ABSTRACT
The organizing question asked by Caren Deming’s thoughtful and provocative essay is, “What might television criticism learn from feminist scholarship?” The answer she gives is, not surprisingly: “Quite a bit!” She is quite correct, it seems to me, to see a useful analogy between feminist scholars and television critics and between the denigrated status traditionally assigned women’s writing and that suffered by popular television. Furthermore, the relationship between feminist scholarship and television criticism is more than merely analogous: Since the mid-nineteenth century, women have been the primary consumers of popular literature in the United States, and, since the early days of network radio, they have also been the primary audience sought for many types of popular broadcast programming.
