What is exciting to me about media studies, and game studies in particular, has been the changing landscapes, disrupted industrial structures, and new audience/consumer/player practices that have come along since I was schooled in the 90s. In fact, all that is “new” in new media has only convinced me of the continued relevance of and necessity for feminist media studies. Intersections, fissures, convergences boundary-crossings, naming what is and isn’t (tv, a game, a film, etc) – these are all forces that feminism has interrogated well before it all went digital.

Both meanings are are important, but we cannot assume that any work that doesn’t affirm its feminism under the first definition must be rejecting the second one, and thus rejecting feminism. Throughout its history, many landmark works of television & media studies would be hard to classify as affirmationally feminist, but still helped forge the field that I agree is largely feminist by the second definition (but less so by the first). There must be space for work that is not primarily about gender (or race, or industry, or reception, or anything) without labeling such work implicitly postfeminist – such work has always been part of the field, and is essential to build a larger vocabulary & understanding of media, even if the primary motivating questions are not explicitly feminist.

What I’d like to see is exactly what you’ve called for, but without returning to a 1980s-90s conception of these media forms as intrinsically categorically distinct. Instead, we need to complicate these boundaries and differences, and challenge our own preconceptions (e.g., what is a television show anymore? Are these series “television”? Is this comparable to this? Can we assume we know what “people watching television” means anymore?). Conceptualizing these more complex categories, roles, and practices through considerations of cultural and social power, as you argue, is absolutely vital.