Conceiving of social inequality as a salient object of research for media industry studies is a tricky business. As a research matter, approaching inequality is mired in if not now displaced by a cluster of terms like diversity, multiculturalism, difference, lifestyle, and niche. Media’s role in the production of inequalities based on class, race, gender, and sexual identification is displaced onto questions of access and representation, multiculturalism and diversity, branding and audience appeal. As the subject of media industry studies research, approaches to the study of diversity often direct researchers to see diversity as a discrete outcome and empirically track rates of diversity in the production and expression of media content.
Thinking with the possibilities opened up by renewed energies and critical foci in media industry studies, I ask what assumptions underwrite how diversity is thought in media studies of race and difference. What evidence locates, measures, and assesses its effectiveness as a social accomplishment? Is the study of diversity a salient means of getting at the role of media in the production of inequalities? As the editors of this collection suggest, following such a research agenda means starting with the methodological assumption that diversity, like studies of creative labor, operates at multiple levels and in multiple registers, including textual representation, reception, and production, as well as in the micro transactions that circulate among different sites.1 Such transactions include critical discourses and industrial practices that organize and nominate media objects as significant and worth studying, as well as the legal and aesthetic disputes that make social differences based on race, gender, and sexual identification objects of legal oversight, political dispute, financial (dis)investment, and administrative management by studios, the FCC, global entertainment corporations, and guilds. As with studies of work objects, deep texts, and implicit ritualized relations, at each of these levels media researchers might aim to identify the quotidian practices of diversity and ask how is it framed, how it works, and to what ends.
Research on questions of diversity (as a gloss for inequality) seems especially suited to neoliberal approaches to studies of media industries as a robust site to generate new evidence about the actual practice of diversity in media organizations and institutions, its expression and production as a practical outcome of the doings that happen in particular and specific production and creative sites.2 This includes researchers asking with respect to diversity, what do creative personnel understand themselves to be doing and what notions of diversity matter, how, and where do such understandings express themselves in their actual quotidian practice?
Diversity is also the object of contentious political, legal, and academic disputes. In the United States, diversity is a practical outcome, the momentary stabilization of a discursive logic and signifying system that produces material effects in the social world. As a proxy for addressing race and a disavowal of racism and inequalities based on gender, racial, and class difference, diversity operates in a shifting nexus of legal rulings, social claims, cultural practices, and media narratives about its practical life and effects. As a key location where diversity is practiced materially and symbolically, the media too is constantly undergoing economic, institutional, and technological change, marked by the appearance and disappearance of new platforms, synergies, financial entities, and international networks of finance and production. The cultural idea of diversity circulates in a media environment where, at least on the issue of race and ethnicity, social difference is a cultural signifier of a (purportedly) postracial America. Cultural signs of diversity, such as language, sexual identifications, school textbooks, and university admissions policies, are not only contested but extremely “hot” discursive objects. As the subject of news stories, reality television, and salacious entertainment, these signs of social difference veer between “postracial” racial insignificance and disputes about the primacy of racial and ethnic difference in access to economic resources and differential exposure to personal vulnerability and social insecurity, such as environmental toxins, police abuse, youth violence, and substandard housing. In this sense, diversity is also a technology of power, a means of managing the very difference it expresses, which prompts me to focus in this chapter on the social life of diversity as a working practice, social commitment, and policy goal in the media as well as media studies scholarship.
Industry, scholarly, and market inventories of the distribution of race and gender difference in media content look to representational parity as the most salient benchmark of diversity in the entertainment business. Of course, representational parity is essentially meaningless without demography as a reference point. Hence the path to diversity in entertainment media must always pass through the “assumed link between representation and demography,” a link that has defined media studies of race and diversity in the United States over several generations now.
What are the conditions of possibility that produced the discursive alliance between representation and demography? Moreover, why (and how) did the discursive alliance between representation and demography come to settle on production as the site of correction and regulation that still organizes scholarly research, industry responses, and state intervention as means of addressing racial and ethnic disparities in U.S. media? In the remainder of the chapter, I detail the technological, discursive, social, and cultural conditions of possibility that gave rise to this initial alliance, then identify the subsequent shifts in media discourses of race and racism that give rise to a different problem space and set of research questions. Drawing on examples from recent media studies scholarship, I then consider some possible ways that researchers and scholars might approach media studies of difference, diversity, and representation that conceive of a different problem space for thinking about media and diversity.
