Beyond ‘reifying whiteness’ in feminist media studies

Abstract

In this talk, I turn a Black and transnational feminist reflexive eye on the field of feminist media studies, to surface for critical consideration a certain ‘story that we tell’ about race, more specifically about the visibly dominant whiteness, in the global North, of the kinds of media texts and cultures that commonly comprise our objects of analysis. I show that there is a repeated critical claim to the effect that the texts and cultures ‘reify whiteness’. Interrogating and faulting some of the variously methodological, epistemological and ontological premises and effects of the claim, I argue that it is itself performative: it contributes to the very reification that it decries, not least by seemingly serving to explain and justify why, in a given piece of scholarship, further questions about race cannot really be attended to. I argue that we need to go beyond reifying whiteness in feminist media studies, so that we can attempt to offer more complete and rigorous consideration of the racial politics of what we study and how, and indeed who we are, our various positionalities, as not only scholars of media but also audiences, consumers and users ourselves.