Identity, discourse, and media audiences: A critical ethnography of the role of visual media in religious identity construction among United States adolescents

Employing a critical/cultural studies approach, this dissertation argues that identity-construction is best understood as the nexus of public discourses and individual subjectivities. To understand the role of media in identity-construction, this work analyzes both the themes of discourse that are available in mediated texts and echoed throughout the culture, and the various social, political, economic and other contexts that frame the individual adolescent's identity narratives and practices. The discourses of religion and their relation to the religious identity-construction of individual subjects provides the focus for the current analysis.;The study employed ethnographic interviews with 70 adolescents and their parents, 5 in-depth case studies of adolescents, 3 "peer-led" discussion groups (some of the adolescents involved in case studies were trained to lead focus groups without the primary researcher present), and 3 focus groups with parents of teens.;The dissertation argues that there are three distinctive elements of religious identity-construction among adolescents today. First is a flattening of religious symbols. Religious symbols are not necessarily seen by adolescents as authoritative and "fixed" due to their reference to formal religious institutions but are rather approached as somewhat autonomous and, like other commodified symbols of the postmodern condition of late capitalism, they must be made useful. Second, analyzing the interpretive strategies teens brought to the popular television program Touched by an Angel, the dissertation finds that adolescents embrace a variety of publicly-available discourses of religion which are not solely attributable to race, class, gender, and religious affiliation. Thus the dissertation affirms the rise in personal autonomy or the privatization of religion and the subsequent importance of the mediated realm (as opposed to solely the realm of religious institutions) in determining religious identities. Third, while affirming Stuart Hall's interpretive taxonomy of dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings, the dissertation demonstrates a fourth interpretive approach, a regeneration that draws upon a dominant or negotiated reading of a text and is based on a viewer's position with reference to the text, yet also subtly informs the individual's larger system of beliefs, thus resulting in a subtly changed belief system.