ABSTRACT
I ponder here a topic that likely is not new to many readers of Feminist Media Studies—the need for more formal mechanisms for dialogue, strategic learning, and collaborative projects to be forged among generations of feminist media scholars. The issue of a generation “gap” (or more precisely, gaps) is particularly salient in the US context in which the specter of tenure often stifles the voices of pre-tenure scholars and can discourage socializing outside one’s academic rank and relative age. Given that our larger community is composed of scholars with a wide variety of orientations with respect to the socio-historical era in which we came to understand our view of feminism, with respect to how we view prior scholarship, and regarding what we feel is at stake in feminist media scholarship, dialogues and collaboration across spans of age and academic generations are vital. Such dialogues arguably can promote productive scholarship, the growth of scholarly networks, and, ultimately, reinvigorate the field. In this informal essay I illuminate cross-generation dialogue as important for the field to prioritize in order to evolve and grow apace with disciplinary and cultural shifts.
