leading to the emergence of global image industries, while on the other hand, there have been significant developments towards local production. New technologies facilitate the fragmentation of mass markets and the targeting of particular audience segments by large media and advertising corporations: ‘the issue is not one of global media or local media, but of how global and local are articulated … One possibility is global homogeneity. Another … offers the possibility of reinventing and rearticulating international and local cultures and identities’ (Morley and Robins 1995:1–2, emphasis mine).

Inevitably, the papers in this volume raise questions about the role that the communications media play in constructing ideas about the world today, and in particular the complex nature of local cultural identities in Asian contexts. ‘Audiences derive meaning from audio-visual media by using a perspective orientated by belief, common sense and local everyday practices in which visual codes play an important role … as visual representations, images are embedded in a codified vocabulary inextricably linked to ‘local’ culture. Although recent developments in communication technology and software distribution are a global phenomenon, the ways in which audio-visual media are established and integrated into local practices can be linked to culture-specific traditions, aesthetics, narratives and rhetorics’ (Brosius and Butcher 1999:12, emphasis in original).

Kevin Robins' paper on changing spaces of global media suggests that the development of the media has always been aligned to the idea of the national imaginary and imagined communities. This way of thinking about culture has tended to overlook and shut out other complexities such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, diaspora, etc. What he examines in his paper is how the discourse of global media flows can potentially break down the homogenising nature of the ‘imagined community’ and allow for an examination of developments in which possibilities of other cultural complexities exist. Robins rejects the corporate ideology of global media corporations in their ideals of creating ‘an international media community.’ He suggests that what in fact happens here is the creation of a global consumer order. The global-local nexus offers more possibilities, in Robins' opinion, to examine complexities, in that global media flows as experience has shown, have to negotiate with local cultural complexities. In his paper, Robins examines the model of diasporic communication, and within that, suggests that the contested processes in the development of ‘new femininities,’ is one of the possible areas where potential for taking into account differences in discourse exist. He suggests moving beyond community closure to recognition of cultural complexities, involving the awareness of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, family and social structures, because it is in struggles around these sites that cultural expressions and reformulations of ideas of the ‘modern’ take on increased significance.

IMAGES OF THE ‘MODERN WOMAN’ IN ASIA

Terms like the ‘modern woman in Asia’ are fraught with contradictions. The ‘modern woman’ is not a ‘real’ but a potential subject position, one that is always in progress. The ‘Asian modern woman’ may be no more than a discursive ideological space for identification created by the global/local media, but her image interacts with so many other social forces that compete for space in female imagination, that historically and cross-culturally she continues to be a powerful dream or female fantasy. Social theorising about the ‘modern woman’ continues to influence so many cultural forms and processes of popular culture from organisation of dress and space to participation in advertising and pornography.

How do we define and interpret the feminine as understood in an Asian context? Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Editor's Preface
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Changing Spaces of Global Media
• 3 Women and Pornography in Kathmandu: Negotiating the ‘Modern Woman’ in a New Consumer Society
• 4 Interiority and the ‘Modern Woman’ in Japan
• 5 Marvellous Me: The Beauty Industry and the Construction of the ‘Modern’ Indian Woman
• 6 Selling the ‘Modern Woman’: Consumer Culture and Chinese Gender Politics
• 7 Mulan Illustration? Ambiguous Women in Contemporary Chinese Cinema
• 8 Prostitution, Politics and Power: Issues of the ‘Foreign’ in Western Television Documentaries of Female Sex Workers in Thailand
• 9 A Suitable Romance? Trajectories of Courtship in Indian Popular Fiction
• 10 Comparative Modernities: Ottoman Women Writers and Western Feminism