Renewing Feminisms: Radical Narratives, Fantasies and Futures in Media Studies (original) (raw)
The Past in Visual Culture: Essays on Memory, Nostalgia and the Media, 2017
In her discussion of contemporary postfeminist media culture, Rosalind Gill argues that while in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, feminist discourses were expressed in the mainstream media as “external, independent, critical voices,” by the 1990s, feminism had moved from its position of externality to become “part of the cultural field” (Gill, 2007, p.161). For Gill, this move into the mainstream, or the incorporation of “feminist-inspired ideas” into a new form of mediated “common sense,” cannot be read as an unproblematic success for feminism. The various incorporations, appropriations and co-optations of feminism by mainstream media and political cultures have been of deep concern to many feminist scholars, because in the processes of the ‘mainstreaming’ of feminism, the radical impulses and collectivist politics of the movement are so often erased. Angela McRobbie (2009, p.12) points to the ways in which certain individualist elements of feminism are “taken into account” by postfeminist popular culture, while at the same time the women’s movement is positioned as a “spent force,” as something that is no longer necessary, and which belongs firmly to the past. As such, a form of liberal, individualistic, depoliticized feminism has become a legitimized part of the contemporary cultural field, while the collective and radical nature of the women’s movement is simultaneously cast out, pilloried, and rejected. Feminism and anti-feminism have become inextricably “entangled” (Gill, 2007) with one another. The ‘feminism’ that is visible in media culture, then, is as a kind of “shadow feminism, a substitute and palliative for the otherwise forced abandonment of a new feminist political imaginary” (McRobbie, 2009, p. 90). Elsewhere, Nancy Fraser names this as the “uncanny double” of feminism (Fraser, 2013, chapter 9), which has “split off” from the movement proper; it is, for Fraser, a deeply problematic form of feminism that has “gone rogue” (ibid.). In many academic feminist accounts, it is the 1990s that marks the moment in which postfeminism becomes entrenched in media culture, and in which the radical possibilities of future feminist solidarities are closed off. While I find these arguments compelling, they give little sense of how feminist discourse moved from ‘outside’ to ‘inside’ media culture; how a “rogue” feminism “split off” from the movement and took on its own form of life; or, indeed, how the gender politics of pre-1990s media culture may also have been messy, entangled, and complex. In this chapter I explore how one example of British media culture was tightly bound up with the shifting and contradictory gender politics of the mid-1980s, and seek to theorize the nature of this relationship. To this end, I consider a program broadcast on Channel 4 in 1985 entitled Watch the Woman, which offered itself as a “glossy women’s magazine” for television, targeting a young, ‘aspirational,’ upwardly mobile female audience. In a book about memory, this television text may seem an odd choice for analysis, because it is now almost entirely forgotten, and it occupies no obvious or tangible place within popular memory. Even at the time, it was not heralded as culturally significant; it was summarily dismissed by critics, and it did not win a commission for a second series. However, as I go on to show, an analysis of this rather unique program can offer critical insights into the shifting dynamics of gender politics at this moment, and contribute to a more nuanced history of gendered media culture in the late twentieth century. I want to suggest that there is value in looking back from the contemporary neoliberal and postfeminist conjuncture to a particular moment in the mid-1980s when a “rogue” feminism was, in fact, already emerging.
The Power of Television Spectacle: Feminism and Popular Television
European realities - Power : Conference Proceedings 5th International Scientific Conference
Popular television is perhaps the most important tool for the production and promotion of popular culture content. It is a strong place of resistance and a space for various cultural struggles, including the feminist struggle that we observe through a number of genres and characters that resist established definitions of femininity and typical female characters. Products of popular culture, such as television soap operas, and lately a number of other genres, especially those that put female characters in the role of heroines, have enabled the development of a diverse spectre of female characters and given their audience a place where they can find authentic representations of their identities and life experiences. Through the analysis of such series, this paper will show how popular television, empowered by the ideals of feminism, and above all, popular feminism, introduced many female characters to a wider audience, and has undeniably become one of the primary places for female con...