Identity, Discourse, and Media Audiences: A Critical Ethnography of the Role of Visual Media in Religious Identity-Construction among U.S. Adolescents
Dissertation directed by Professor Stewart M. Hoover, Ph.D.
Lynn Schofield Clark, Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Fellow
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Colorado
Box 287
Boulder, CO 80309
Lynn.Clark@Colorado.EDU
This dissertation argues that there are three distinctive elements of religious identity-construction among adolescents today. First is a flattening of religious symbols. Religious symbols are not necessarily seen by adolescents as authoritative and fixed due to their reference to formal religious institutions but are rather approached as somewhat autonomous and, like other commodified symbols of the postmodern condition of late capitalism, they must be made useful. Second, analyzing the interpretive strategies teens brought to the popular television program Touched by an Angel, the dissertation finds that adolescents embrace a variety of publicy-available discourses of religion which are not solely attributable to race, class, gender, and religious affiliation. Thus the dissertation affirms the rise in personal autonomy or the privatization of religion and the subsequent importance of the mediated realm (as opposed to solely the realm of religious institutions) in determining religious identities. Third, the dissertation extends the metaphor of negotiation commonly used to describe the subject/text relation, demonstrating an interpretive approach here labeledregeneration . Subjects employing this approach negotiate a reading based on their social, gendered, racial/ethnic and other positions with reference to the text, yet regeneration implies that the interpretation gleaned also informs the individuals larger system of beliefs, thus resulting in a subtly changed belief system.
Employing a critical/cultural studies approach, this dissertation is founded upon the assumption that identity-construction is helpfully understood as the nexus of public discourses and individual subjectivities, thus challenging much of the identity literature in the U.S. based solely on the assumptions of developmental psychology. The role of media in the identity-construction of the individual subject, therefore, requires an analysis of both the themes of discourse that are available in mediated texts and echoed throughout the culture, and the various social, political, economic and other contexts that frame the individual adolescents identity narratives and practices. This project focuses on the discourses of religion and their relation to the religious identity-construction processes of individuals. The study employed ethnographic interviews with seventy adolescents and their parents, five in-depth case studies of adolescents, three peer-led discussion groups (some of the adolescents involved in case studies were trained to lead focus groups without the primary researcher present), and three focus groups with parents of teens. Over one hundred persons participated in the research, although the five case studies and the six focus groups provide the in-depth material that is central to the final analysis.