Post by Elana Levine, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The editors at Antenna graciously have invited me to contribute a series of posts upon the release of a new book I’ve edited, Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early 21st Century (University of Illinois Press). The book explores a range of recent media and cultural forms associated with femininity, including investigations of the social and economic forces that shape this culture, the ways such products speak to and about feminine identity, and how audiences, readers, and users engage with and experience such culture. This post focuses on the genesis of the project and its central claims.

The origins of this project come from my experiences as a teacher and researcher. Over the past few years, I have taught a graduate seminar on gender and popular culture several times. While the course inevitably considered some questions of representations of gender IN popular culture, I have always structured it more specifically around how and why various popular cultural forms are gendered and how and why the audiences and users of such forms do or do not identify along gendered lines in their practices of cultural consumption. To me, these were the more interesting and pressing matters, the broader “so what?” to which inquiries about gendered representation point. One trajectory of the course had been to read, contextualize, and extrapolate from the history of feminist scholarship on gendered cultural forms—foundational work on the woman’s film, romance novels, and soap operas, as well as studies on masculinized culture such as sports and video gaming. As the course shifted into the present and the contemporary context of postfeminist culture, however, it was hard to find as substantial a body of work on gendered forms and the experiences of their audiences and users.

At the same time, my research on the history of the U.S. daytime television soap opera was leading me to think about the decline of the soaps industrially and culturally. My hunch was that, while the soaps might no longer be as meaningful to as many viewers as they once were, the needs they fulfilled and the pleasures they delivered had not disappeared—they had shifted into newer cultural forms and experiences. I had my pet theories about where that might be (lookin’ at you, reality TV and social media), but I wanted to know more.

I also wanted to understand how the influences of postfeminist culture, neoliberalism, digital culture, post-structuralism, multiculturalism, queer theory, and transgender theory had shaped feminized popular culture, user experiences of it, and scholarship on it. These were big questions, and the potential sites of inquiry were vast, given the rapid proliferation of media in a digitized and niche-ified world. There was no way I could grapple with all of it on my own. So I sought out colleagues across the worlds of media and cultural studies to help me understand it. Their contributions make Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn a provocative start at reopening this once robust arena of scholarly inquiry.

While I hope you will read the book to better understand my argument about what may have occasioned the scholarly shift away from analyses of gendered culture, suffice it to say that I see two opposing forces at work. One of these forces is the insidious dominance of a postfeminist sensibility, one so powerful, and so common-sensical, as to turn even feminist scholars away from conceiving of culture as gendered. Indeed, the postfeminist sensibility assures us that gender specificity is old-fashioned, that it re-inscribes inequalities that have been overcome. While there are of course notable exceptions to this tendency (I see studies of girl culture as a prime example), I think it has affected scholarship as well as shaping popular culture itself.

The other influencing force is wholly different, in that it is the progressive impact of post-structuralism, queer and transgender theories, and intersectional feminism that have helped us to understand how impossible it is to talk about women or even a more flexible category like femininity in any definitive way. When we accept that a gendered identity is as variable as occupation, skin shade, body shape, personality, and a thousand other traits, both individual and social, it is rather paralyzing to consider it at all. While we need the provocations of these theoretical and political interventions, we might use them not to avoid considering gender as an experiential category but rather to push us to imagine gender differently.

While I went into the project with these principles in mind, as well as with a list of objects for analysis that I was determined to include, it was only through the scholarship of the contributors that I really began to see the ways that early 21st century feminized popular culture was being circulated and experienced. Their work helped me to recognize the three chief ways in which this period of feminized popular culture has been developing. While I have categorized in this way, the book as a whole demonstrates how intricately these categories intertwine.

The first of these is “Passions,” meant to characterize the intensive affective and identificatory aspects of feminized cultural experience, whether labeled as fandom or simply as pleasure. This section includes chapters on readers of Fifty Shades of Grey (the “ladyporn” of our title), Scandal fans, Lifetime Television, and celebrity gossip media.

The second category is “Bodies,” given the ongoing conception and experience of femininity as an embodied state, a situation that provides both constraints and freedoms for differently embodied people. This section explores pregnancy apps, fashion and nail polish blogging, and somatic experiences of spirituality.

The third category is “Labors,” the one that I see as most noticeably reflecting the altered social, economic, and political contexts of early 21st century femininity. The chapters cover “chick lit” and economic precarity, reality TV figures Bethenny Frankel and the Kardashians, Pinterest and the “mamasphere,” and the cupcake craze. These cases point to the imbrication of labor and leisure, pressures and pleasures, in the feminized popular culture of the early 21st century.

We now live within and beside all of these cultural forms and experiences; Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn aims helps us to understand them a bit better. In subsequent weeks, several of the book’s contributors will offer examples of the kinds of analyses the book offers. Stay tuned for the delicious details . . .

Post by Elana Levine, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

This is the third in a series of posts on my use of digital tools for a television history project. See part 1 and part 2.

Many of the digital research and writing needs I have been discussing in previous posts might apply to any historical project. Anyone who is grappling with thousands of sources in multiple formats might find data management and writing software useful to their task. But the work of managing audio-visual sources is more specific to media history. Television historiography, in particular, can be especially challenging in this regard, for series television includes episode after episode and season after season of programming — a lot of material for any researcher to take on.

In the case of my history of American daytime television soap opera from its beginnings in the early 1950s to the present, I face a task even more daunting than most TV history, for the genre I am studying has run 15-minute, half hour, or hour long episodes each weekday, 52 weeks a year, with individual series continuing this schedule for more than 50 years. Of course there is no way to watch all of it, or even to sample it in some representative way. Much of it no longer exists, for all soaps were broadcast live initially and many of those that started to be shot on video in the 1960s did not preserve the episodes — producers erased the tapes on an established rotation schedule. As far as I know, no public archive anywhere has all of the episodes of any US soap, although some of the shorter-lived ones do exist in complete form in the hands of media distribution companies or fan collectors. Fan archivists have preserved and uploaded to user-generated streaming video sites a massive amount of their private collections, taped off-air from the beginnings of the home VCR era to the present — there is more than one researcher could ever consume from the post-‘80s era alone.

But my point here is not to marvel at the voluminous output of soap creators and soap fans (although, wow!), nor to lament the disappearance or inaccessibility of so much of this crucial form of American popular culture (although, what a loss!). Instead I’d like to explain what I watch and, more specifically, how I watch, for that is entirely dependent on digital tools.

For the past 7 years, I have been integrating the viewing of past soap episodes into my daily routine. My choices of what to watch have been directed largely by availability. Other than episodes I have been able to see in museums and archives, my viewing has been focused on the limited numbers of soaps I have access to otherwise, of which I have tried to watch as many episodes as are available. Because I have been a soap viewer since the early 1980s, I have been less concerned with seeing programs from my own viewing history, although I am gradually integrating more material from the user-generated streaming archive over time. Instead, I have focused on the one soap that has been released in its entirety on DVD, Dark Shadows, and on soaps that have been rerun in recent years on cable channels, mostly the now-defunct SOAPnet, and on the broadcast network, RetroTV, which is carried primarily by local affiliates’ digital sub-channels.

In addition to daily reruns of just-aired soaps, SOAPnet reran select past episodes from a number of programs, but also aired a full run of ABC’s Ryan’s Hope from its 1975 debut through 1981 (the show aired originally until 1989). It also reran several years’ worth of Another World episodes from the late 1980s and early ’90s, and Port Charles’ telenovela-style 13-week arcs of the early 2000s. There have been other such instances, as in Sci-Fi’s rerun of Passions’ first few months in 2006. These repeats began airing around 2000, so I started recording them well before I was actively working on this project. As these repeats aired, I saved them first to VHS and then, once I abandoned those clunky old tapes, to DVD. DVD is a poor archival medium. But when I started doing this there were not the digital recording and storage options we now have. As with many other technological tools, what I did worked for me so I kept doing it.

I’ve watched much of this material over the past 7 years and am watching more every day. The recent addition of RetroTV’s rerun of the Colgate-Palmolive NBC soap, The Doctors, beginning with the late 1967 episodes, has further contributed to my archive. But how I do my viewing is where I employ digital video tools.

The author’s two-screen work set-up.

Because most of my episode archive is on DVD-Rs I have burned over the years, my process is to convert these DVDs to mp4 files. Software like Handbrake accomplishes this on my Mac, as did the now-defunct VisualHub. For content I access through user-generated streaming sites, I use downloading software, some of which is available for free online. I also use iSkysoft iTube Studio for its ability to download from a range of different such sites, and to convert those files to iPad-ready mp4s. Managing the files through iTunes, I transfer them to my iPad in week-long viewing chunks, moving them off my limited-capacity first generation iPad after I watch. This multi-step process can be a bit cumbersome, but it achieves some key goals that have allowed me to watch a lot of content over time.

One goal was that my episodes be viewable in an off-line and mobile capacity to increase my ability to watch any time and anywhere (such as airplanes and my community fitness center gym, which did not have wifi until the past few years). Another goal was for the episodes to be on a screen separate from my main computer screen not only for portability but so that I could multitask as I watch. My pattern for years has been to watch three episodes of half-hour soaps or two of hour-long soaps each working weekday. Skipping commercials, this means spending 1–1 ½ hours of my day watching. I rarely take the time to do that in a concentrated way. Instead, I watch the episodes each day while dealing with email or other lower-attention work tasks, and in a host of other times when I find pockets for viewing — doing my hair, making dinner, cleaning a bathroom, waiting for a kid to fall asleep — these, I assure you, are all excellent times to watch soaps. I also watch at the gym and occasionally in the living room, with earbuds, when someone in my household is watching something else (e.g., Teen Titans Go!) on the “big” TV.

I take notes on the shows when I notice revealing moments (in DevonThink), but daytime soaps were not made for one’s full attention at all times. They are excellent at using audio and video cues to signal narrative significance. When I was watching Dark Shadows (perhaps the slowest of the soaps despite vampires, werewolves, and time travel) I knew exactly when to pay close attention because of the predictable music cues. Each of the soaps I watch has its own such patterns, which I have picked up through my regular viewing.

The work of television historiography is distinct in multiple respects, but surely the volume of content one might consider is especially notable. While watching the programs one studies is a central part of our research, cultural studies has helped us to understand that processes of production and reception are equally significant. Still, this de-centering of the text may be puzzling to those more accustomed to traditional forms of cultural analysis. For my soap research, my often-partial attention to the text has become an unintentionally revealing experience. I’ve come to understand my viewing as the 21^st century digital version of the 1960s housewife glancing back and forth at the set as she irons, starts dinner, or moderates between squabbling siblings, an experience hilariously portrayed in a 1960 TV Guide Awards sketch. There may be no more fitting research strategy for a TV genre that has long served as a daily companion to its audience’s lives.

Post by Elana Levine, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

This is the second in a series of posts detailing my use of digital tools in a television history project. Read Part I here.

When I set out to manage all of the research materials for my history of US daytime television soap opera digitally, I was mainly concerned with having a system for storing PDFs, notes, and website clippings in a way that made them easily searchable. But after I had decided to use DevonThink as my data management system, migrated existing materials into the program, and began taking new notes with the software, I had to face the second part of my process—converting research materials into chapter outlines.

As I described in my previous post, my earlier method for this stage involved a floor and piles of papers. It also involved blank notecards, on which I would write labels or topics for the different piles as I sorted them into categories, and then a legal pad and pen, upon which I would sketch an outline of my chapter, figuring out the connections across the piles/categories, and testing ideas for the big picture arguments to which the piles built. Having gone digital, however, there were no physical piles of paper to organize. I needed a digital means of conducting that analog process. I needed digital piles.

For a while, I was resistant to considering writing software as the answer to this dilemma. Writing was not the problem. I had been writing digitally for a long time. (No, you need not remind me of the typewriter I took to my freshman year of college). Because I did so much planning and thinking before writing, I had no problem using conventional word-processing software to write. In fact, I like to write in linear fashion; it helps me construct a tight argument and narrate a coherent story. It was the outlining—the pile making, the planning and thinking—that I had to find a way to digitize. Then I saw the corkboard view on Scrivener with those lined 3X5 index card-like graphics. A virtualization of my piles, beaming at me from the screen instead of surrounding me on the floor!

The “Binder” feature in Scrivener.

The “Corkboard” view in Scrivener.

So began my experimentation with Scrivener, which has now become an integral part of my process. Scrivener is writing software and, like DevonThink or any other digital tool, has many uses. As with my use of DevonThink, I have been learning it as I go, so I am far from expert in all of its features. Because I needed the software to help me to categorize my research materials and outline my chapters, I mainly use its “binder” feature to sort my materials into digital piles. The hierarchical structuring of folders and documents within the Scrivener binder provides me with a way of replicating my mental and, formerly, haptic labor of sorting and articulating ideas and information together in a digital space.

I began by reading through all of the materials in DevonThink associated with the 1950s. As I read I categorized, figuring out what larger point the source spoke to, or what circumstance it served as evidence of. I created what Scrivener calls “documents” for any piece of research, or connected pieces of research, that I thought might be useful in my chapters. Early on, I realized I had multiple chapters to write about the ‘50s and ended up outlining three chapters at once as I moved through my materials. I gradually began to group documents into folders labeled with particular themes or points. This is the equivalent to me putting an index card with a label or category on top of a pile of papers, a way of understanding a set of specific pieces of information as contributing to a larger point or idea. These folders became sub-folders of the larger chapter folders. But it is the way I integrate this process with DevonThink that allows me to connect specific pieces of my archive to my argument. In DevonThink I am able to generate links to particular items in the database. I paste those links in the Scrivener documents I create.

How does this look in Scrivener? Sometimes this means that a Scrivener document is just my link, the text of which is the name of my DevonThink item, such as, “SfT timeline late ‘50s/early ‘60s,” which is my notes on story events from Search for Tomorrow during that period. But Scrivener’s “Inspector” window, which can appear alongside the document on the screen, is a useful space for me to jot down notes about that document, reminding myself of the information it offers or indicating what I see as most relevant about it. The synopsis I create here is what I see if I look at my documents in the corkboard view.

The “Portia and Walter relationship” document in Scrivener.

Other times my Scrivener documents include a number of DevonThink links that feed into the same point. For example, a document called “Portia and Walter relationship” includes links to five different items in DevonThink, four of which are notes on Portia Faces Life scripts; the fifth is notes on memos from the show’s ad agency producer to writer Mona Kent. In my synopsis notes on this document, I reminded myself that these were examples of the ways that married couple Portia and Walter talked to each other as equals, and how this served as a contrast to another couple on the show, Kathy and Bill. This ability to link to my DevonThink archive has allowed Scrivener to serve as my categorizing and outlining system.

While I have written sentences here and there in Scrivener to help me remember the ideas I had about particular materials, I have not yet found need to actually write chapters within it—I use a conventional word processing program for that. I know this is unlike the typical use of the software, but working this way has helped me to manage an otherwise unwieldy task. Scrivener provides a way to include research materials within its structure, but does not have the functionality for managing those materials that I get with DevonThink.

The “free form text editor” Scapple.

This system is working well for me, but at times I do find the Scrivener binder structure to be too linear. The ability to move my paper piles around, to stack them or spread them apart, was a helpful feature of my analog methods. As a result, I have begun experimenting with Scapple, a “free form text editor,” similar to mind-mapping software and created by Scrivener’s publishers, as a way to digitally reimagine the fluidity of the paper piles. Like Scrivener, Scapple allows me to link to DevonThink items and has met my desire for a non-linear planning system. I can connect examples and items from my archive to larger points and, through arrows and other forms of connection, note the relationship of particular pieces of data to multiple concepts.  I’m not yet convinced it is essential to my workflow, but I am intrigued by its possibilities and eager to keep experimenting within the generous trial window (which Scrivener and DevonThink both have, as well).

My use of these digital tools is surely quite idiosyncratic, but in ways more specific to me than to my object of study or the field of television historiography. More particular to the history of soaps and to media history in general are the challenges of managing video sources. Tune in next time for that part of my story.

Post by Elana Levine, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

This is the first in a series of posts detailing my use of digital tools in a television history project.

When I was researching and writing my dissertation at the turn of the 21st century, analog tools were my friend. Because my project was a history of American entertainment television in the 1970s, I drew upon a wide range of source materials: manuscript archives of TV writers, producers, sponsors, and trade organizations; legislative and court proceedings; popular and trade press articles; many episodes of ‘70s TV; and secondary sources in the form of scholarly and popular books and articles. The archive I amassed took up a lot of space: photocopies and print-outs of articles, found in the library stacks or on microfilm; VHS tape after VHS tape of episodes recorded from syndicated reruns; and stacks and stacks of 3X5 notecards, on which I would take notes on my materials. I gathered this research chapter by chapter and so, as it would come time to write each one, I would sit on the floor and make piles in a circle around me, sorting note cards and photocopies into topics or themes, figuring out an organizing logic that built a structure and an argument out of my mountains of evidence. It. Was. Awesome.

As I turned that dissertation into a book over the coming years, and worked on other, less voluminous projects, I stuck pretty closely to my tried and true workflow, though the additions of TV series on DVD and, eventually, of YouTube, began to obviate my need for the stacks of VHS tapes. Around 2008, I began to research a new historical project, one that I intended to spend many years pursuing and that promised to yield a larger archive than I’d managed previously. This project, a production and reception history of US daytime television soap opera, would traverse more than 60 years of broadcast history and would deal with a genre in which multiple programs had aired daily episodes over decades. Still, as I began my research, I continued most of my earlier methods, amassing photocopies and notes, which I was by then writing as word-processor documents rather than handwritten index cards. By late 2012, I was thinking about how to turn these new mountains of research materials into chapters. And I freaked out.

Sitting amidst piles of paper on the floor seemed impractical—there was so, so much of it—and I was technologically savvy enough to realize that printing out my word-processed materials would be both inefficient and wasteful. So I began to investigate tools for managing historical research materials digitally. Eventually, I settled on a data management system called DevonThink. I chose DevonThink for a number of reasons, but mostly because it would allow me to perform optical character recognition (OCR) to make my many materials fully searchable. This was a crucial need, especially because I would be imposing a structure on my research after having built my archive over years and from multiple historical periods. It would be impossible for me to recall exactly what information I had about which topics; I needed to outsource that work to the software.

This required that I digitize my paper archive, which I did, over time, with help. My ongoing archival research became about scanning rather than photocopying (using on-site scanners or a smartphone app, JotNot, that has served me well). And I began to generate all of my new notes within DevonThink, rather than having to import documents created elsewhere. Several years into using DevonThink, I still have only a partial sense of its capabilities, but I see this not as a problem but as a way of making the software fit my needs. (Others have detailed their use of the software for historical projects.) I have learned it as I’ve used it and have only figured out its features as I’ve realized I needed them. There are many ways to tag or label or take notes on materials, some of which I use. But, ideally, the fact that most of my materials are searchable makes generating this sort of metadata less essential. I rely heavily on the highlighting feature to note key passages in materials that I might want to quote from or cite. And I’ve experimented with using the software’s colored labeling system to help me keep track of which materials I have read and processed and which I have not.

Because I have figured out its utility as I’ve gone along, I’ve made some choices that I might make differently for another project. I initially put materials into folders (what DevonThink calls “Groups”) before realizing that was more processing labor than I needed to expend. So I settled for separating my materials into decades, but have taken advantage of a useful feature that “duplicates” a file into multiple groups to make sure I put a piece of evidence that spans time periods into the various places I might want to consider it. I have settled into some file-naming practices, but would be more consistent about this on another go-round. I know I am not using the software to its full capacity, but I am making it work in ways that supplement and enable my work process, exactly what I need a digital tool to do.

In many respects, my workflow remains rather similar to my old, analog ways, in that I still spend long hours reading through all of the materials, but now I sort them into digital rather than physical piles (a process that involves another piece of software, which I will explain in my next post). In writing media history from a cultural studies perspective, one necessarily juggles a reconstruction of the events of the past with analyses of discourses and images and ideas. I don’t think there is a way to do that interpretive work without the time-consuming and pleasurable labor of reading and thinking, of sorting and categorizing, of articulating to each other that which a casual glance—or a metadata search—cannot on its own accomplish.

But having at my fingertips a quickly searchable database has been invaluable as I write. Because I have read through my hundreds of materials from “the ‘50s,” for instance, I remember that there was a short-lived soap with a divorced woman lead. Its title? Any other information about it? No clue. But within a few keystrokes I can find it—Today Is Ours—and not just access the information about its existence (which perhaps an internet search could also elicit) but find the memo I have of the producers discussing its social relevance, and the Variety review that shares a few key lines of dialogue. OCR does not always work perfectly—it is useless on handwritten letters to the editor of TV Guide—but my dual processes of reading through everything and of using searches to find key materials has made me confident that I am not missing sources as I construct my argument and tell my story. It’s a big story to tell, and one that may be feasible largely due to my digital tools.

Jack and Kristina Wagner, stars of General Hospital, in 2004.

Here I am, about to start writing this column, when the news arrives. Frisco Jones! Back on General Hospital! Secretly shooting as we speak! If you find this half as exciting as I do, you just may have spent the 1980s in a bedroom wallpapered with photos of GH actors and/or as a charter member of the Jack Wagner fan club.

Jack Wagner’s imminent return to General Hospital is the latest in a long string of actors reprising their roles on ABC’s sole remaining daytime soap. Over the past year, an ongoing stream of GH favorites from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s have appeared on screen, some in short-term runs, others in long-term contract roles. That these characters were part of General Hospital’s heyday, the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s when the program achieved high ratings and reaped major ad dollars, is reflected in the fan excitement that attends each of these returns. But the rejuvenation of General Hospital is not just about the appearance of popular actors. Since former One Life to Live executive producer Frank Valentini and head writer Ron Carlivati took over in early 2012, the program has mined its own rich history, as well as that of ABC Daytime and the soap genre more broadly, to tell stories rooted in the long on-screen lives of its characters, referencing story events from as far back in General Hospital history as the 1970s, and bringing into the diegetic world characters and events from defunct ABC soaps, as well. These returns and references have made forward-driving contributions to new and ongoing stories and have remained true to most fans’ understandings of the characters.  Most importantly, they express an unabashed love and respect for these on-screen worlds, the daytime soap genre, and viewers’ life-long commitments to these programs.

Duke Lavery (Ian Buchanan) returning to General Hospital in 2012.

Between 2009 and early 2012, things looked very dire for the U.S. daytime soap opera. In that period, four of the genre’s eight shows were canceled, including CBS’s Guiding Light, a carry-over from radio, and As the World Turns, the longest running TV soap to date. Also in this period, ABC canceled two of its three remaining soaps, All My Children and One Life to Live, in a single blow. Yet something curious has happened over the past year.  In this time, the genre has seen something of a revival both economically and culturally. The remaining four soaps seem relatively secure in their network berths, and the production company Prospect Park has put into place in recent weeks the production of both All My Children and One Life to Live for their web-based The OnLine Network. News coverage and fan buzz about soaps has been positive and hopeful of late, a 180-degree turn from just over a year ago, when despair, cynicism, and dismissiveness reigned.

We might explain the rejuvenation of this scaled-down genre in multiple ways. For one, the broadcast networks can much more viably manage the economics of one (or two, in the case of CBS) daytime soaps on their schedule than they could the multiple programs of the recent past, helping the remaining four broadcast soaps achieve a new kind of stability. In addition, the intensive investment of soap fans and our culture’s enthusiasm for new media innovations are bringing Prospect Park’s online revivals some heady buzz, even if their long-term viability remains uncertain. Such developments suggest that shifting soaps into niche-targeted slots within the broader media landscape, as opposed to expecting them to retain mass hit status amidst universal audience fragmentation, may be the key to sustaining the genre’s economic viability.

Actress Lynn Herring, who started out on General Hospital and later appeared in Days of Our Lives and As the World Turns, also returned to GH in 2012.

But soap viewers have long known that many of the problems the genre has faced were as much about the substance of the shows themselves as they were about changes in TV economics or a mismatch between the genre and contemporary women (a view Oprah Winfrey, among others, endorsed). Soaps were often victims of mismanagement, of network interference in the creative labor of writers and producers, and of some of those creative forces too readily buying into the argument that soaps no longer resonate with the needs and interests of their primarily female audience. Over the past twenty years, the genre’s basic principles, its respect for narrative history, its concern with the travails of strong women, and its ability to weave complex narratives out of a multi-dimensional, multi-generational array of characters, were too often abandoned. But in the past year, spearheaded by the remarkable final weeks of One Life to Live, viewers of some soaps have witnessed a return to such principles, buoyed by faster-paced storytelling and the paired emotional experiences of laughter and tears that had been a trademark of the ABC soaps in particular. With this resurgence of respect for the genre and its viewers, the present moment has become one of the more exciting and promising in U.S. daytime soap history.

As Antenna begins a new series devoted to feminist media studies, I want to consider what it might mean to have such a series and why it might be necessary. You see, in my way of thinking about media studies and, more specifically, about television studies, feminism is not just an approach one might take. It’s kind of the point.

I recognize that this way of thinking about media studies may be limited, and that television studies in particular has changed somewhat in recent years. But I think it is worthwhile to consider how and why I might have this perspective and how and why the field has changed to make feminism a perspective to choose, to take on (or, presumably, off) at will.

To be trained in media and cultural studies, with a focus on television studies, in the 1980s and 1990s (as I was) was a feminist enterprise. The humanistic study of television at that time was heavily indebted to cultural studies, especially British cultural studies and its politicized view of media culture. This perspective understands all media and culture as sites of struggle over power. This power may at times take on conventional political-economic forms but it also includes the negotiation of social position and identity, matters we might more typically associate with feminism. I hope it is no stretch to say that this feminism is one not only concerned with gender as a locus of struggle but also sexuality, race, class, age, nation, ability, etc., all of which are inevitably intertwined with one another, and with gender. The question of gender is particularly significant in the study of television in the U.S., in that the medium’s primarily domestic location, its blatant commercialism, and its propensity for “lowest common denominator” programming are traits that have connected it historically to the feminine (as well as to the underclass). That a substantial body of television scholarship has focused on the feminization of the medium, and on soap opera as a feminized product of that feminized medium, also established the centrality of gender and a feminist approach to the study of TV. Television is a feminized medium, thus the very act of studying it, of taking it seriously as a space for meaning making and social struggle, is a feminist act.

Except that so much has changed in the media landscape, in the social positioning of television, and in dominant constructions of feminism and femininity, that this foundational belief has been challenged. With convergence, “television” is much less clearly bounded, media of all kinds have been digitized, and new institutions, technologies, and experiences have expanded what “media” may mean. As Michael Z. Newman and I argue in our book, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status, these developments have been crucial partners to the cultural legitimation of the medium both within and outside the academy. Now, some television programs are seen as art, some television technologies are seen as high-tech and cutting edge, and some television viewers are seen as discerning tastemakers. This emerging cultural discourse puts the discussion of television, both academic and otherwise, onto different terrain, associating some dimensions of TV with the masculine and the upscale, even as the feminized and denigrated standing of the medium persists and the social hierarchies upon which these categorizations have been built continue to thrive.

The changes in and around television have been accompanied by social and political shifts that may also make it seem as if matters of cultural struggle, particularly over gender, are in the past. Central here is what many have labeled postfeminist culture, a new, hegemonic common sense that assumes that because various social movements have accomplished some of their goals (feminism, to be sure, but we can also consider post-race or post-gay rights perspectives similarly), that the work of such movements is done. A “post” perspective thereby assumes that inequalities no longer exist, and any mention of them—or of the movements that strive for justice in their name—take us backward, doing more harm than good. That postfeminist culture has become dominant alongside processes of legitimation and convergence has made it even more difficult for a feminist and politicized media studies to be the assumed norm. Postfeminist perspectives combined with the masculinizing discourse of legitimation may seem to evacuate feminist concerns from the study of TV—a troubling notion, to say the least.

What, then, might a feminist media studies series of blog posts offer us? For one, it might remind us of the terms that have motivated and animated television, media, and cultural studies. My hope is to see questions of gender and the other categories of identity with which gender intersects directing the questions we ask and the analyses we offer. This may mean talking about representations of women, or women working behind the scenes, or women users and audiences. But the kind of foundational feminist media studies I am championing understands feminism more broadly than this. It encompasses the gendered address of various media, the gendering of media in popular and industrial discourse, and constructions of masculinity alongside those of femininity, as well as a limitless number of other questions that take on the intersectional nature of social identity and power. Together, such inquiry insists upon the vital relevance of feminism for media studies, now, and always.

More recently, as ABC has signed Katie Couric to a syndicated talk show deal, the network’s only remaining soap, General Hospital, appears all the more vulnerable. (Couric’s show is scheduled to air in GH’s current time slot on ABC’s owned & operated stations.)  ABC president Anne Sweeney declared a survival of the fittest competition between GH, The Chew, The Revolution, and Couric, a contest GH seems poised to lose.  While president of ABC Daytime Brian Frons has pitched the cancellations and replacement series as responses to audience demands, there is no question that the main motivation is that the binge-and-purge “lifestyle” pairing can be produced much more cheaply than a soap, and thus can draw a smaller audience and still allow the network to come out ahead.

Yet these developments have been accompanied by some promising high points, steps that offer fascinating illustrations of new industry/fan interactions.  These shifts have exposed and magnified the tensions between network management, the soaps’ creative talent, and audiences, and have suggested that management might be taking viewers’ perspectives into account in a way they have not for many years.  ABC is clearly allowing AMC and OLTL some budgetary leeway in wrapping up their shows, as every day brings announcements of former cast members returning to the screen as the programs conclude.  Here, at least, fans and the soaps’ creative teams are being afforded the chance to have a proper send-off.

Even more intriguing are the behind-the-scenes developments at General Hospital.  Perhaps because there is nothing left to lose, soon after the cancelation announcement, ABC fired GH’s long-running head writer, Bob Guza, a man that fans perpetually blame for the serial’s decline in quality over the past fifteen years.  These complaints are not centered around unpopular couplings or preposterous plot twists; instead they are protests against the program’s male-centered, even misogynist, storytelling, with male mobster characters and their ever-faithful female love interests skewing the program’s moral compass in disturbing directions.  Replacing Guza is a staff writer, Garin Wolf, who wrote the show during the 2007-2008 Writers Guild strike in ways that met with fan approval (along with many other soap writers, Wolf worked under the Guild’s fi-core status).  Among Wolf’s many admirable qualities, in the eyes of fans and former fans, is his respect for and investment in the history of the on-screen world, as well as his privileging of female characters and commitment to romance-centered storylines.

At a time when the future of the show is in grave doubt, ABC finally seems willing to attend to audience complaints. (NBC’s Days of Our Lives is also making major changes behind the scenes, so this may be an industry-wide trend.) Almost none of the discourse on the end of the soaps has considered the content of the shows themselves, seeing such developments as the expanding media universe, the fragmentation of audiences, and the rising numbers of women in the workplace as explanation enough.  Yet many viewers (and former viewers) insist that the problem with the soaps is that they are just not as good as they used to be, and that they would gladly watch more, or return to watching, with some different kinds of storytelling.  To see the networks and production companies giving some credence to that theory as they make these backstage changes is quite remarkable.  The recent wave of cancellations has no one optimistic about the big picture future of the genre.  However, the industry’s newfound investment in heeding viewer concerns may help to make whatever time is left truer to fans’ desires for classic soap storytelling.

Mad Men is a series frequently praised and sometimes criticized for its lush visual style.  Foremost in the attention paid to the program’s style is its mise-en-scene—the sets, the props, the hair, make-up, and costumes.  While this retro style is certainly one of the fun elements of Mad Men viewing, its presence is never mere style for style’s sake.  A basic lesson in the analysis of media texts is the awareness that all on-screen elements are there for a reason; they have been chosen deliberately and they thereby communicate meaning.  Mad Men’s vintage setting and generous budget may make its style particularly compelling, but for me—and perhaps for many other of the show’s admiring viewers—the attention to how things and people look is key to the show’s exploration of gender roles so precariously perched on the edge of disruption and change.

“The Rejected” in particular uses the way the characters look to map out some of the ways that femininity, and the kind of sexuality normatively associated with it, is on the verge of change.  The young SCDP secretaries that make up the focus group are garbed in the dresses, jewelry, updo’s, and hair height we associate with the “fifties” part of the 1960s.  Sure, there is a range of looks amongst them—the more juvenile Dotty and Allison in their plaid, the Joan-wannabe Megan in her curve-enhancing jewel tones—but together they represent a traditional young femininity.  This femininity sees marriage as the ultimate goal.  Or so concludes Dr. Faye Miller, the educated, professional, (married) market researcher.  But Faye sees herself as a different kind of woman. She changes her clothes to lead the focus group, abandoning her more businesslike jacket and scarf for a look more akin to the secretaries, hoping to induce a greater degree of revelation from her test subjects.

But the really new femininity introduced in “The Rejected” belongs to Joyce Ramsay, the new friend who takes Peggy into a hipster world of Warhol-worshipping, pot-smoking adventure.  Joyce does not look like any of the other women in the Mad Men world.  She wears a men’s style blazer and button-down shirt, her hair parted in the middle, laying flat against her head and secured in a low ponytail, her one piece of jewelry an “ethnic” looking turquoise necklace.  And she wears pants.  Pants.  Joyce’s “unusual” vibe is further secured when she kisses (licks?) Peggy at the party.  As usual, Peggy is the point of negotiation for these differing depictions, a position made clear as she stands amidst a triangle of options:  Megan, the SDCP men in suits, and Joyce and her hipster gang.

While Mad Men uses its characters’ sartorial style in these thoughtful and revealing ways, AMC and the show producers are also aware of the marketing magic of the program’s fashion-savvy.  Capitalizing on a broader cultural embrace of the program’s retro style, AMC has partnered with national retailer Banana Republic to sell “Mad Men Style” to the (upscale) mass market.  In weekly vlogs, costume designer Janie Bryant chats with Banana Republic Creative Director Simon Kneen, who links the Mad Men look for both women and men to BR’s contemporary stock.  Meanwhile, a weekly “Fashion File” blog post deconstructs that week’s looks, much as I have done here.

We can certainly see these sorts of marketing efforts as savvy exploitations of one of the program’s appeals.  But I’m not convinced that these efforts detract from the value of the show’s use of fashion and style to explore femininity and masculinity in flux.  A show that takes fashion seriously is also taking seriously a cultural arena long dismissed for its association with the feminine.  To discount it as mere surface appeal or promotional wizardry risks duplicating that troubling rejection of the feminine.  But to take fashion seriously in a way that also explores the limits of conventional gender roles and the welcome potential for feminist change, that helps us share in the looks of the Peggys, the Allisons, the Megans, and the Joyces as they try to find their way?  Yes, please.

Disney’s announcement that it will be replacing cable channel SOAPnet with a new preschool channel has generated serious concerns for U.S. soap viewers.  When television institutions such as the CBS soaps Guiding Light and As the World Turns are getting canceled and ratings across the 7 soaps currently on air are averaging a 2.33, any change in the soaps’ distribution is worrying news.  But the impending disappearance of SOAPnet (which is still 18 months away) is a loss in a number of other ways, as well.

SOAPnet began in 2000 as a way for ABC-Disney to repurpose the broadcast network’s three daytime soaps.   The channel also included original programming (such as Soap Talk) and reruns of defunct daytime and prime time soaps.  In an era before the widespread distribution of TV on DVD, a cable channel willing to rerun such fare as Dallas and Knots Landing was a rarity.  Even more rare was SOAPnet’s airing of past daytime soaps, notably ABC’s Ryan’s Hope (SOAPnet has aired every episode from the 1975 debut to early 1981) and NBC’s Another World (the channel reran a swath of episodes from the 1990s).  In addition, SOAPnet would occasionally air retrospective episodes of current soaps.  In these ways, SOAPnet helped to preserve and perpetuate one of the most obscure of television’s archives, as daytime soaps are never rerun and never released on DVD.

SOAPnet’s archival contribution may have been its most significant offering for a soap historian like me, but for the broader public the channel offered an alternate venue for keeping up with the soaps, not only those on ABC, but also NBC’s Days of Our Lives and CBS’s The Young & the Restless, which struck deals with the channel to carry same-day and weekend repeats of currently airing episodes. These cable repeats have become many viewers’ chief mode of soap viewing and their loss will surely create a gap in those viewers’ TV experience, as many are attesting in light of the news.

In announcing the channel’s end, Disney executive Anne Sweeney explained that the rise of DVRs and multiplatform distribution have made SOAPnet a less crucial space for soap viewing than it once was.  This is no doubt true, as all of the currently airing soaps can now be streamed online, although this is a relatively recent development for some.  In fact, I long suspected that ABC was hesitant to make its soaps available online in an effort to protect SOAPnet’s ratings.  Of course, many soap viewers may not have DVRs or access to streaming video, so they may be lost entirely.  But the SOAPnet ratings were never part of the broadcast network ratings picture, and thus the loss of SOAPnet viewers should have no real effect on the broadcast numbers.

In addition, many soap viewers have long found SOAPnet to be a disappointment.  In recent years, the channel has moved further and further away from its daytime soap roots, picking up repeats of more and more prime time dramas and importing original fare from Canada as well as venturing into reality shows.  ABC executive Brian Frons has gotten a lot of flak from soap fans for his remarks about expanding the definition of “soap” in ways that seem to equate “soapy” with repeats of exploitation-level made-for-TV movies and cheap reality shows.

Still, SOAPnet has delivered a number of soap-related treasures over the years and for these I, for one, will sorely miss it.  From the original, prime time General Hospital spin-off GH: Night Shift (the second season of which I, and many others, loved) to repeats of such prime time rarities as Fox’s Pasadena (including many never-before-aired episodes) and such gems of daytime’s past as the 1970s Ryan’s Hope, SOAPnet offered something unique.  Its disappearance may not be any more deadly to the daytime soap genre than the many other challenges soaps are facing.  More troubling is the loss of SOAPnet’s potential—both as a player in the TV business and as an all too rare space for soaps to get their cultural due.

Another sub-genre focuses on an individual retailer, with bloggers identifying as fans of a particular store and focusing their energies upon reviewing its latest offerings.  One such community exists around the retail chain, Anthropologie, a retailer of women’s clothing, shoes, and accessories, as well as home décor items. Anthropologie identifies itself as targeted to women with household incomes between $150,000 and $200,000, but the bloggers in this community, including such blogs as Anthroholic and Effortless Anthropologie, do not necessarily fit this income level.  Indeed, there are links between these blogs and those of the academic bloggers, which suggests that Anthro “fans” come from a variety of economic circumstances.  The Anthro bloggers are well aware of the pricey nature of their adored objects, and regularly discuss strategies for acquiring Anthro products more affordably.  Indeed, much time on these blogs is spent monitoring the sale patterns of the stores and website, tracking ebay offerings, and buying, selling, or trading items within the blog community.

The Anthro blogs are as much about appreciating the store’s unique products as they are about consuming them.  Bloggers spend significant time in Anthropologie fitting rooms, photographing themselves in the latest items, most of which they are not buying imminently.  While there is no doubt that such blogs celebrate and support mainstream consumerism, they also exhibit features typical of other kinds of fan communities, those that media scholars are more accustomed to studying.  For one, they certainly function communally, with bloggers and readers supporting each others’ style choices and complimenting each others’ taste and appearance.  They also challenge dominant conceptions of feminine beauty, as fashion fans of all sizes and appearances are celebrated and seen as role models.  The women wearing Anthro clothing on these blogs have adopted some of the poses and style choices forwarded by the company’s own advertising, but much of the photography is more utilitarian, with women taking pictures of their outfits in mirrors, their cameras or, more typically, their camera phones more visible than their faces.

There is no doubt that the ability to think this carefully about fashion, as well as to invest the time and money in maintaining a particular look, not to mention blogging about it, is a product of privilege.  But the style bloggers whose work I am so enjoying remind us that we all negotiate a place for ourselves in a culture within which we possess different degrees of privilege in different contexts.  The women of the style blogging communities I have explored consciously use fashion to shape their identities, form connections with one another, and define particular iterations of contemporary femininity.  That they do so in negotiation with a patriarchal, consumer culture makes no less significant their efforts to find small ways of making that culture their own.