By Shoma Munshi
Assuming that readers have had the opportunity to find in a previous newsletter the list of speakers and their respective papers, I will present here some of the main threads of discussion which emerged during those three fruitful days. All the papers addressed different media genres of television, advertisements, magazines, and films. What they also all had in common was that they dealt with media representations as discursive constructs using both theories developed from media studies as well as poststructuralism. Femininity as sites of webs of discourse dealt with nation and nationhood, modernity and consumerism, ambivalence and sexuality: the way in which representations of women are capable of bearing (at times) contradictory discourses. Striking was the fact of the comparative dimension across so many different cultures. Discourses of citizenship and consumerism converged in many of the papers as did the kinds of images that were being talked about. For instance, there seemed, at times, to be an almost unnerving similarity of the 'modern woman' as represented in the ads of both the Indonesian and Indian magazines similarly entitled 'Femina'! Another common thread was how the local and self are produced with relation to other things which are global.
What came up recurrently during discussions was the number of issues which were thrown up for comparative research. To this end, debate centred on how the specificity of problematics are articulated in specific contexts - in their national and local dimensions as well as in their transnational contexts. The papers presented distinctions and differences between the West (Britain, France, and America for example) and also distinctions in Asia (India, Indonesia, and China).
That the woman today is absolutely central to notions of consumerism was a point that everyone found agreement on. However, the problematization of the 'modern woman' in different contexts in the West and Asia was clearly felt. The anxiety about Westernization, embodied in the figure of the stereotypical Western woman as 'not-so- good', with resonances of individualism, career, and self was to be found in the papers dealing with the problem more within the Asian context. This fear of Westernization: is it based on illusion; or does it embody a real threat? were some of the issues we felt we had to examine in greater detail. Cautionary words urged people to be wary of recapturing 'tradition', because what appears as traditional is often a reinvented, ethnicized, and orientalized picture of what tradition is. Historically too, it is important to remember that in the colonial world, at some level, modernity was very often used as a lure, a trap - more a method of control. In fact, we were reminded that critique of the Enlightenment project began in places like Calcutta, not Paris. Trying to think of 'alternative modernities' therefore becomes a very complicated project. There was thus general consensus on the fact that the idea of the 'modern woman' should be made much more explicitly a contested category.
As with any conference, it was inevitable that certain aspects were played up more than others. For further research (and hopefully another conference along similar lines!), stress was laid on the significance and importance of attending to a historical juncture, i.e., thinking about the historical periods addressed for different countries; meanings circulating 'inside' and even 'outside' texts; sociological issues like class and political economy; issues of how images mediate between the social world and levels of individual subjectivity since the 'personal' is always the hardest thing to look at.
To conclude, research within the realm of Media and Cultural Studies has licensed discussion on the politics of knowledge. If we talked about 'anxieties' in our conference, we also celebrated them.