18.6: Conclusion – From Inventory to Attachment
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- Herman Gray
- University of California Press
Jennifer Petersen’s Murder, the Media, and the Politics of Public Feeling might be taken as the kind of study that moves away from the dominance of concerns with parity and representation as routes to social and racial justice toward concern with the affective work of media in galvanizing feelings, organizing publics, and materializing grievance. 24 In her concern with emotional conflicts, legal adjudications, and social negotiations over the depiction, circulation, investment, and use of the coverage of the murders (and their aftermath) of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Petersen traces the circulation, disputes, and impact of the emotional economy of these events. She shows how they came to matter on questions of sexuality, race, gender, and nation. Petersen’s study prompts media studies of race and diversity to consider not just what things mean but also how they matter, where, for whom, and with what effects.
To Peterson’s emphasis on the relationship of media to public feeling and how things matter, I urge attention to the concerns mobilized by media content and the resonances it generates for users as well as producers of content. Engaging research this way may at the very least complement if not reimagine insights that the nexus between representation and demography now yields. Practically, this means moving away from the assumption that a bid on image accuracy and authenticity anchored by demography will provide some assurance of social parity. It suggests moving toward the possibility that a focus on resonance and attachment might critically address the complexities of race making and the production of diversity as a technology of power in the current conjuncture. Signaling matters of concern registers a different assumption, one that considers the inscription of racial meaning as endemic media work.
Complementing media studies of production, industrial organization, and routine media practices with critical research on the intensity, duration, and locus of emotional concerns engendered by media could direct critical analytic attention to forms of attachment and identification that do a bit more than document annual diversity effects in media. The alliance of discursive and social conditions of possibility that has defined much of media studies research on race and media for several generations now suggests that we have reached a critical limit of the capacity of the alliance of demography and representation to tell us enough about the practice, production, and normalization of diversity to matter. The annual research reports on representational parity have themselves become normative, organizing and fueling policy prescriptions, research agendas, guild training programs, marketing research, and branding campaigns. Perhaps it is time to ask that our research tell us a different story about the operations of power/knowledge and the role of media in the making of racial inequality (and its potential for the making of racial justice).