Critical Studies on Terrorism

ISSN: 1753-9153 (Print) 1753-9161 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rter20

Ask the audience: television, security and

Homeland

Louise Pears

To cite this article: Louise Pears (2016) Ask the audience: television, security and Homeland,
Critical Studies on Terrorism, 9:1, 76-96, DOI: 10.1080/17539153.2016.1147774

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2016.1147774

Published online: 29 Apr 2016.

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CRITICAL STUDIES ON TERRORISM, 2016
VOL. 9, NO. 1, 76–96
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2016.1147774

ARTICLE

Ask the audience: television, security and Homeland

Louise Pears
Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article puts forward a synthesis of work from Security Studies Received 15 October 2015
and Cultural Studies in order to trace the link between popular Accepted 17 December 2015
culture and security. This analysis contributes to the growing KEYWORDS
research in Critical Security Studies on the role of popular culture Popular culture; television;
in the representation and reproduction of terrorism, security, and audience; Homeland; cultural
identity. It brings in approaches from Television Studies to Critical studies; narrative
Terrorism Studies to theorise the process of meaning creation for
audiences of terrorism shows on television. This synthesis enables
an original contribution to the conceptualisation, theorisation, and
methodology of the study of terrorism discourse, which allows me
to draw together and operationalise the growing concerns with
identity, emotions, and the everyday in Security Studies. It brings
in examples from an analysis that applied this approach to an
analysis of the television series Homeland, which considers both
the meaning within Homeland and the process of meaning making
by members of the show’s British audience. Using data gathered in
focus groups, it shows how viewers read, reproduce, and resist the
dominant narratives within the text demonstrating the utility of
audience studies.

Introduction
At 9 pm each week, I sat down in my living room to watch Homeland1 (Gansa, Gordon,
and Raff 2011) as Carrie Mathison attempted to stop another terrorist attack on the USA.
My heart rate quickened when danger closed in. I sat on the edge of my seat as terrorists
were chased through American streets. I even cried when favourite characters died. This
is how I “experience” terrorism, sat on my sofa, remote in my hand, heart in my mouth. I
am not alone. The Broadcasters Audience Research Board reported on their website that
2.8 million people watched Brody’s last gasps in the finale of season three. Terrorism
stories are televised, visual, emotional and popular.
This article makes the link between terrorism and television, putting forward a critical
narrative approach to security. It speaks to those who are interested in the representa-
tion and discursive construction of terrorism, as well as those from other fields who are
interested in the relationship between popular culture and world politics. It argues that
work on popular culture and world politics should pay attention to the text’s audiences.
In doing so, it challenges the boundaries of Security Studies to argue for the inclusion of
the politics of identity, emotion, and the everyday. It develops an understanding of

CONTACT Louise Pears l.k.pears@leeds.ac.uk

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 CRITICAL STUDIES ON TERRORISM 77

security as culture, building on the “narrative turn” in International Relations (IR), by

incorporating work from Cultural Studies and Sociology.
There has been a proliferation of work in Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) on the
representation of terrorism, in political discourse, the news media, and increasingly in
popular culture. This can be viewed as a niche topic in CTS and Critical Security
Studies (CSS), or taken as part of the collective of scholars from a range and of
disciplines, including Popular Geopolitics, Cultural Studies, Contemporary History,
Film Studies, and more; it is part of a sub(inter)discipline of popular culture and
world politics (Dittmer 2010; Rowley and Weldes 2012). This article aims to supple-
ment this work by putting forward a new approach to the study of popular culture
and security.
It argues that although Security Studies has begun in recent decades to recognise the
importance of language, narrative, and culture, it suffers from two lacunae: the first is
audiences and the reception of texts about security, and the second is the everyday
practices of consumption in relation to popular cultural texts. It puts forward a critical
narrative account that brings people back into the analysis of popular culture. This
critical narrative approach takes advantage of the increasing theoretical diversity in the
social sciences and in IR, and draws on popular culture and world politics to consider
narrative accounts of security. It also incorporates accounts of security and the everyday,
and approaches that use representations to study emotion, and it argues that these
gaps occur because of a limited engagement with the theoretical, methodological, and
substantive insights offered by other disciplines that have been grappling with the role
of popular culture in the formation of identities and world views for much longer. This
article puts forward a synthesis of the work from the disparate disciplines of Security
Studies and Cultural Studies in order to trace the link between popular culture and
security, and brings approaches from Television Studies and Sociology to Security
Studies in order to theorise the process of meaning creation for audiences of television.
This synthesis enables an original contribution to the conceptualisation, theorisation,
and methodology of the study of terrorism on television. It lays the groundwork for the
investigation of the process of meaning making in the interaction between context,
television shows, and audience, and puts forward a methodology that combines textual
analysis with focus group audience studies. This allows me to draw together and
operationalise the growing concerns with identity, emotions, and the everyday in
Security Studies.
The article then uses two examples from a longer study of the television show
Homeland to briefly illustrate how this approach can strengthen work on terrorism
and popular culture. First, it looks at how, despite a seemingly pro-Counter
Intelligence Agency (CIA) message that can be read within the Homeland text, partici-
pants take a much more varied and often oppositional stance to the CIA than a straight
reading of the text alone might indicate. Second, it considers how the consumption of
Homeland also plays a part in the creation of racialised boundaries of inclusion and
exclusion central to terrorism discourses. It is important to consider both how a text is
consumed, and who is consuming it, to understand how it becomes meaningful. This
demonstrates the utility of audience studies to CTS.
As well as being a critically acclaimed and internationally popular television show,
Homeland is also now (in)famous for its depiction of Muslim people and places.
78 L. PEARS

Described in an article on Al Jazeera’s website as “TV’s most Islamophobic show,” it also

recently received wide coverage for a scandal surrounding a piece of Arabic graffiti
(commissioned to make the set more realistic), which translated to read “Homeland is
racist.” This article contributes to this debate to consider how the context and practices
of consumption are also important to understanding the racialising effects of the show.
The term racialisation is used to describe the process by which race is discursively
constituted, and the article addresses Critical Race work, and also Critical Whiteness
Studies.

Popular culture and terrorism

What has terrorism got to do with popular culture? Common sense tells us that terrorism
is about life and death, the bombs, beheadings and bodies that are the extreme
expression of political violence, whilst popular culture is what we do for fun, what we
switch on in order to switch off from the complications of politics and everyday life. Yet,
scholars in CSS have shown that popular culture is a key site where terrorism comes to
make sense (Jackson 2005; Boggs and Pollard 2008; Hülsse and Spencer 2008; Brecher,
Devenney, and Winter 2010; Breton Ortega 2010; Brereton and Culloty 2012; Löfflmann
2013).
This article builds on the growing work that takes the role of popular culture seriously
in Security Studies (Weldes 2006; Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009; Shepherd 2013;
Caso and Hamilton 2015). Where this started as a marginal pursuit in Security Studies, it
has become an increasingly established way to interrogate the production, circulation,
and contestation of power (Rowley and Weldes 2015). What is often dubbed the
“narrative turn” in IR has shown how popular culture does not simply represent the
real world, but that it in fact shapes the world (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009). In
order to do this, Security Studies has drawn on discourse theory to conceptualise these
representations. Discourse functions to “determine the terms of intelligibility whereby a
political reality can be known and acted upon,” so that our critical attention then turns
to “examine how meanings are produced and attached to various social subjects and
objects, thus constituting particular interpretive dispositions that create certain possibi-
lities and exclude others” (Doty 1996, 6). This work builds on narrative accounts of
security (Wibben 2011). The stories that we are told constitute the reality we know
(Shepherd 2013). Once security is seen as a narrative, we can challenge representations
and so challenge what is taken for granted.
Terrorism has long been represented in popular culture, and as Shaw (2015) outlines,
it has been a plot device since the emergence of early silent era cinema. Academics,
pundits, and industry insiders alike were quick to announce that the terrorist attacks of
9/11 would usher in a new era for film and television, which eschewed the glorification
of violence. However, the pronouncements of the end of an era were premature, and
despite initial reticence, creative and academic attention turned to terrorism to analyse
and process the traumas of 9/11. Audiences bought Marvel’s special edition book,
Heroes: The World’s Greatest Super Hero Creators Honor The World’s Greatest Heroes
9-11-2001 (Quesada 2001), they watched Jack Bauer’s exploits in the Counter Terrorist
Unit (Surnow and Cochran 2001), they laughed with Team America’s (Parker 2004) satire
of American interventionism, they sat on the edge of their seats as Maya hunted Osama
 CRITICAL STUDIES ON TERRORISM 79

Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow 2012), and they played their part in a terrorist
attack in Call of Duty Modern Warfare (Activision 2009). Terrorism was not just on the
news, but it was at the cinema, on our televisions, and in our video games.
There has been a rich and diverse body of work that has analysed the symbiotic
relationship between popular culture and terrorism, including analysis of comic books
(Dittmer 2005; Faludi 2007), novels (Carroll 2011), action movies (Dixon 2004; Froula and
Randell 2010; Brereton and Culloty 2012), horror movies (Prince 2009; Briefel and Miller
2011), video games (Schwartz 2006), and television (Erickson 2008; Van Veeren 2009;
Takacs 2012), amongst other cultural artefacts, to show how stories about terrorism were
crucial in establishing and supporting dominant discourses of the war on terror. As
Löfflmann (2013, 4) argues, there is “long-standing cooperation between the Pentagon
and Hollywood,” such that “that the Department of Defence and the Armed Forces are
not just passive service providers to the film industry, but in fact an active part in the
process of filmmaking” (Löfflmann 2013). This direct relationship between the US and
military intelligence forms part of a nexus which is often identified as the “Military-
Entertainment-Complex” and which recognises the specific material context of
production.
There has also been work that points to the potential for resistance that can also be
contained within popular culture. For example, Seja (2011) shows how humour is used in
the 2008 film Harry and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo to argue that despite criticisms
that this film received (from Amnesty International amongst others) for the trivialisation
of Guantanamo bay detainees, it actually brings into view victims that are usually absent
from terrorism discourses. Morey and Yaqin (2011, 175) argue there are two types of
post-9/11 thriller, those which repeats stereotypes, but also those which:

begin by deploying the usual set of stereotypes only to unsettle them and even use them to
reflect back to the viewer some of the more unthinking prejudices and smug attitudes the
West has been encouraged to indulge in as civilizations supposedly clash.

These works have shown “how easily the traumas of 9/11 bond with formulas of popular
culture and can be repackaged as entertainment” (Prince 2009, 1).
Yet, whilst this work has done much to uncover and challenge the discursive
construction of terrorism and counterterrorism, it has not asked how the messages
and meanings from these diverse texts are made, and accounts of the audience have
largely been missing. There has been increasing attention paid to deconstructing dis-
courses and examining texts within Security Studies and CTS, which has produced
important interventions into terrorism research. However, so far, this has largely failed
to take into account the context of consumption and production. Dittmer (2010, 42)
argues that the focus on discourse left the study of geopolitics and security “disembo-
died – literally devoid of people.” This absence means that Security Studies lacks a
theorisation of the process of meaning making from popular culture. It has acknowl-
edged that security is created through representations, but the mechanisms are absent
from most accounts. Whilst it has put forward television as a site of meaning production,
it has not developed an account of the relationship between television, audience, and
the “real” world of security. That is, it does not place the representation of security into
its wider cultural context. Accounts of security and popular culture in Security Studies
focus on the messages within the text, but they have not asked how these texts or
80 L. PEARS

shows are read and interpreted differently by different people depending on their
cultural setting. Crucially, this means that accounts of security discourse have left
depressingly little room for agency. The audience are assumed to simply absorb the
message from the text exactly as the producers intended them to. At the same time, it
has not asked how the meaning that a text produces is also shaped by who engages
with it and how they engage with it. This article shows how this offers up space for
resistance, but simultaneously it shows how it can also rely on, and reify, particular
racialised categories.
Grayson, Davies, and Philpott (2009) put forward a nine-point research agenda for the
ongoing study of Popular Culture in IR. They argue that scholars need to pay attention
to “the signifying and lived practice of popular culture as ‘texts’ that can be understood
as political and as sites where politics takes place” in order to study identity formation.
They suggest that there needs to be more attention paid to the interpretation of texts,
and they also suggest that the study of popular culture in IR would be improved by
including work from Cultural Studies. This article makes an attempt to pursue and
operationalise these elements of this research agenda.
There has been some work, particularly from Popular Geopolitics, that has begun to
work to this research agenda. One account that considers audience reactions is from
Brereton and Culloty (2012) who consider the reception of The Bourne Ultimatum and 24
by looking at online reviews. They conclude that “the question of textual effect is greatly
complicated by the desires and motivations of individuals,” and whilst this may seem an
obvious point, it is often missed from discussions of terrorism discourse (Brereton and
Culloty 2012, 495). A second account comes from Dittmer and Dodds (2008, 437), who
are concerned with “the making of geopolitical meaning by audiences as they consume
popular culture,” an approach that Dodds (2008) implemented to look at how audience
engage with and contest meaning in the film Rendition. These works make an initial
foray into audience reception, but they can be built upon through a greater attention to
the theories and methodologies that come from Audience Studies.
There are two additional fields in CSS, which could be brought together via an
attention to audiences in popular culture, namely, security and the everyday, and
emotions and security. This article will go on to explore how attention to popular
culture and audience can supplement these burgeoning fields of work.

Terrorism and the everyday

A further critical strand in Security Studies involves the recognition of “the everyday.”
Scholars have turned their attention to consider how security interacts with people’s
everyday lives. Davies (2010) writes of the “conceit that International Relations are
constituted separately from the everyday.” An attention to the relationship between
audience and culture provide a way to think through the relationship between security
and the everyday.
Jarvis and Lister (2012a) look specifically at terrorism in their project, Anti-terrorism,
Citizenship and Self in the UK. This project asked “ordinary people” how they understand
security, how this affects citizenship, and how this differs by geography and ethnicity
within the UK (Jarvis and Lister 2009). The research was done through focus groups with
people in cities across the UK. In a 2012 article drawn from this study, they argue that
 CRITICAL STUDIES ON TERRORISM 81

terrorism policy has negatively impacted upon citizenship. However, they also found
some moments of resistance to the logics of counterterrorism enacted in people’s
everyday lives (Jarvis and Lister 2012b). This research demonstrates how “ordinary
people” interact with, and negotiate, security. Rowley and Weldes (2012, 158) specifically
theorise security, the everyday, and television using Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel
to explore how these shows act as “a terrain of everyday theorising, negotiation and
contestation”. This important intervention demonstrates the potential of using television
to access the everyday negotiations of security.
The attention to the everyday is about studying how security is experienced and
understood. One of the most insidious ways that security comes to interact with our
lives each day is through the media we consume. Television is an everyday and
mundane activity, and, as argued by popular culture and world politics scholars, televi-
sion is a place where security stories are told and thus where norms, discourses, and
common sense are made. Television is how security is brought into our living rooms,
our day-to-day, and our “private” spaces. Therefore, work on television offers untapped
potential to explore one interaction of security and the everyday, to ask questions about
the sociology of cultural consumption, and to see how the practice of watching security
stories impacts on identity.

Terrorism and narrative

A key intervention from within CSS has been what is commonly referred to as the
“narrative turn” in IR. Indeed, much of the work on popular culture and world politics
builds upon a narrative approach, because once security is seen as a narrative we can
challenge representations and thereby challenge what is taken for granted. This builds
on narrative theory that has a longer history in humanities research, in particular,
Cultural Studies. Narrative approaches recognise that “[w]e glean ideas about the
world and our place in it from the stories we are told; we repeat these ideas and ideals
in the stories that we tell” (Shepherd 2013, 345). Security narratives also articulate
subjectivities, and thus identities, for their audiences. In the words of Rowley and
Weldes (2012, 524), “identity and in/security are mutually constituted social relations.”
In 2011, Wibben outlined a narrative approach as a continuation of feminist approaches
to security, arguing that “The framing of events in a particular narrative always has
implications for action because it includes and excludes options and actors, whilst also
limiting what can be thought or said, thus imposing silences” (Wibben 2011, 3).
Consequently, “the choice to privilege one perspective over another is never innocent
or obvious but always intensely political. What is more, the insistence on a singular
narrative is itself a form of violence” (2). Narrative theory has been used to critically
interrogate texts about security. It underpins the approach that I put forward here,
though I argue it can be supplemented by an understanding of the role of emotion and
the everyday, and made more robust by way of a return to cultural studies.
This “linguistic” turn in Terrorism Studies enables us to ask questions about how
terrorism and counterterrorism violences are made possible (Doty 1993), in that “facts do
not carry with them automatic political responses; they need to be located inside a
discourse and used to have a particular effect on policy and reproductions of identity”
(Hansen 2006, 32). The othering of the terrorists, which relies on the binary of good/bad,
82 L. PEARS

legitimate/illegitimate, rational/fanatical (amongst others) that are necessary to make

counterterrorist violence legitimate and terrorist violence illegitimate, are being decon-
structed from within CTS (Erickson 2008; Jackson 2009; Brereton and Culloty 2012), but
also from scholars working across disciplines that include English (Keniston and Quinn
Follansbee 2010; Carroll 2011), Cultural Studies (Prince 2009; Takacs 2012), History (Shaw
2015), Gender Studies (Nacos 2005; Hunt and Rygiel 2006; Shepherd 2006), and Critical
Race Studies (Bhattacharyya 2008; Alsultany 2012). This research is based on the fact that
terrorism is not a category of violence “out there,” which can be identified and cate-
gorised, but is a category of violence that is created in the stories that are told around
terrorism and political violence.

Terrorism and emotions

Another research area that could be built on through attention to the interaction
between popular culture and its audience is security and emotion. Crawford (2000)
and Mercer (1996) led a call to take emotion seriously in IR. This is not about inserting
emotions but rather paying critical attention to how emotion lies behind (re)action in
security. As Crawford (2000) argues, emotion is actually already assumed, even in realist
accounts of IR where fear is the governing condition of state decisions. Yet, the long
held attachment to “rationality” means that emotion has been ignored by theorists.
Emotions are important to how people perceive insecurity, national security, and how
they relate this to their own lives and identities.
This ties in to a wider move towards the study of emotions more generally and a
concerted effort to bring the body back into post-structural accounts. It therefore relates
to a broad movement from Cultural Studies, and within the Social Sciences as a whole,
to study “affect” and to re/turn to the material and the embodied in IR, a movement
termed as “post-deconstruction” (Hemmings 2005; Lundborg and Vaughan-Williams
2015). Ahmed (2004) argues in “affective economics” that it is important to research
how “emotions do things, and [how] they align individuals with communities – or bodily
space with social space – through the very intensity of their attachments.” She goes on
to apply this to the role of emotion in relation to the figure of the international terrorist.
Affect theory has been specifically applied to consider the solicitation of subjects in the
post-9/11 US public sphere through the media (Pease 2009; Grusin 2010; Melley 2012).
Without rehearsing the debate over the potential, diverse, and contested contribution
that affect theory can make to Security Studies, I examine emotion in this article. I do
this because I am interested in the manifestation or interpretation of the text through
emotion, rather than the “affective state of being” that is generated through the
interaction with texts, in this case, Homeland. Deleuze (1997) theorises affect as separate
from emotion in order to emphasise its role as bodily meaning. This difference between
affect and emotion is sometimes lost in accounts where the two are treated inter-
changeably. Therefore, in this piece, I want to stress the role of emotion in security
settings (Hemmings 2005).
There are considerable methodological challenges involved in trying to study
emotion, given it is internal and ephemeral in nature. It is for this reason that
Bleiker and Hutchinson (2008b, 118) argue that representation is one of the key
ways that emotions can be examined; consequently, they stress “[t]he importance
 CRITICAL STUDIES ON TERRORISM 83

of examining processes of representation, such as visual depictions of emotions and

the manner in which they shape political response and dynamics.” They argue that
images both capture and provoke emotional reaction, so that “representation is the
process by which internal emotions become collective and political” (Bleiker and
Hutchinson 2014, 506). There has also been work that has considered emotion,
security, and representations (Ross 2006; Fierke 2013). This work is part of a wider
turn to study “affect” in politics and IR.
There are a small number of works that have considered emotion in relation to
terrorism. Emotion is obviously central to terrorism, as even the most orthodox of
definitions include an understanding of the invocation of a wider fear and response.
Analysis and media commentary has long pointed out the traumatic nature of the 9/11
attacks, not just on the victims but on a wider consciousness. Yet, there has been
relatively few works that have engaged with what that means and how it is manifested
in the discourses and practices of counterterrorism. Three exceptions are Bleiker and
Hutchinson’s (2008a) chapter in which they make a convincing case for considering the
circulation of emotion inherent to the war on terror. A piece by Saurette (2006) similarly
makes a compelling account of the dynamics of humiliation in post-9/11 global politics,
while Edkins (2003) considers the trauma wrought by terrorism. She argues that 9/11 is a
key example of “mediated trauma” on individuals, cultures, and nations, and is particu-
larly interested in how trauma produces new subjects, but is always experienced in a
pre-existing political and ideological context.
In short, popular culture allows us to access and investigate the role of emotions in
security stories and IR. Television and terrorism are saturated with emotion. There is also
an unexplored opportunity to consider the role of emotion in the consumption of
security texts, to consider how they take effect.

Bringing these accounts together: the turn to Cultural Studies

Narrative accounts of security have shown that stories about terrorism are constitutive of
terrorism, whilst they also create identities and subjectivities for their audiences. Security
scholars’ work on popular culture has shown that this is a key site where meaning is
made for terrorism. Work on security and the everyday has shown that security as theory
and practice is happening as part of people’s everyday lives. There has also been a move
to try to understand how emotion works in terrorism discourse and practice. These three
fields mark an increasing interest in the relationship between popular culture, security,
and identity. They complement and build upon the work on representations of terrorism
and call scholars to notice how security operates through the creation of subjectivities.
The growing interests from within Security Studies in the everyday, emotion (and affect),
and culture are fundamentally about an interest in people, people who have hitherto
been disappeared by the grand theories of IR, or the state-centric politics of security
strategy. Yet, people too often remain obscured by the theoretical gestures of critical
accounts that are not supported by empirical work. These accounts too readily repeat
hypodermic models of meaning reception where the audience is expected to entirely
absorb the messages that are present in the text.
This article has argued that attention to the audience could contribute to work on
popular culture, the everyday, and emotion in Security Studies. The next section echoes
84 L. PEARS

the call of Dittmer (2010) and Dodds (2006) for a turn to Cultural Studies and Television
Studies. Cultural Studies can supplement the work that Security Studies has done on
popular culture because it strengthens an investigation of identity and subjectivity. The
central argument here is that there is more to be learnt from Cultural Studies, which I
then aim to illustrate through showing what Audience Studies can contribute to an
investigation of terrorism stories.

Asking the audience: a critical narrative approach

A critical narrative approach attempts to bring the increasing theoretical developments
in popular culture, emotion, the everyday, and narrative, but to operationalise them by
adding in theory and methods from Cultural Studies, namely, an understanding of the
consumption of popular culture and the introduction of audience reception to discourse
analysis in Security Studies.
A critical narrative approach is, in part, about recognising resistance and agency, but
within a framework of the decentred self. Alcoff (1988) argues “in their defence of a total
construction of the subject, poststructuralists deny the subject’s ability to reflect on the
social discourse and challenge its determination.” A theory of narrative identity provides
a way through this impasse because it is not about focusing on the subject as a fixed
entity, but rather on a more fluid notion of subjectivities that are related through and in
narrative form. Whilst there is only a limited set of cultural narratives available to us,
these are always mediated, and can be resisted and reworked as different people (with
their existing collection of subjectivities) encounter them. Each narrative is approached
differently by people with diverse narrative identities and settings. The temporal and
spatial dimension inherent in narrative identity can account for both multiplicity and
change. Furthermore, it empowers critical accounts of discourse to recognise that the
stories about security and terrorism, and our places within them, are not given, thereby
opening up space for alternative narratives.

Audience studies
The first theoretical contribution comes from Cultural Studies. It recognises the potential
for agency in the interaction of text and reader. Audience Studies were inspired by the
encoding and decoding model of Hall. In his words (Hall 1981, 171):
Before this message has an “effect” (however defined), satisfy a “need”, or be put to “use” it
must first be appropriated as a meaningful discourse and be meaningfully decoded. It is this
set of decoded meanings which “have an effect”, influence, entertain, or persuade.

According to Hall’s (1981) model, the meaning of a text is formed through both the
encoding of the text in its production, and the decoding practices of readers. The text
cannot fully control its final meaning, because different people will read it differently,
drawing on their own various cultural, social, and personal situations, identities, and
knowledge. In this way, context is brought back into an understanding of television.
Additionally, it opens up potential space for resistance in the interaction between text
and viewer. Hall theorised this in terms of codes, whereby readers can read in line with
the text what Hall called a hegemonic position; they can take a negotiated code where
 CRITICAL STUDIES ON TERRORISM 85

they have some opposition to the preferred meaning or they can take an oppositional
reading where they read against the text. There is still a preferred reading in Hall’s
model; the meanings that can be read may be multiple but they are not infinite, nor are
they entirely free from the power of the text. In this respect, the interplay of agency and
structure is recognised (Hall 1981).
Although this investigation has become established within Cultural Studies, this work
has not yet been integrated within Security Studies, though it has much to offer in the
understanding of how security becomes meaningful, how discourses of terrorism
become dominant or accepted, and how in/security discourses are related to people’s
lives and identities.

Cultural consumption and the sociology of the every day

A second theoretical contribution comes from Sociology. This is about recognising
the everyday practices involved in the consumption of popular culture. Television
series should be considered within their context, including the production context
and the context of consumption. Lembo (2000) argues that television watching needs
to be understood as an activity in people’s lives, and argues that “the complexities of
sociality” are missing from the post-structural accounts that dominate cultural studies
(Lembo 2000, 1). This leads to a theorisation of the relationship between text and
audience, a key link in understanding how terrorism television shows come to
influence the meaning of terrorism in society, and therefore the range of possible
actions.
Cultural consumption is a social experience. This section considers how there is an
identity effect that comes not only from the process of interpellation from the text, but
there is also a creation, and performance of, identity inherent to interacting with popular
culture. This is, again, in part inspired by the work of Lembo (2000, 7), who calls
television studies to consider the social process of viewing and the “socially constructed
nature of… participation in a television audience.”
As Skeggs (2004) argues, cultural consumption is central to the display of the self. This
builds on Bourdieau’s (1984) seminal text Distinction, in which he considers the power,
or in his own terms “symbolic violences,” that are inherent in the minute distinctions and
expressions of taste. Born from this was his idea of cultural capital, which is assumed
knowledge that confers power and status. The majority of work that has focused upon
the expression of cultural capital has focused upon the machinations of taste and
processes of consumption in relation to class. Yet, their approach is important to
understanding the way that cultural consumption is part of the reflexive accumulation
of the self, whereby through the relationship to texts and to culture, certain audiences
can perform their identity, whilst recognising that these cultural resources are only
available to some audience members. Therefore, exclusion is central to this process as
the “others” in the discourse are both excluded from the discourse, but at the same time
necessary to act as the visible boundaries of the particular self in creation. For Skeggs
(2004, 20), this is about how “claiming selfhood can be seen as performative of class, as
self-hood brings into effect entitlements not only denied to others, but reliant on others
being made available both as a resource and as a constitutive limit.” The act of
consumption is thus important to how security discourses circulate and take effect.
86 L. PEARS

Methodologies
Taking these theoretical interventions on board, we can see how an exploration of
popular culture and world politics can be enhanced by paying attention to the audience
of texts. Methodologically, this means approaching research on popular culture in two
ways. The first is a discourse analysis of the text, whether that is a television show, comic
or film, to consider the meanings encoded in the text. The second is focus groups with
members from the audience of that text. This enables the research to expand upon the
reading of the text itself to consider how audience members interact with and negotiate
meaning in the text, to consider what discourses they draw on, and how their own
understandings of subjectivities are shaped.
The turn to audiences enables research to consider how meaning can be adopted or
resisted, and how texts interact with wider political contexts. This enables an exploration
of the text, subjectivities, and identities, which does not assume a mechanistic flow of
meanings, but which also does not imply an infinite play of meaning that ignores the
text’s own power. This is a methodology that is familiar to scholars working within
Cultural Studies but which has so far been absent from Security Studies (Miller and Philo
2001).

Homeland audiences and identity

This article has introduced a critical narrative approach to terrorism and shown how this
can bring the work on emotion, identity, the everyday, and popular culture together. It
has put forward theory and methodologies from Television Studies to suggest that
investigations of television should include research on their audiences. In this section,
I want to show how this approach can add to the study of popular culture by giving two
examples that are taken from a longer project on the television show Homeland. This
project included an analysis of the television show, and focus groups with people who
watched the show.
The first example shows the varied meaning that viewers take from the show,
evidencing the potential for “resistant readings.” It specifically looks at the representa-
tion of the CIA in Homeland. The second example shows how important the context of
consumption is for Homeland. Here, I argue that the way that people can engage with
terrorism television is circumscribed on racial lines. Together, these examples give an
initial glimpse of how a reading of Homeland is strengthened by an inclusion of data
from audience members.

An example of negotiated meaning: are the CIA good guys or bad guys?
Homeland is a television show that follows CIA officer, Carrie Mathison, as she attempts
to thwart the latest terrorism threat to the USA. It has won many awards, been
syndicated internationally, and it has been widely reported that Obama has said that
it is his favourite show. It is explicitly positioned as the thinking person’s terrorism
drama, and engages in a more nuanced account of counterterrorism than many familiar
television and film treatments. One way this is done is by depicting some of the more
controversial practices of the CIA and counterterrorism, including “enhanced
 CRITICAL STUDIES ON TERRORISM 87

interrogation,” imprisonment without trial, and mass surveillance of US citizens. In the

most extreme example, it shows how a US drone kills 83 children in an attack that was
authorised, despite the proximity of the target to a school.
Yet, a critical reading shows that Homeland does not simply offer a critical account of
counterterrorism, but instead actually reifies the need for these practices in three
specific ways. First, the drone strike, which is the most extreme example of the wrongs
of counterterrorist violence, is attributed to a few bad politicians, namely, Vice President
Walden, who orders the strike and then covers it up. This makes it seem as though this
action is outside the scope of standard CIA counterterror operations. Second, they are
depicted as always being successful, or at least justified. For example, Carrie (at first
illegally) sets up surveillance of the Brody household and whilst this does not generate
any results, we later learn that it was justified because Brody is involved in a terrorist
plot. In a scene where Carrie and Saul interrogate a Saudi diplomat and use his sexuality,
as well as threats of the deportation of his family against him, he does agree to
cooperate to try to track down terror suspect Walker. We see Aileen, arrested on terror
charges, in a very distressed mental state after solitary confinement. Yet, before she kills
herself, she gives up actionable intelligence and identifies Tom Walker. The extraordin-
ary rendition of Afsal Hamid is then followed by the use of “enhanced” interrogation
techniques, including sleep deprivation, loud music, and limited access to food and
water. Again, this produces useable intelligence. In two instances where Carrie puts
assets in danger, they both yield results that contribute to the investigation. In the case
where they use drones to kill those involved with the Langley bombing – again, a
decision that Saul (head of the CIA) is shown to struggle with emotionally – they do
successfully kill all of the seven targets. In each of these instances, the ends seem to
justify the means.
Third, Homeland shows that the main characters struggle with these practices, which
can serve to legitimise their use. Carrie is shown to be uncomfortable when her
surveillance shows Brody and his wife having sex. In a key scene, we see Saul read the
Caddish over the body of Afsal Hamid. Quinn is shown to be deeply disturbed after he
accidently shoots dead a young boy and threatens to quit the CIA. However, these
struggles do not necessarily undermine these practices; rather, they humanise the
agents who carry them out. They become good people making hard decisions at
difficult times. This can be compared to the much criticised depiction of torture in 24,
where Bauer was shown unflinchingly torturing suspects, master of his own actions. In
contrast, Homeland shows the difficulty of making these kinds of decisions, the moral
struggles that are undertaken, and how thoughtfully these decisions are made. We are
still left with CIA agents who will do whatever it takes to secure America, but this time,
they do not make these decisions lightly. Together, this then becomes a story of the CIA
and counterterrorism where it is a hard job, but somebody has got to do it.
I argue that Homeland can be read as a story that supports the idea that counter-
terrorism is necessary to keep “us” safe, and although they are regrettable, even some of
the more extreme measures are necessary. Fundamentally these measures, whether it is
surveillance, enhanced interrogation, drone strikes or blackmail, work. The image is of a
world of counterterrorism that is not easily morally legible, but one where despite
feelings of discomfort, it is sometimes necessary to commit violence.
88 L. PEARS

The reading so far provides some useful considerations of how terrorism stories are
continuing, though perhaps in more subtle ways that we have previously seen, to
provide support for counterterrorist violence. However, just because it is easy to read
these pessimistic scripts in the show does not mean that they are necessarily the whole
story. I argue that audiences are not just “cultural dupes” who simply absorb these
messages, but that they negotiate the meaning implied within the text. This was
demonstrated by my conversations about the CIA with audience members.

Asking the audience

The readings of the CIA’s behaviours were varied across participants. There were some
participants who picked up on the idea that the security services were doing the best
they could in difficult circumstances. Kate talks about this at length:
I think it showed failings, I think it was very good at showing how complicated the whole
situation is and how it is not clean cut, and how there are wrongs on both sides, and in
order to try and come, you know, whatever the ultimate, you know the ideal outcome is,
everyone has to do something that they wouldn’t be proud of, that they wouldn’t want held
up for doing, but that is why they have got to fit with their morals.

In this quote we see how the complexity of the situation helps to justify the practices
the CIA undertakes to Kate. She recognises the lapses in “good” behaviour (something
they would not be proud of) as part of a larger story, and still sees this in moral terms.
This speaks to the idea of Homeland as a melodrama seeking moral legibility where it
was lost.
She goes on to talk about how the characters struggle with the action that they have
to take, using the example of Quinn: “doesn’t Quinn have a massive problem, Quinn has
issues with what he is made to do in pursuit of this ideal dream, of this end goal. I think
it just shows how complex the layers are, and how there isn’t really any clear way to go.”
Again, here she says there is “no clear way to go” and for her, the complexity of the
situation means that there can no longer be a rigid idea of good or bad behaviour but
instead there are those things that are necessary in a complicated situation. It shows
how there is a new moral legibility established for her in Homeland, even if that legibility
is “it’s complicated.”
Tessa takes a similar perspective:
I think it is massively pro security services, in terms of justifying the times that security
services do something that might make people in the street uncomfortable or unhappy,
they massively justified a lot of that and the bits, there is times when you watch Homeland
and you think why didn’t they just kill that person, then it would have been fine, and it
make that ok, It made kind of restricting liberties because in the show you become a bit
detached to it a little bit, in the show you think it is for the greater good and so it is ok. In
that regard I think it was pro and then it didn’t hide anything, that’s, most of the shows tend
to hide the negative side of the security services and paint them as they are really, really
good and this is a little bad stuff that we have to do, that is like you in your everyday life,
that is justified.

Again, for Tessa, the difficult situations that the CIA finds themselves in justify their
behaviour; it becomes “about the greater good,” and she sees how this has an effect on
her wider perspective of the CIA. She applies this both to the times that the CIA kill
 CRITICAL STUDIES ON TERRORISM 89

people and to their restriction of civil liberties. What is particularly interesting is that she
hints at an identification with “having to make difficult decisions” when she says, “it is
like you in your everyday life.” This also demonstrates how it is only by appearing to
engage in the moral complexity that this narrative can work.
On the other hand, there were participants that rejected the narrative that the CIA
were doing their best in a bad situation, and instead took a more negative reading of
the CIA’s actions. One example is from Giles. He focused on the drone strikes, and read
these very inter-textually as referencing the use of drones to bomb compounds which
he sees as:
actually an act of assassination which I think many people believe it is illegal and something
has happened between Obama and the court system in American where they have really
side stepped the issue three of four times despite the fact that people, or congress have
tried to bring it to being fully debated or talked about.

As a consequence, for him, seeing these actions replicated on Homeland means that “no,
I don’t think the CIA come out of it particularly well.” Barnaby also takes a more critical
stance on the actions of the CIA, arguing that “you definitely get a sense of how
American force creates the people that create Brody, that turn Brody against the US
and how it is just a vicious circle.”
Here, rather than seeing counterterrorism as a winnable fight to stop an attack (the
narrative story of terrorism that the drama relies upon), he instead sees it as a vicious
circle of violence.
This shows that there was potential to take a more critical perspective from
Homeland, whereby instead of seeing the CIA as vindicated in the plot, they are
seen to come out of it very badly. There was not only a range of views on this in
focus groups, but there were interesting moments where participants tried to
negotiate this tension between them. This takes place in a conversation between
Malik, James and Phil:

Malik: Well they don’t win do they?

James: Well they do win.
Malik: Do they? How? They bombed Langley.
James: Disarmament.
Phil: They got that Iranian guy in government.

This interaction is then picked up again by James and Malik:

James: A village has been razed to the ground, but the best thing that has come out of it
is that we have a guy in Iran and they are going to stop developing nuclear
weapons.
Malik: Well in that regard then it is a complete admonishment on the war on terror,
because there is no point in doing it.

In this interaction, the idea that “counterterrorism is necessary for the greater good” is at
stake, particularly for Malik, who rather than seeing the successes of the CIA sees only
the failings, sacrifices and victims. With James, they later doubt whether any of this is
worth the promise of disarmament in Iran. This begins to unpack the very logic of
security practices.
90 L. PEARS

An exchange between Seth and Ben shows how two different audience members can
take away different perspectives on CIA violence:
Seth: But it still tried to justify it, but in a different way, it is impossible to know if it is an
accurate portrayal but in generally portrayed them in a good light and it is kind of
like, we are trying to do our best given resource, information and the political
discourse itself.
Ben: I think it kind of portrayed a certain team within the security services doing that
but as a sort of overarching function I don’t think that you can say it came out
bathed in glory. Most of the atrocities that you see committed in Homeland are
committed by the Americans, or decided upon by Americans, I think it isn’t
supportive of anyone.

Seth seems to take on the potential resolution within the Homeland narrative, whereby
the CIA agents are doing their best, the politicians are at fault, and it is a very hard
situation, whereas Ben takes an altogether more critical stance when he argues that
America comes across as a “baddie” in Homeland.
Engagement with the audience gives a better understanding of how terrorism
becomes meaningful, and challenges the idea that popular culture is a zone in which
terrorism discourses are simply repeated. Instead, it opens up space to consider how
popular culture is also a place where these scripts are contested and renegotiated. The
fact that there are different readings of cultural artefacts should not be surprising, but
they are so rarely studied in any detail, and are almost entirely absent from accounts of
popular culture and world politics and from investigations of terrorism discourse.

An example of the practice of consumption: watching Homeland and the

politics of being in the audience
Cultural consumption is a social experience. This section considers how there is an
identity effect that comes not only from the process of interpellation from the text,
and how there is also a creation and performance of identity inherent from being a fan
of Homeland. This draws attention to the fact that as well as there being a narration of
identity within the show, there is also an emergence of identity that takes place
between the texts and pre-existing identities that frame people’s relationships to
them. In particular, this section stresses how this relates to the racialisation of Muslims
that results not only from the content of Homeland but also from the context of
consumption. Again, this shows the utility of a critical narrative approach and the
added insights that a consideration of the reception of a text can bring to the study
of popular culture and world politics. Any attempt to deconstruct the discourses of
terrorism, particularly via the use of Homeland, necessitates an engagement with dis-
courses of race, as “Islamic extremism” dominates the plot.
During the recruitment of fans for focus groups of Homeland, I struggled to engage
with any Muslim fans of Homeland. Whilst this experience cannot be taken as evidence
that there are no British Muslim viewers of Homeland, and I do not claim that my focus
groups are representative of the Homeland viewing population, there was evidence that
people who are Muslim have a different relationship to terrorism stories than non-
Muslim participants. After initial difficulties in recruiting Muslim viewers, I tried to target
Muslim communities directly. This resulted in several conversations where people
 CRITICAL STUDIES ON TERRORISM 91

explained to me that because of their religious or cultural background and identity, they
deliberately avoided watching shows that focused on the association of terrorism with
Islam or the Middle East. I made an attempt to formalise these conversations in focus
groups with Muslim participants who did not watch the show, but were happy to talk
about the representation of Islam within it. When I asked why they did not watch the
show, the replies included:

Bilal: So I thought, do I really want to do that? And get worked up, about something
that might just rub me up the wrong way, so I thought, I think I will leave
that one.
Ibrahim: I heard about it, and I just thought, not one of these again.
Aafi: I think I vaguely remember hearing about it, but that, perhaps it was more of a
stereotypical characterisation of what is represented in the media, so it is not
much of a point in watching it sort of thing, and also I was busy with my degree
sort of thing.
Nabiha: Yeah it is just, I think it is because I know, that because they are using all
these certain things in the show they would try to make something out of it,
make a story line out of it, and I guess if we see the supposed truth on the
BBC, it is sort of well, I don’t see the point of watching the show, see what I
mean?

These quotes are not representative of a universal British Muslim experience, but they
do evidence a different relationship to terrorism stories than the fans of Homeland
expressed. It points to a pattern of racialising/ed consumption of terrorism stories.
This insight is tentatively made, and further research on the viewing practices of
British Muslims in relation to terrorism television would be valuable. However, consid-
ered within the wider racialised climate of radicalisation in the UK, which has positioned
British Muslims as “suspect communities” through the workings of PREVENT and
CHANNEL, it starts to become apparent that however nuanced the representation of
Islam is within Homeland, it is a representation of Muslims for non-Muslims.
This was evident in the different ways that the Muslim participants spoke about
terrorism discourse than the participants of my audience groups, who were all non-
Muslim. When I asked Nabiha why she took part in the group, she answered:
For me I thought it would be a way for a Muslim person to actually say my opinions about
terrorism, and what I think of it and how it affects Muslims in this country because it is not
nice to be wearing a hijab, to go around being called a terrorist, or people saying have you
got a bomb under your scarf and you do get that, and you might not hear about it
every day but stuff like that affects us, it affects us a lot and it is becoming more and
more difficult to show yourself as a Muslim.

This shows how she feels the discourses of terrorism affect her day-to-day life. She
experiences the effects of the association of Muslims in a very real and personal way. She
has experienced anti-Muslim racism that has been articulated in relation to terrorism.
Ibrahim, in my other Muslim discussion group, also said that his experience of racism at
school got worse after 9/11. This is very different to the tone and perspective articulated
in the groups with the non-Muslim viewers of Homeland who had the space to talk
about terrorism in a more conceptual and distant way, where their concerns come from
the perspective of potential victim of terrorism, rather than as victims of racist abuse.
92 L. PEARS

The mode of engagement in terrorism discourse is different dependent upon how

people are racially identified prior to any engagement with the show.
The non-Muslim participants have a freedom to offer critical perspectives on
American violences, the representation of Islam, and to sympathise with the motivations
of terrorism. This privilege is even starker when we consider that this is a process that
they can enjoy. For many British Muslims, the way that they can interact with terrorism
discourse is markedly different. On the one hand, as the incidence of racial discrimina-
tion, abuse, and indeed, violent crime is increasing, the association between Islam and
terrorism is something that they experience in a much more visceral way. Of course,
there is also the emotional fallout of having to consider and often defend their faith for
the constant associations to violent “extremism” that are part and parcel of the modern
representation of terrorism. This prefigures the type of engagement that is available to
Muslims because of the pre-existing racialised discourse of terrorism.
The ability to critique the show is then prescribed along racialised lines. To extend
this point, it becomes apparent that there is a process of inclusion and exclusion that
happens in the way that terrorism discourse circulates, which itself recreates the specific
identities of subject (and object) of security discourse. This understanding of the func-
tion of popular culture about terrorism is drawn from the work on the reception of
Homeland, and has wider implications about how texts are consumed. It also shows that
the politics inherent in the label “popular” culture is often reified, rather than chal-
lenged, in our scholarly interventions.
Crucially, this section has argued that participation in critical debate is itself
embedded in a set of racial conditions. In the UK, counterterrorism has begun to
focus on counter-radicalisation. Therefore, the consumption of this text happens within
a wider discourse of counter-radicalisation. The ability to engage in critical reflection
around terrorism is itself a privilege that is a product/productive of the racialised
character of terrorism discourses. This recognises the consumption context of
Homeland. Audience members approach from different positions, which affects both
who can engage with a text, and in what ways they engage with it. This section has
revealed what these modes of engagement tell us about the politics of consumption
whilst they also recreate the racial logics on which these hierarchies rely.

Conclusion
This article marks an important intervention in the typical analysis of terrorism
discourse, world politics, and popular culture. Among others, it has argued that
paying attention to the audience can bring together the research on the everyday,
on emotion and on popular culture, to show how it is through the everyday and
emotional interactions with popular culture that people come to make meaning for
terrorism. Importantly, the synthesis of Audience Studies and Security Studies enables
a new set of research questions to emerge that seek to consider links between
terrorism, identity, emotions, and the everyday. Such questions include: How do
audience reproduce or resist security discourses? What do people draw on to make
sense of security? Do audience read with texts or do they subvert them? If so, how
and what does this mean for agency and resistance? How does security interact with
 CRITICAL STUDIES ON TERRORISM 93

subjectivities? How do people read security discourses differently? How does security
work through cultural anxieties?
The article then used research with fans of Homeland to give an initial insight into
what audience studies can add to an account of popular culture and world politics. It
showed that it is not enough to give an academic reading of the text, and to assume
that the audience accept the meanings within. Whilst creative deconstructions are a
useful way to challenge problematic security discourse, they perhaps miss something in
how these discourse become meaningful when they overlook the varied and nuanced
interactions that the audiences of these texts have with the show (and indeed with
security discourses in general). This article has shown that audience members can resist
the logics that are present in the Homeland story. We see how audience members can
take both pro- and anti-CIA messages from the text.
It has also shown how important it is to place a consideration of a text into its context
of consumption. It draws attention to how limited and limiting the debates around
counterterrorism can be. Even though Homeland works to offer spaces for resistance
and reflection on racial stereotypes, we have to see how taking part in the “debate around
terrorism” is an activity that is only available to some. This has shown how the consump-
tion of these texts can draw racialised boundaries that in turn contribute to the racialisa-
tion of Muslims. Paying attention to audience interactions with Homeland enables us to
draw out the processes of meaning negotiation at work. This does not give a definitive
account of the meanings for terrorism contained in this show, but rather allows us to
unpack how this show interacts with security discourse, and terrorism discourse more
widely, how it reinforces meaning, but also any potential moments of resistance.
Asking the audience for their interpretation makes an analysis of texts messier, it
highlights the tension between structure and agency at the heart of popular culture,
and it strengthens our understanding of the connections between the personal and
the political, between terrorism and television, between security and identity. A
critical narrative approach can enable scholars with an interest in popular culture to
consider the context of consumption, the emotional experiences of the viewers, and
the everyday nature of security stories. It can provide a way to interrogate potential
spaces for resistance even within a dominant discourse. It also provides a way to
explore the concept of the popular, to ask when, where and amongst whom a text
can be said to be “popular.” It reinserts the politics of reception into accounts of
security and culture.
In a 2015 blog post, Dittmer argues that popular culture should not be studied as a
thing, but instead as something that “is done.” He argues that “popular culture is about
doings, about lively interactions between people, pop culture artefacts and the wider
world of politics.” CTS has formed an important part of the inter-disciplinary movement
to better understand the politics inherent in representations of terrorism. It must
continue to do so, in order to challenge the stories that we are told and the violences
that they make possible.

Note
1. These citation details apply to, but are not included for, all subsequent mentions of
Homeland.
94 L. PEARS

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This research was undertaken as part of an ESRC funded PhD.

Notes on contributor
Louise Pears has recently submitted her doctoral thesis at the University of Leeds, and has begun
working as a Research Fellow in the Security and Justice Research Group at Leeds University. Her
PhD research looked at the negotiation of race, gender, and nation in terrorism TV. Prior to this,
she completed an MA in Gender Research at the University of Leeds, an MSc in Gender and
International Relations at the University of Bristol, and an MA (cantab) in Social Political Sciences at
the University of Cambridge.

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