Feminist Media Ethnography in India: Exploring Power, Gender, and Culture in the Field

This article is a self-reflexive account of one postcolonial feminist media scholar’s research among young middle-class women in urban India who read Western romance fiction. Urging feminist scholars to pay attention to the politics of representation of audiences in media studies, the article explores power imbalances in the field that arise due to social constructions of gender, ethnic, class, and sexual identities. The article reflects on failures, successes, and dilemmas experienced during the research process to show that feminist media ethnographies are embedded within discourses of power. By examining the multiple positionalities occupied by the researcher in relation to people encountered in the field, this account challenges binary distinctions between categories such as Self/Other, native/Westerner, and insider/outsider. In concluding, the article underscores the implications of research by non-Western feminist scholars in their own cultures for postcolonial feminist ethnography, feminist media ethnographies, and for media reception research on globalization in the cultural studies tradition.