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