Textual Analysis

Textual analysis is an interdisciplinary qualitative method used to critique cultural artifacts, most commonly media texts. Though textual analysis has historically been associated with cultural studies, the method has increasingly been utilized in mass communication research to expose power dynamics in media representation, reception, and production. Textual analysis is grounded in a critical or interpretive research perspective that views reality as constructed through interaction and discourse. In the critical paradigm, the researcher is the primary instrument of analysis because she is understood as an active, subjective part of the knowledge-building process. Carrying a postmodern disillusionment with truth claims, critical perspectives interrogate power hierarchies and inequity. Textual analysis has been identified as an ideal method for analyzing hegemonic representations of gender, race, class, and sexuality, as well as illuminating subversive messages embedded in dominant texts.

The very use of the word text illustrates a certain post-structuralist perspective at the root of textual analysis. In the practice of textual analysis, there is an understanding that people from different cultures experience reality differently and that there is no right or wrong way to interpret texts such as films, advertising, books, and fashion. As Alan McKee argues, the meanings of texts are culturally specific, and researchers must be aware of the ways in which language, culture, values, and relationships change over time and place. Understanding the diversity of possible interpretations and experiences, researchers may turn the same critical lens on their own culture and begin to dissect and discuss the meaning embedded in texts. Textual analysis often focuses on the geographically and temporally specific nature of texts but situates the texts historically. Illuminating themes in texts requires an understanding of the culture that produces and consumes them: the myths, embedded norms, and stereotypes that underlie the texts.

Textual analysis is an effort to decode the latent meanings that exist in texts. In a sense, it is taking a given text (such as an advertisement) and working backward to try to understand the cultural values and norms that would have informed the production of the text. Researchers may ask, What stereotypes are present? What cultural norms would have informed the reproduction of those stereotypes? There is less concern with determining how the text may or may not “match” a given “reality” and more effort to understand the ways that texts represent the embodiment of producers' own notions of what reality is and then how the texts may further construct or influence what consumers believe about reality. Texts therefore provide insight into the intentions, beliefs, values, and norms of any given culture. Textual analysis requires an examination of those cultural norms that have become so ubiquitous as to be considered invisible, inconsequential, or “normal” and to question why those norms exist and how they are reproduced in text as unquestioned realities.

Furthermore, researchers often discuss a range of possible interpretations based on the audiences' subject positions. One of the foundations of textual analysis is a concern with the fluidity of meanings in any given cultural artifact. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall argues that every text carries traces of dominant ideology but that all texts are also polysemous and may incorporate embedded meanings that allow for oppositional or negotiated interpretations. Thus, a major consideration of textual analysis is the variety of possible interpretations of meaning and the role that the consumer plays in decoding texts. Therefore, there is also an onus on researchers who use textual analysis to be self-reflective by explaining their own subject positions and experiences with the texts.

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