I Don't Want to Be a Citizen (if it Means I Have to Watch the ABC)

Abstract

This paper argues that much writing about media and citizenship tends to rely on a set of realist or structuralist assumptions about what constitutes a state, a citizen and politics. Because of these assumptions, other forms of social organisation that could reasonably be described as nations, and other forms of social engagement that could be called citizenship are excluded from consideration. One effect of this blindness is that certain identities, and the cultural formations associated with them, continue to be overvalued as more real and important than others. Areas of culture that are traditionally while, masculine, middle-class and heterosexual remain central in debates, while the political processes of citizens of, for example, a Queer nation, continue to be either ignored or devalued as being somehow trivial, unimportant or less real. The paper demonstrates that this need not be the case — that the language of nation and citizenship can reasonably be expanded to include these other forms of social organisation, and that when such a conceptual move is made, we can find ways of describing contemporary culture that attempt to understand the public-sphere functions of the media without falling back into traditional prejudices against feminised, Queer, working class or non-white forms of culture.