ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book deals with audience analysis on the basis of personal narratives and comments inspired by film watching and class discussions with graduate and postgraduate students from many countries around the globe. It outlines the history of audience analysis before moving to intersectionality's preferred methodology: ethnography. Critics claim that categories of race, class, and gender are often used as Western ontological presumptions, taken-for-granted categories of the modernist imperial project that perpetuates epistemic violence in the non-Western world. The "anticategorical" approach assumes that an analysis of social mechanisms with the use of categories such as race, class, and gender falls short of a holistic account of intrinsic social relations and proposes the inclusion of more analytic categories, i.e. intersections.
