Preaching to the converted? Media representations of feminist politics and their reception

This paper addresses van Zoonen's [Van Zoonen, L. (1994) Feminist Media Studies (London, Sage)] argument that the media, in their role as agents of public knowledge, have signally failed to mobilise public support for feminist politics. A primary aim of the paper is to open this argument up for further debate by considering two alternative explanations for this failure. I show that on the one hand there are some convincing arguments that it is representations and the conditions of their production that are the primary source of the problem, but on the other hand I argue that we also need a greater understanding of how representations of feminist politics are received by audiences if the media's failure to mobilise public recognition and support for feminist ideas is to be rectified. To this end I discuss an empirical study I carried out which is premised on Sperber & Wilson's [Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1995) Relevance (Blackwell, Oxford)] inferential model of communication, and which was designed to make explicit the processes involved in the interpretation of a positive non‐fiction media representation of feminist politics. The findings of the study indicate that audience members who are unfamiliar with non‐mainstream discourses derive different interpretations from such media representations to those for whom these discourses are already familiar. These findings raise some questions about the media's ability to communicate feminist ideas effectively to a mass audience and also raises the question of whether representations of feminist politics which call on non‐mainstream discourses can only ever preach to the converted.