Since writing a genealogy affords an author a position of some (albeit here, small) influence, I will take advantage of this platform to make a bold claim: production studies is a feminist methodology. At its core, it production studies often resists or complicates traditional power hierarchies, it has its origins in a nonbinary interdisciplinarity, and it has a capacity to highlight cultural inequities. Though there are production studies scholars who push back against, or simply ignore, the tradition of feminism within the study of cultures of media production, a genealogy of production studies reveals its deep affinities with feminist scholarship: a tradition of research by and about women, as well as core themes that resist top-down hierarchies, that highlight production at the margins, and that make visible hidden labor.
While the branches of the production studies family tree stretch across scholars from the humanities (film and television studies, English, cultural...
University of California Press