Scholarship has long demonstrated how a focus on women's roles can reveal vital new elements of broadcasting history, adding critical perspectives on institutional, aesthetic, communicatory, and participatory media narratives. This article asks: What happens if we stop looking at the stories of women in broadcasting as “media history”? What other interpretive lenses and disciplinary traditions might we draw on, and how might we insert media fruitfully within them? The work derives from research on the early years of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT) as read from the correspondence of founder Wilhelmina (Lilian) Posthumus-van der Goot (1897–1989), and builds on IAWRT's example to develop methodological considerations for writing entangled transnational histories of gender and broadcasting, absorbing insights from studies of international organizations, collective biographies, and reconsiderations of the archive in the digital age.
Lessons from Lilian: Is Transnational (Media) History a Gendered Issue?
Alexander Badenoch is the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision Endowed Professor of Transnational Media at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam, and an assistant professor of media studies at Utrecht University. His core research interests are the transnational media history of twentieth-century Europe and digital transnational media heritage. He coedited (with Golo Föllmer) Transnationalizing Radio Research: New Approaches to an Old Medium (Transcript, 2018).
Kristin Skoog is a senior lecturer in media history in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. She is interested in the social and cultural history of broadcasting, the role of radio and other media in postwar reconstruction, and women's radio and women broadcasters in Britain and Europe.
Alexander Badenoch, Kristin Skoog; Lessons from Lilian: Is Transnational (Media) History a Gendered Issue?. Feminist Media Histories 1 July 2019; 5 (3): 9–35. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2019.5.3.9
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