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In terms of film textuality, resistant spectatorship is constituted not only in the production of an ironised 'space' through a spectator's sense of 'lack of fit' with the visual-spatial or narrative coding offered by dominant cinema, nor only in the consistency or inconsistency of diegetic performances. Resistant spectators do not read films seamlessly in accord with preferred meanings however much they may go along, more or less, with the pleasures of its fantasy scenario during the performance. Some locally (or sub-culturally) reflexive re-narrativisation also takes place. As Young (1996) pointed out, the full implications of anti-essentialist positions in accounts of the cultural specificity of spectatorship are often not fully appreciated:

For example, they [Stam and Spence, 1985: 641] write of how a North American spectator taking a different reading from the text's preferred meaning is deemed to have misread the scene from a Brazilian film, rather than to have made sense of the scene in terms of their own cultural context. This is inconsistent with their use of the more favourable, more academic term 'aberrant reading' to refer to Latin American audiences' interpretations of a Hollywood text. (Young, 1996: 9-10)

At the same time, Young doubted whether, for example, white audiences are always successfully and seamlessly sutured into the colonialist perspective which 'hails' them as such through the form of the dominant text. It must also be open to spectators to "consciously choose" (10) a dissident identification. If 'consciousness' (the discursive organisation of subjectivity) — and its 'repetition' in the processes of spectatorship — are not given but are sites of discursive struggle, this must be the case.

The multiplicity of locations (in institutionalised relations of power) cited by the production, distribution, and consumption of a text or performance also need to be taken into account. At the same time as conflicts and incoherences in practices and locations of 'performance' and 'spectatorship' are recognised, it needs also to be taken into account that the discourses and practices of postmodernity have reconstituted the productive contexts and strategies of popular and marginal cinemas. That is, the cinematic text itself may be seen as increasingly diversified. Moreover, in a postmodern ethos, the conventional coding of popular film-narratives, and of the scopic regime itself, is becoming increasingly ironised.

This 'undecidability' in the post-modern text and the ever-increasing agility of its diverse readers made 'aberrant' discourses assimilable in an unprecedented way. The next chapter looks at the recirculation of 'PoMo Homo' discourse in the segmented mainstream media culture in the 1990s.