ABSTRACT
Feminist analysis of television has much in common with other areas of feminist scholarship. Emerging in the 1970s, it combined politics with academic study and embraced interdisciplinarity. Much of the early work of feminist television critics was linked to activism for women's liberation and operated from a conviction that representations of women in the mass media had a real effect on the ways in which women were treated by, and can operate in, society. Ann Gray addresses the early use of video cassette recorders (VCRs) in home and the ways in which that use both reflects, and offers challenges to traditional understandings of television and female pleasure. The same issues of invisibility and typing that spurred mainstream feminist television criticism have also been raised by academics interested in representations of women of colour and non-heterosexual women. The study of the audience for television draws on both sociological and anthropological methodology, as well as concepts used in film theory.
