ABSTRACT
Gender is less and less a ‘fashionable’ academic subject. To focus on gender means paying insufficient attention to ethnicity or to sexuality, which will lead to an inadequate theorization of social and discursive practices and structures. Or it means focusing on women or femininity, whereas men and masculinity have until recently escaped critical attention. In general ‘gender’ has become a theoretical tool that is almost impossible to wield. More the pity for interdisciplinary fields such as media and communication studies, in which gender has hardly been given the theoretical attention it deserves. In this chapter I will try to defy the odds and present a summary overview of how gender has its place in media and communication studies debates. To make room for my particular interpretation of gender’s place in this field, I will mix that old-fashioned noun and its reified sound with adjectives and verb forms such as ‘gendered’ and ‘gendering’. At the risk of sounding obtuse, what I hope to accomplish is a ‘sexing’ of media studies to paraphrase Elspeth Probyn’s (1993) title for her exposé of gendered positions in cultural studies, which in turn paraphrased the novelist Jeanette Winterson.
