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. This breadth of approach remains a crucial aspect of feminist television criticism, which often applies a mixture of methodological approaches to a range of issues, which are themselves rarely discrete. The inter-relatedness of issues concerning women and television is evident, for example, in a piece by Michèle Mattelart who demonstrates how the commercial identification of the housewife as prime consumer (an economic issue), the ways in which programmes are scheduled (an industrial matter) and the style and content of soap operas (a question of genre) have at certain times combined to reinscribe the female viewer into the domestic role. 1
