The Pressures of the Text: Intertextuality and Preferred Readings

Abstract

This chapter introduces the theoretical and methodological tools I intend to use in the second of my two major lines of inquiry for this book — the production of preferred readings through mutual constitution in discourses on cosmetic surgery. These tools, intertextuality and interpretive repertoires, will be used to analyse the discourses around cosmetic surgery I mentioned earlier, in order to shed light upon the way cosmetic surgery acts as a technology of gender through its construction of preferred readings. In the first section of this chapter I investigate the value of notions of intertextuality to my analysis and at the same time confront the use of the concept of polysemy that characterises much cultural criticism at present. While the term ‘polysemy’ refers to the presence of more than one possibility for the interpretation of a text, more than one semiotic function, it is frequently used to argue for a limitless range of possible interpretations. It is the latter appropriation of the term that I tackle in this chapter. My use of theories of intertextuality is contingent upon adapting them so that neither an entirely closed and controlled process of reading, nor an entirely open or free one is implied. In the second section I explore the concept of interpretive repertoires’ as developed by Potter and Wetherell in their book, Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour.