ABSTRACT
This collection of essays comes at the end of a twelve-year journey. In 2004, we
organised a workshop at the University of Warwick, to which we invited key
scholars to talk with us about the kinds of questions that might need to be asked were
we to embark upon a project to reinvigorate the study of television for women.1
Some of the key questions underpinning our subsequent AHRC-funded project
‘A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947-1989’ (2010-14), and now in
Television for Women: New Directions, came out of that two-day meeting: what were
the parameters of the existing field and how might a richer history of women’s
programming inform that field? Why were we interested in television ‘for’ rather
than television ‘and’ women, or television ‘by’ or ‘about’ women? What kinds of
methodological approach would be needed, or preferable, in order to research
television for women? It seemed to us that research on the relationship between
women and television continued to proceed without an adequate history, and was
based on key assumptions about the gendering of tastes. Our project picked up
and moved on from the vital work on soap opera (Brunsdon, 1981, 2000; Modleski,
1979; Geraghty, 1981, 1991) and its audiences (Hobson, 1982, 2003; Seiter et al.,
1989) in the 1980s and 1990s which aimed to ‘rescue’ women’s genres and women
audiences from derision. Feminist work on ‘women’s genres’ continued into the
1990s with the prominence of the talk show (Masciarotte, 1991; Moorti, 1998;
Shattuc, 1997; Wood, 2009), but when the theoretical shifts into poststructuralism
began to argue that we should move beyond researching stable gender categories
(e.g. Ang andHermes, 1991) and that the gendering of audience tastes was apparently
less relevant than it had previously been considered to be (e.g. Gauntlett and Hill,
1999), there seemed to be a need to reflect.Was the field really stalling?Didwe know
all we needed to know about women’s relationship to television? If not, what new
or reframed questions, in relation to the terms ‘woman’, ‘feminism’ and ‘television’,
would be generated by the shifting context of the 2000s? Surely therewere lacunae in
the existing field?
