Book Review: The Media Studies Reader, by Laurie Ouellette

The Media Studies Reader. Laurie Ouellette, ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. 606 pp. $59.95 pbk. $220 hbk.A treasure trove for courses in cultural studies, film, gender issues, media, popular culture, and sociology, The Media Studies Reader includes historically established and avant-garde essays. Taken together-and coupled with audiovisual material-the essays will challenge and entertain undergraduates.Enhanced by the number of women and/or people of color who contributed their insights, the collection of more than forty readings includes seven sections, each of which features class, ethnicity, gender, geopolitics, race, and sexuality. Laurie Ouellette, the editor of the collection, introduces multiple critical perspectives and highlights them effectively.Although the publisher promotes The Media Studies Reader as a collection appro- priate for introductory media courses, it would be a welcome addition to lower- and upper-division classes in disciplines as far ranging as film studies, journalism, gender studies, history, literature, media studies, and sociology. The editor introduces each section with a short summary and ideas for class discussions about audience, citizen- ship, culture, identity, representation, technology, and other compelling topics, making The Media Studies Reader an interdisciplinary success.An associate professor of communication studies at the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities, Ouellette organized the collection into sections that include media and culture, media and technology, media and representation, media and industry, media and identity, media and audience, and media and citizenship. Well-known scholars include Theodor Adorno, John Berger, Susan J. Douglas, Stuart Hall, George Lipsitz, and Tania Modleski. Provocative titles include "Eyes Wide Shut: Capitalism, Class, and the Promise of Black Media," "What's Your Flava: Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture," "Oh, Behave! Austin Powers and the Drag Kings," and "Makeover Television, Governmentality and the Good Citizen." Advertising, black media, fan- dom, Japanese media, labor issues, popular culture, mobile phones, music and copy- right issues, and women's media are well represented.The introduction, "Mapping Media Studies," first introduces Marshall McLuhan as one of those who advocates for critical understanding of media. What follows is a romp through a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives and what the editor acknowledges to be a "dizzying range of media objects" in industries as diverse as advertising, computers, digital games, film, the Internet, print, music, and television.One of the strengths of the collection is that it does not pretend to be all things to all people. Ouellette acknowledges that the collection is "not inclusive" (nor could it pos- sibly be) and that it is "not a progress narrative" where "each new-and-improved the- ory overcomes the limits of earlier approaches." Instead, The Media Reader establishes "distinct (but overlapping) 'stages' of media, broadly characterized as mass, niche and interactive." The interactive media stage, for example, includes studies about "500 channels, flexible viewing platforms and recording devices, online blogs, social net- working sites and reality TV shows soliciting the participation of ordinary people," writes Ouellette. Contributors analyze American media texts within the cultures and economies in which they took root. In an attempt at "slicing what has become a quite voluminous body of literature," Ouellette introduces two approaches that are organi- zational and thematic.As noted earlier, instead of isolating racial, ethnic, international, and gender differ- ence, Ouellette includes representative essays about these subjects in every section. …