An Ethnography of Political Identification: The Birmingham School Meets Psychoanalytic Theory

Scholarly work on the topic of identification—on how readers and viewers identify with cultural texts—has suffered from a rift between two fields of inquiry, psychoanalysis and ethnography. Practitioners in these two fields often view themselves as antagonists propounding antithetical knowledge claims. Psychoanalytic film and literary theorists locate meaning in the text, arguing that identification is a function of textually embedded codes that suture the spectator or reader into particular subject positions. In contrast, ethnographers working in media and cultural studies decry such textual and theoretical determinism, arguing that any study of how identification or interpretation takes place should be based upon interviews with actual audience members rather than speculations about “implied spectators.” This perceived rift has led many audience researchers to ignore new psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity focused on the fluidity and intersectionality of identity, and thus they continue to adopt essentialist ideas about group difference in their studies of patterns of consumption. This is clearly a case in which disciplinary boundaries and enmities have prevented a fertile exchange of ideas about identification with cultural texts. Borrowing insights from both camps, I offer a hybrid methodology in my own case study of identification, in which I interviewed readers and viewers of a cultural style I call “sentimental postmodernism.” This mixed-code style combines the emotional strategies of sentimentality and melodrama—chiefly their solicitation of identification—with a postmodern critique of identity politics and essentialism. While I invoke psychoanalytic and post-structuralist concepts concerning spectatorship and identification to explain the audience responses to these texts, I also use the ethnographic data to question and revise existing theory. In my work, audience ethnography and theories of subjectivity are dialectically engaged with one another rather than at odds. Valerie Walkerdine employs a similar hybrid methodology in her book Daddy’s Girl, in which she presents an “ethnography of the unconscious” desires and defenses of working class girls, as they interact with popular cultural representations of girlhood (122).1 Likewise, Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing offers an empirical study of female fans of Hollywood movie stars in order to revise psychoanalytic identification theory. While these two studies address the complexities of gender identification, my ethnography focuses on forms of identification that are either ignored or underemphasized by psychoanalytic theory—fluid identifications that cross traditional identity boundaries, enabling audiences to forge a consciously political sense of self that subverts rather than supports the status quo. By engaging in an ethnography of “political identification,” I combine the Birmingham School’s attention to the politics of cultural consumption with a psychoanalytic emphasis on emotion and the formation of subjectivity. Such a methodological mediation is still relatively rare, given the lasting power of the schism between the Birmingham School and psychoanalytic theorists. One of the essays that inaugurated the rift was David Morley’s “Texts, Readers, Subjects” (1980), in which he attacked psychoanalytic film theory, typified by the journal Screen, from the position of the Birmingham cultural studies school. Complaining that apparatus or “suture” theory treats readers merely as “bearers or puppets of their unconscious positionings” (167), Morley instead describes the reader as an active participant in the construction of meaning and the “struggle in ideology” (165). Similarly, Stuart Hall has spoken out against textual determinism, stressing that audiences do “interpretive work” (“Encoding/decoding” 134). Implicitly criticizing a psychoanalytic reading