ABSTRACT
Early critiques of mass culture discussed the connection between television and consumption in the context of political economy and the Frankfurt School's more general critique of ideology, the media and the public sphere. This critical perspective on mass culture and mass consumption was based on implicitly gendered concepts of production/consumption, high/low culture, private/public spheres. As Adorno himself noted self-critically in 1969, the equation of culture industry with consumer consciousness had female consumers in mind (Adorno 1969: 65). The social identification of consumption and mass culture with the attributes and notions of femininity and the assignment of the sites and business of consumption to women on the one hand, and their status as objects within economic and symbolic exchange processes on the other, has made the question of the connections between television and the female consumer/ audience a central issue for feminist theories of representation (Houston 1984; Doane 1987; Spigel and Mann 1992).
