Introduction - Affect and Identity A Cultural Studies Perspective on Audience Research

This part of the Routledge Companion to Media Audiences will explore affect and identity. As the parts before will have made clear, to be a media audience (member) can be all-consuming. Identities register in and as ‘affectivity’ in terms of how engaging and disengaging with media texts and forms makes us feel about ourselves. This happens regardless of the fact that they will likely be partial identities, one of the many sides or layers that make up who you are at a given time in your life, in a given context. Indeed, as Yiu Fai Chow’s chapter illustrates beautifully, one can become identified and identify as an audience member in totally unforeseen ways. Chow reports how visitors at a concert of the Hong Kong boyband Mirror coped with a major incident when a giant video screen fell and seriously injured dancers. Videos of the disaster went viral. For those present ‘being a (live) media audience’ and ‘becoming an audience-represented-in-the-media’ forged new identities. Chow interviewed three of them and uses their stories to understand how they formed an affective community and built audiencehood in terms of resilience. It is an extreme example of how affect and identity intersect and impact one another. It uses the cultural studies’ tools of researching audiencehood, as do all the chapters in Part V: interviews and ethnographic work. As with two other chapters in this part, Chow uses his case study to reflect on earlier work. In so doing, a strong sense of cultural studies’ engagement with media audiencehood transpires, notably the ways in which its tenets of attending to power relations, everyday life and what Raymond Williams called ‘structures of feeling’ continue to matter and inform an important research tradition (Williams 1961).