http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-december-8-2009/gretchen-carlson-dumbs-down

The far-right can’t go completely backwards; feminist gains have been achieved in some respects. But they ARE damned and determined to fashion those gains in ways still conducive to patriarchy. My point is that by engaging other genres and media spaces, the connection to overt broader societal ideological efforts against feminism (ones that extend beyond media) might help illuminate those bigger questions that need answering, yet seem hidden by confinement to certain areas of media textuality.

Does that make sense?

But I think Mary Kearney may also be hitting on an important point, echoed in others’ comments, and that is the way feminist scholarship may not be as expansive in subject areas as it should be (thereby getting caught up in “eddies” of certain areas–fandom, melodrama–but not being adequately applied in other areas. For instance, my research is in politics, public affairs, news, and talk shows. But I am hard pressed to tell you who is writing on Rachel Maddow, or who is writing on Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer as anchors, or who is writing on Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes, and Chelsea Handler. Now that may be my ignorance or stupidity (given), but I do try to keep up with scholarship in these areas, and no feminist names jump to mind. I’ve made the point many times before (as has Toby Miller, John Hartley, and Todd Gitlin), but American cultural studies has done a fine job of analyzing melodrama–how about some public affairs?

Which leads to my third point–in this day and age of Flow, Antenna, In Media Res, and personal blogs, feminist scholars may need to do a better job of marketing themselves through their writing in these more open and immediate forums. I now have the potential to know what graduate students from around the world are working on–something not so easy to know several years ago. So when I am contacted by the Houston Chronicle to comment on Chelsea Lately, I should be able to recommend that they speak with a feminist scholar as well as the male colleague to whom I directed them. And finally in terms of marketing oneself (and somewhat leading back to point one), when we were doing an anthology on HBO, two of our feminist colleagues wrote us and asked if they could add a chapter (beyond the one they were doing on Six Feet Under) on “What HBO Has Done for Women.” We thought it was a great idea, yet somewhat not fitting the format the book had taken, but we included it because it was important. But without that marketing/push, that was a feminist road we weren’t taking.

Anyway, thanks Mary for the conversation, and I hope these comments are helpful in some way.

Obviously, this issue replicates itself in many situations and sub-fields. And I don’t present it as a reason for why I personally haven’t done enough feminist scholarship (maybe I flatter myself as “supportive” and “smart”, but the final sentence of Melissa’s first par. above provides a sting of recognition). But I often hear feminist scholars of my generation who feel that the generation above them have been the hardest on their scholarship since it doesn’t “do” feminism in the same way, and yet they’d be bored to rewrite the same papers, or at least reiterate the same basic point albeit with a different case study. I use that example because many of these women and men have succeeded in spite of the challenge, so I don’t mean to suggest an impenetrable barrier, but it’s important for us to realize how hard it might be to do political project-related work in a pre-tenure environment.

I think this is a really thought-provoking post, and though I’m not a media scholar, I thought I’d mention something I thought of. A couple years back, I reviewed a pretty great collection of essays by Merri Lisa Johnson called Third Wave Feminism and Television (my review: http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/chavez.html), that I think took up some of these same questions about the relationship between media studies and feminism, and more specifically how television can be a source for feminist theory building. The impetus for that collection really seemed to be the sort of “predictable” findings of most feminist media studies, and so the essays in there all tried to do work to go against the grain of “predictable” feminist readings. While I challenge the notion of “predictability” a bit, I think that these essays were doing some important work to revitalize the feminist/media studies link. It might be worth checking it out.

Anyway, lots to think about here in relation to the politics of citation and also the continued influence of postfeminism…

Thanks for turning my attention to the blog.

Karma

I’m wondering if we might think about how the perceived dearth, absence, or marginalization of feminist media studies is subject specific. For example, the majority of my work has been within girls’ studies, a site of vibrant feminist media scholarship since the early 1990s.

Thanks for an important and compelling discussion! At SCMS this year, the folks who are working together to revive the Women’s Caucus discussed frustration with the tendency at most conferences to have one or two special panels that focus on gender (or race, sexuality, or class–pick one or all!), while the majority of panels at conferences carry on their work as if it has no impact on gender, etc. I think we’re definitely hitting up against the discourses of postfeminism, but I think we’re also still dealing with the treatment of the study of gender as “women’s work” (as if men, masculinity, or male-targeted texts are genderless). We have so many, many supportive, smart male colleagues who no doubt have our backs in terms of valuing the work we do, but I think we need them to see how our work reflects on theirs (and vice versa)–and press them to expand their analyses a bit.

I love the Hall quote Nina referenced above: Hall said that feminists broke in like a thief in the night and crapped on the table of cultural studies…his words definitely suggest the rupture and the aggression felt by the predominantly male scholars at the CCCS in the 1970s. As lovely as the metaphor is, I think we’ve (or maybe I’ve) gotten to a place, especially since feminist media studies has made a real impact on our field, that we/I don’t want to be seen as “those women/that woman” who are constantly bringing up gender, race, sexuality, etc. in Q&A sessions when we feel important aspects have been left out of analyses.

All of this is to say that I think Mary’s on to something–something really important–and we need to be talking about how to revive media studies work on gender from a feminist perspective.