Audience Reception Theory

 Audience Reception Theory describes how audiences respond to certain texts. Each audience member will react to texts differently based on their age, cultural experiences, gender, sexual orientation, etc.

 A section of this theory is the 'Encoding Decoding Theory'. This theory, created by Stuart Hall, suggests that a text is 'encoded' with meaning by the producer, which is then 'decoded' by the audience. Texts can have multiple meaning that were encoded by the producer and different people can decode these messages in different ways. 

For example, a director of a film my encode a meaning of feminism and female power. If the audience decodes a preferred reading, they will get the same message that the encoder gave. If the audience decodes a compromised meaning then they can understand the feminist encoding, yet they might not appreciate or agree with the exact message the creator has encoded the text with. This would mainly be due to different in religious, political, cultural or more personal reasons. An opposing reading would instead completely disagree with the given encoded message, once again due t o differences in culture, personal experience, political or other valid reasons.