ABSTRACT
The figures of audience that we produce have a wider public circulation that has a political effectivity outside of people's particular analytic goals. At the same time the figures that we produce are different from others in that we demand that they tell people something grounded in facticity. However, it is the instability of the concept "audience" itself that most exacerbates the development of coherent research approaches and productive debate between different theoretical formations. Like many other analytic terms essentially adopted from ordinary language, the term "audience" is always already implicated in a complex semantic/discursive field. The privileging of broadcast reception has reinforced atomistic models of the activity - privatized reception by lone viewers or the family unit. Recent debates within feminist sociological theory offer models for the regional reconstruction of reception study. Recent feminist researches into media reception have entered into and rearticulated this debate both methodologically and politically.
