Introduction

The final part of this book returns to many of the concerns with which it opened. These two chapters were written a good ten years after the early work on soap opera, and offer, in different ways, reflections on the institutionalisation of feminist film and television criticism in the academy. If many of the concerns recur-notions of a gendered audience, the aesthetic place of women’s genres and the difficult relation of feminism to femininity-what is perhaps more interesting is the way in which the same characters persist. ‘The feminist’ is a character with a long history. A politics based on gender identity has been differently inflected through other contemporary political concerns. As historians of feminism such as Lucy Bland (1995) and Vron Ware (1992) have shown us, feminism has never been a unitary phenomenon, and its politics and allegiances have been extremely diverse. The feminist, if we can speak of such an abstract figure, has both honourable and dis-honourable inheritances. She has fought against slavery and for eugenics, for the right of married women to own property, for and against the veil and for votes. She has come to historical prominence at different periods in different contexts with different meanings and profiles. My concern here has been with the particular coming-into-being of this figure in relation to the academic disciplines of film and television studies. That these disciplines too are only emergent in this period from the mid-1970s both complicates the picture, and suggests that these disciplines may be porous to concerns around gender precisely because they themselves are only semiinstitutionalised.