Janet McCabe and Kim Akass's “Feminist Television Criticism: Notes and Queries” (2006) offers an expansive notion of feminist television studies: “Never monolithic, the wide-ranging knowledges produced by feminism since the 1970s are quite remarkable, reliant upon diverse aims, separate objectives and different intellectual concerns.”1 Feminist inquiry in television studies offers a roomy berth. Through this critical lens, some of us explore television in relation to other popular media and the televisual landscape of their day. Others focus on how industrial factors or government policy shape the content of programming. Still others are committed to television audience research, production cultures, or transmedia storytelling.
This essay aims to map a genealogy of feminist television studies that embraces the personal, pedagogical, and political and, as such, the aims, objectives, and intellectual concerns that are and always will be “in progress.” Feminist television scholars initially embraced the second wave ethos of “the personal...
University of California Press