Other Halves: Lesbian-Feminist Post-Structuralist Readings of Some Recent New Zealand Print Media Representations of Lesbians

Abstract

In this thesis I examine some instances where the New Zealand print media has represented lesbians, and produce theory for a reading of these constructions. Lesbians are marginalised in both the mass media and media studies, as well as in social science theorising. These absences lead me to focus on knowledge as a social construction, and particularly to explore the mutual interrogation of feminisms and post-structuralisms, specifically in terms of how this might connect to my attempted conceptualisation of lesbian oppression and its relationship to the media. I first consider the potential utility and tensions of a feminist post-structuralist approach to the topic. I develop my particular version of feminist post-structuralism as a coalition, via a feminist appropriation of the concept of deconstruction of binary oppositions. This provides me with a useful framework with which to critique lesbian feminist, gay and more 'sex radical'-influenced theorising about the inequality of lesbians, and produces the more logocentric strand of my theorising which I term lesbian-feminism. I then 'post-structuralise' this mix further using a Foucauldian perspective, producing my situated knowledge version of a lesbian-feminist post-structuralism. I go on to use this approach to review and criticise the relevant media studies and theories. In the second half of the thesis, I give readings of two recent examples of the New Zealand print media's constructions of 'lesbians', which are also importantly inflected by contests over the politics of sexual violence. These are the Mervyn Thompson affair, in which a university lecturer was tied to a tree by a group of women rumoured to be lesbians (1984); and the child sexual abuse controversies and associated targeting of lesbian feminists as over-zealous professionals (1988-89). My readings suggest that there are connections in each narrative field between 'lesbians' and other themes in the media accounts, which go beyond any simplistic conclusion that lesbians are scapegoats. Each critical reading involves the deconstruction of dominant and oppositional discourses of gender and sexuality, and considers their connections to the ways in which 'lesbians' are produced by the accounts. Just as I have used a multi-way interrogation of feminisms, accounts of lesbian oppression, post-structuralist theories and media studies to construct my oppositional readings of the media stories, the media readings feed back into my theoretical narrative. The oppression of lesbians and its relationship to discursive constructions in these media accounts is importantly connected to dominant phallogocentric and logocentric discourses. Lesbian-feminism, feminist post-structuralisms, and post-structuralisms more generally, have some useful conceptual and political tools to offer one another. In my readings, lesbian-feminism and radical feminist theories of sexual violence play off against deconstructive analyses of the media texts. This multi-way exchange across boundaries demonstrates that these fields were never binarily opposed, and further, that such traffic is necessary to produce texts more open to further readings and less productive of their own exclusions.