Who’s the Audience Anyway?
When the world was on pause in March 2020, I picked up my drawing tablet - a birthday gift from my family just a month prior to the pandemic in Canada - and made more digital art than I ever had time for before. When I first started, many of my designs followed the theme of South Asian and Islamic culture mixed with science fiction - a combination of what felt very me.
But when I began sharing my work on Instagram, I introduced another consideration to my work:
Who is my audience?
It’s a question I’ve asked myself on every artwork, written piece, and journalistic story I’ve created since, and one that has drastically shaped the kind of storyteller I want to be.
As a Pakistani-Canadian Muslim woman who grew up in the US and Canada, my lived experience naturally draws me to stories from both my own communities and other marginalized groups. In my artwork and writing, I gravitate towards imagining inclusive futures. In my journalism, I seek out stories about communities that have historically been misrepresented by the media.
But what I found while creating those art pieces two years ago, was that I became hyper-aware of who was consuming my work. And more so, observing what art did the best in terms of likes and shares and which didn’t. There was a clear difference between the pieces where I used more recognizable South Asian imagery like a cup of chai, a rickshaw, and cultural jewelry, versus the ones where those connections were less blatant.
I realized that the most palatable, vague, and often tokenized aspects of my culture captured the most attention online, while often the work that was more nuanced, and often took more time to make, didn’t reach as wide an audience.
As with many creators who share their work on social media, I felt a dilemma to create content that pushed forth cultural symbols that could be easily consumed by an audience outside my own community (see: re-Orientalism), forgoing creating nuanced artwork that was influenced largely by my own identity. What hung in the balance was authenticity.
In the end, I stuck to what I enjoyed making. In this small and intimate space, I was satisfied with an audience that wanted exactly my brand and nothing more.
But when it comes to my journalism, this question of audience becomes more complicated.
When writing stories that relate to my own people or other marginalized communities, the goal is not only to tell the stories fairly and with care, but to also reach a wide audience that may learn something new. With that responsibility, what looms is the possibility of that work succumbing to the white gaze.
The white gaze, a term popularized by literary icon Toni Morrsion, refers to the assumed white audience, often cisgender, heterosexual and male. It’s when we cater to this imagined audience as the default, often self-censoring and policing our own work. Canadian newsrooms have been complicit for decades, focused on targeting this very demographic at the expense of BIPOC audiences who have either been excluded or misrepresented in news coverage.
In my art, writing, and journalism, my identity is always etched in the metadata, as is everyone else's in their own work. The white gaze then operates as the tool of a system where whiteness dominates how we think, and why I, at times, have felt the urge to waterdown my art or over-explain cultural references in stories to manufacture a digestible version for a default audience.
So what does a storyteller do?
There’s a push and pull between telling stories authentic to your community in a way that doesn’t insult their experience, but also sharing those same stories with a larger audience that may not be as familiar with the content in an educative way. And while part of me wants to be as unapologetic in decolonial practice, the other part of me knows I have to reach the largest audience because after all, I want as many people as possible - not just my own communities - to think about the ideas I present.
Recently, I wrote a story that centered marginalized communities in Alberta and while I got many messages from members of those communities appreciating the coverage, I also got the impression that it wasn’t garnering the highest numbers (relative to the news organization) in online reads. I wasn’t entirely surprised. I know that as a storyteller with an intersectional perspective, many of the stories I’m drawn to telling aren’t necessarily ones that will top the “most read” charts, but if anything, those are the stories that need to be told and brought to new audiences.
The conclusion I’ve arrived at is this: materialize what needs to exist. Because even if 99 per cent of the time my work is only consumed by my expected audience, there’s still a 1 per cent chance it will land in front of someone who has never encountered anything like it.
And that could make all the difference.
