Television for Women : New Directions

Television for Women is a timely intervention into the broader analysis of television across genre, across time, and from a range of international perspectives.

The book opens with a Preface from Charlotte Brunsdon, a leading figure in feminist television studies, followed by an introduction by the editors explaining the continued salience of critical analysis of gendered television and its relationship to the formulations of television and women and also television by women.

Bringing together established and emergent scholars the collection re-invigorates the field of feminist television studies by placing the question of television’s address to women at the heart of all its contributions.

Television for Women brings together emerging and established scholars to reconsider the question of ‘television for women’. In the context of the 2000s, when the potential meanings of both terms have expanded and changed so significantly, in what ways might the concept of programming, addressed explicitly to a group identified by gender still matter?

The essays in this collection take the existing scholarship in this field in significant new directions. They expand its reach in terms of territory (looking beyond, for example, the paradigmatic Anglo-American axis) and also historical span. Additionally, whilst the influential methodological formation of production, text and audience is still visible here, the new research in Television for Women frequently reconfigures that relationship.

The topics included here are far-reaching; from television as material culture at the British exhibition in the first half of the twentieth century, women’s roles in television production past and present, to popular 1960s television such as The Liver Birds and, in the twenty-first century, highly successful programmes including Orange is the New Black, Call the Midwife, One Born Every Minute and Wanted Down Under.

This book presents ground-breaking research on historical and contemporary relationships between women and television around the world and is an ideal resource for students of television, media and gender studies.