The Reception and Experience Approach

The Reception and Experience Approach "focuses on the readers and viewers of cultural products, their experiences and perceptions".  Women typically interact with different social cultural items that they may feel as though they can relate to it some how. For example I chose the image of the Desperate Housewives because some women can relate to the stories of each individual character. Let's take Lynette for example, she's a mother of three children who started off as being close to the top at her job then got pregnant and had to change her life completely. Some mothers can relate to this because she has three kids. These women also go through divorces, which is another concept that women can relate to.

According to Lana Rakow, "approaching popular culture from the standpoint of women's experiences with cultural forms presents feminists with a central tension in feminism. That is, it presents feminists with the challenge of respecting other women's understandings of their own lives, though that understanding may be different from a feminist reading of their situation. It also, however, presents feminists with a central objective of feminism, the opportunity for activism and change as feminists come to better understanding how other women function in partiarchy. " These soap operas that women can relate to helps understand what other women feel about a topic. Not every women may necessarily agree with what is being presented in media, but it allows those who are interested to have some kind of identification with other people.