5

Approaches to Gender and Sexuality in Media History

Gretchen Soderlund

Like historical scholarship more broadly, the overwhelming majority of studies tracing the history of media are written with a decidedly male bias: the considerable involvement of women in all facets of media production is often downplayed, diminished, or outright ignored. Take, for instance, two lengthy histories of media since 1600, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media by Michael Emery, Edwin Emery, and Nancy Roberts (2000) and The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communication by Paul Starr (2004). Their very titles portend to offer a comprehensive history of the social actors and debates that made the mass media what they are today. Indeed, both works are richly detailed and offer informative accounts of major developments in news industries over several centuries. Starr's work, in particular, seeks to demonstrate how open debate about media-related policy helped to shape the development of the media from the eighteenth century onward. Yet these works, written from a grand history perspective, have little to say about women's role in the development of the print and telecommunications media (let alone the role media have historically played in producing, reinforcing, and challenging gender and sexual identities).

Indeed, over the last two decades the subfield of media history has arguably lagged behind the discipline of history in recognizing gender and sexuality as conceptually important, let alone analytically central, to its object of inquiry. Feminist media historians thus face what Maria DiCenzo (2004) calls the dual challenge of “filling the gaps of more conventional histories of the press, as well as situating women's social movements in larger social, political, and economic historical contexts” (p. 45). Despite the magnitude of the task at hand, each decade since the 1980s has seen an increase in the number of works chronicling the involvement of women in media or demonstrating the significance of media to the historical construction of gender/sex.

Drawing on material from journalism and communications, media studies, history, and English, this chapter provides an overview and analysis of studies that lie at the intersection of media history, women's and gender history, and the history of sexuality. Much of this work falls within four broad categories: (1) accounts of women in mainstream print or broadcast journalism and other media trades, including advertising, public relations, and entertainment industries; (2) examinations of women's and LGBTQ social activist media; (3) analyses of gender- and sexuality-related media content; and (4) research on gendered reading, listening, or viewing audiences and the rise of the woman consumer. We can draw further distinctions between studies that treat media as technological forms, those that understand media as political and social institutions or commercial industries, and those that conceive of media as instruments of publicity (i.e., work on the public sphere). The works considered in this overview serve as important correctives to the conventional media histories. Taken as a whole, however, they display their own biases and omissions. The existing English-language historical scholarship on media/gender/sex betrays a Western bias: the majority of studies center on Britain, the United States, and English-speaking Canada. These studies are also temporally limited in that they focus on the last two centuries of media use. Gender and sexuality in the media histories of non-Western societies and within longer histories of media use are fruitful and important sites for further investigation.

In this chapter I will focus on histories of print and telecommunications media. Since Laura Mulvey's groundbreaking 1975 article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” feminist and queer film theory has produced a rich body of work theorizing the relationships among film, gender, and sexuality. This work shares an affinity with feminist and queer literary theory and has emphasized psychoanalytic and poststructural/queer theories of gender identification and the construction of het-eronormative desire. Studies of gender in other media, by contrast, have taken a more empirical, sociological, or populist/Marxist bent and have often paid more attention to the audience as a sociological entity than has film studies. With a few notable exceptions, studies of the history of gender/sex in journalism and telecommunications have neither lent themselves to densely theoretical analyses nor attempted to link various media platforms or media content to the production of sexual desire itself.

Gender, Sexuality, and Media

Like the term “media,” gender, sex, and sexuality are far from straightforward concepts. Within second-wave feminist theory, sex and gender were presented as a dyad with sex denoting raw biological markers of sexual difference and gender signifying the meanings, roles, and statuses that society attaches to differently “sexed” bodies. Thus what it means to be a “woman,” according to this logic, is culturally and socially constructed, and therefore changeable, even if being “female” is largely an immutable biological fact. This critical distinction between sex and gender led feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin (1997) to suggest that every society has its own sex/gender system, which she defines as “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed needs are realized” (p. 28). Formulations like the sex/gender system were important for feminists because they demonstrated that what was represented as the most “natural” form of difference, that of sex, which served to justify women's status as the “second, inferior sex,” was actually the product of a given social order (Beauvoir, 2010).

Some later feminist theorists charge that second-wave feminism endowed biological sex with a materiality that it did not deserve. Butler (1993), for instance, questions whether our scientific and popular understandings of biological sex can exist outside of cultural systems of signification. She argues that it is only through the repetition of cultural performances of gender that biological sex is given its status as immutable substance. Further, feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000) critiques the notion that biology itself gives us only two options, male and female. Using examples of “intersexed” people whose chromosomal traits and reproductive organs do not fit neatly into the dominant biological framework, she argues that the two-sexed model obscures at least three additional sex categories.

Some of the historical scholarship surveyed in this chapter recognizes the feminist distinction between gender and sex and is attentive to the significant role media have played in naturalizing gender difference. A large portion of it, however, tells a straightforward “women's history” that treats gender as a synonym for women and understands women as all people biologically female. One work within gender/sexuality/media history that productively engages the idea that gender and sex are actively constructed through media is Margaret Beetham's A Magazine of Her Own? (1996). This study of such Victorian-era domestic magazines as Woman at Home and the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine shows how these texts “brought into being the woman it addressed as gendered, sexual and embodied.” Taking a performative perspective, it argues that the “naturalness” of the forms of femininity promoted in these magazines “had to be insisted upon again and again precisely because [they were] so slippery.” Beetham goes on to suggest that the “magazine which comes out regularly weekly or monthly over time is the ideal form” for the repetition of these complex identities (Beetham, 1996, p. 4). Indeed, through her close readings of articles on grooming and childrearing and of lavish instructions in the etiquette of how to behave like a proper middle-class Englishwoman (not to mention the advertisements for corsets and other products for physically transforming the body into a feminine form), Beetham demonstrates that that there was nothing remotely natural about the Victorian female body.

Within the discipline of history, Joan W. Scott (1999) offers an expansive definition of gender that allows us to see the relevance of this concept to even seemingly ungendered domains. For Scott, “gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.” She goes on to suggest that “changes in the organization of social relationships always correspond to changes in representations of power, but the direction of change is not necessarily one way” (Scott, 1999, pp. 42–43). Scott identifies gender as a central organizing concept in history that should be present in even the most “analytically cast account of the workings or unfoldings of large-scale processes of social change” (p. 17). Thus historians of the press like Starr who make only passing mention of women because their focus is on the “masculine” political or military realm ignore the ways in which gender informs and even structures these arenas as well. The application of Scott's understanding to media history would show that the media are always richly social and have historically included topics pertaining to gender and sexuality as well as heavily gendered viewpoints, ideologies, and analysis.

Indeed, in her study of radio in Weimar and Nazi Germany Kate Lacey (1997) concludes that “the history of radio cannot properly be understood if gender is absent as a category of analysis” (p. 221). Her analysis considers women as audiences for German radio programming but also the ways in which a subtly gendered language of media discourses framed policy discussions and determined the social and political functions of radio during this period. In general, histories of radio and television have been quicker to foreground gender than histories of the press, in part because the programming these media offered often centered around the domestic sphere where many middle-class women labored. Consequently women were recognized as an important audience for these media shortly after their inception. For instance, much of the early television programming centered on the home, that medium's central locus of consumption (Spigel, 1992).

In contrast, while women did run early printing houses and wrote for newspapers and political journals, men were often at the forefront of print media production and use. The fact that men were recognized as the primary practitioners of and audiences for news in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has, in part, contributed to the gender-blind approach in histories of print media. However, scholars like Christopher Wilson (1985) have convincingly demonstrated that movements within journalism including muckraking were linked to particular understandings of masculinity. In particular Wilson shows that writers like Jack London and Upton Sinclair conceived of their work as fact-based yet actively engaged with the social world and strove to embody the Rooseveltian ideal of the strenuous life and the man of action. Thus gender operates within journalism as a coding of its primary forms as either masculine or feminine. If early twentieth-century muckraking appealed to a particular form of masculinity, stunt reporting in which journalists disguised themselves in order to turn up secrets about closed institutions like mental asylums (as Nellie Bly did in her reports for the New York World in the late 1880s) was a predominantly feminized news-gathering mode.

It is important, then, for media historians to think more rigorously about the importance of gender to media history. Within the history of technology it may be difficult to see how gender might figure in accounts of technologies along the lines of Marshall McLuhan (1964) or Friedrich Kittler (1999), theorists whose broad strokes leave little room for social actors. Yet against such technological determinism are studies that show how deeply embodied and engaged in the production of identities technologies are. Ruth Schwartz Cowan's More Work for Mother (1983) demonstrates that the supposedly efficiency-enhancing domestic technologies of the industrial period in fact created more work for women, ensconcing them further in the domestic sphere. Carolyn Marvin's When Old Technologies were New (1988) shows that communication technologies are always connected to bodies that are themselves traversed by gender, race, and class. As Lacey (1997) puts it, “gender issues are always critical to and implicit in the relationship between the technological potential and the social application of a new medium” (p. 245).

Women as Media Producers

A major area of inquiry within the history of media/gender/sex is that of women as mainstream media producers. Much of the work that falls within this area is recuperative. That is, it seeks to recover the unwritten, forgotten, or marginalized history of women's participation in the media field as active practitioners within mainstream journalism industries. Attempting to remedy accounts like Emery et al.'s history of the American press that focuses primarily on the accomplishments of male printers, editors, and reporters, many of these studies recreate the history of news from the perspective of her-story (Scott, 1999). They seek to correct what is perceived as a male bias not only within media industries, but within the enterprise of writing history itself. In her study of nineteenth-century British women reporters and editors, Barbara Onslow (2000) suggests that “outside the cohort of specialist scholars, women's collective contribution to journalism has largely gone unregarded” (p. 1). Onslow and others offer a corrective in the form of women's history, seeking to render the involvement of such writers, reviewers, and editors visible.

Works like Patricia Bradley's Women and the Press: The Struggle for Equality (2005) foreground the accomplishments and experiences of American women journalists and editors like Cornelia Walter and Margaret Fuller while chronicling the discriminatory practices and private sphere ideology that kept most women out of newsrooms until the 1970s. Bradley connects the workplace struggles of women journalists to contemporaneous nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movements for women's suffrage and, later in the book, to late twentieth-century activism around women's liberation and equal rights. Similarly, Maurine Beasley and Sheila Gibbons's Taking Their Place: A Documentary History of Women and Journalism (1993), first published in 1977 as Women in Media: A Documentary Source Book, credits the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s for unveiling many of the sexist attitudes held by male publishers and editors about newswomen (e.g., that they were too emotional to write “hard news” or would inevitably quit when they got married) and documenting widespread discrimination and gender disparities within the nation's major media organizations. Emboldened by women's liberation, in the 1970s women in print and broadcast journalism filed protests with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and launched class-action sex discrimination complaints against such media outlets as the New York Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, Associated Press, NBC, and Reader's Digest (Beasley & Gibbons, 1993, p. 26). Taking Their Place offers excerpts of women's reportage from the colonial era to the present, with prefaces describing the conditions of women printers and reporters in each era.

Studies that fall within the her-story framework also include Sharon Harris and Ellen Gruber Garvey's Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands (2004), a fascinating collection of articles highlighting the work and accomplishments of women editors in both advocacy and general-interest periodicals between 1830 and 1910. The book includes chapters on pioneering women like Frances Wright of the Free Enquirer, Pauline Hopkins of the Colored American Magazine, and Mariana Burgess of the Indian Helper. Along the same lines, Janice Fiamengo's The Woman's Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada (2008) analyzes the work of six prominent nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women writers and reformers in English-speaking Canada, including Agnes Maule Machar, Sara Jeanette Duncan, and Nellie McClung. As a literary scholar, Fiamengo looks closely at these women's work and asks “how each of them created a public voice.” Fiamengo's book emerges from the literary and rhetorical tradition, as she is concerned with questions about each writer's “sense of purpose, relationship to their audience, and self-presentation,” in addition to their use of analogy, metaphor, and persuasive techniques (Fiamengo, 2008, pp. 6–7).

Authors that offer a more focused look at women in television news include David Hosley and Gayle Yamada (1987) and Marlene Sanders and Marcia Rock (1988). Donna Halper's Invisible Stars: A Social History of Women in Broadcasting (2001) utilizes newspapers and magazine stories as well as interviews with relatives to reconstruct the lives of the many forgotten women who helped to shape radio and television starting in the 1920s. Halper's two fixed sites are broadcasting and women, but she casts her social history widely. Thus she considers not only women who had an on-air presence, but also the production and marketing of radios and television sets for women, the participation of women in radio electronics, the appointment of Frieda Hennock as Federal Communications Commission commissioner, and the rise of Bertha Brainard at NBC, while connecting women's changing roles in broadcasting to broader historical contexts.

All of these studies provide a necessary remedy for the male-centric understanding of press history, which ignores the critical contributions made by women. However, many of these recuperative narratives of women in the media do not approach gender as a social and cultural construction and instead interpret the category “women” quite literally as not only a sociological but also a biological reality. A notable exception is Jean Marie Lute's Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (2006). While not as broad a chronicle of the achievements of women journalists as some of the works discussed above (the book focuses on only a handful of the most famous women journalists, like Nellie Bly and Ida B. Wells), it offers an important cultural analysis of specifically feminized reportorial forms like stunt reporting and so-called sob sister journalism. Lutes argues that the women who were allowed access to the male sphere of journalism were often forced to use their bodies as instruments of sensationalism in order to draw readers' attention to their stories. While their stories were rendered orthographically, these reporters' bodies became an integral part of their work and the publicity surrounding it (in fact, the epithet “sob sister journalism,” often used to describe women reporters in the early twentieth century, draws attention to the supposedly intrinsic emotionality not only of the topics they wrote about but of the women writers themselves). Bly, for instance, found commercial success and fame by adopting the persona of a working-class immigrant woman and feigning mental illness in order to gain access to Blackwell's Island women's insane asylum. Her body was central to the story she told about this experience, which was serialized in the World and prompted other city papers to hire their own “girl stunt reporters.”

Lutes is also attentive to the role of racial difference in the treatment and reception of nineteenth-century women reporters. She argues that underlying stunt reporting was a “drama of endangered whiteness” that African American journalists like Wells could not imitate and actively “wrote against.” Because of her status as both a woman and an African American living in a violently racist society, it was incumbent upon Wells to personify her “race's intelligence, virtue, and promise” and cultivate a style that emphasized rational argumentation devoid of sensationalism (Lute, 2006, p. 40).

Advocacy and Activist Media

While a majority of the histories of women as media producers have focused on women's involvement in the mainstream commercial media, a handful of important studies of women-produced periodicals have been published in recent years, many of them focusing on the suffrage press in Britain (DiCenzo, Delap, & Ryan, 2011; DiCenzo & Ryan, 2007; Tusan, 2005) and the United States (Solomon, 1991). In Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals, and the Public Sphere, Maria DiCenzo, Lucy Delap, and Leila Ryan distinguish what they call “feminist media” from the domestic content and advertising that filled women's magazines, and point out that the former has been a surprisingly neglected area in the study of late-Victorian and Edwardian periodicals (DiCenzo et al., 2011, p. 3). However, as Michelle Tusan argues, the label “feminist media,” while perhaps an apt description of suffrage periodicals, does not capture the entire range of women's nineteenth- and early twentieth-century activist publications:

Because of the diversity of women's activist publicity in both Britain and the United States, it is a misnomer to consider the range of advocacy periodicals feminist media. Harris and Garvey (2004), for instance, consider a wide range of nineteenth-century women-produced religious and multicultural media that were activist, but not feminist, in orientation.

Scholarship on women's activist media draws heavily on feminist iterations of Jürgen Habermas's (1991) theory of the public sphere as a site that exists between the state and the private sphere. Habermas argues that the press was a key component of an emerging eighteenth-century liberal public sphere. For Habermas, this public sphere of uncoerced critical rational debate flourished through the Western European and American revolutions but was corrupted by an increasingly commercialized mid-nineteenth-century press and, in the twentieth century, by the rise of an institutionalized welfare democracy. In an ideal public sphere, the press is an overtly political site where diverse people come together as equals to debate pressing matters. Because reason triumphs over other means of establishing authority (like wealth and status) in the public sphere, individuals are judged solely by the quality of their arguments.

Feminists like Mary Ryan (1992) and Nancy Fraser (1992) argue that the concept of the public sphere is a useful way to designate processes of deliberation and political action that bear upon but occur outside of official state apparatuses. However, they point out that Habermas's initial formulation (which he has since revised) imagined diversity where there was in fact homogeneity: debates occurring in the liberal public sphere were discussions among elite White men who actively sought to exclude the participation of women and racial/ethnic minorities. As Ryan (1992) puts it, “women were patently excluded from the public sphere [...] and were even read out of the fiction of the public by virtue of their ideological consignment to a separate realm called the private” (p. 260).

To correct this bias within Habermas's original formulation and to make the public sphere concept match the actual historical record, Fraser (1992) posits a multiple public sphere model. The existence of eighteenth-century alternative social movements that operated alongside or in opposition to the liberal public sphere has been documented by the revisionist historiography of Ryan and other social historians. Fraser (1992) argues that these movements created counterpublics that have taken the form of “nationalist publics, popular peasant publics, elite women's publics, and working-class publics” (p. 114). Historians of media/gender/sex have found Fraser's formulation useful because concepts of the public sphere offer a role for the press and the notion of counterpublics brings the efforts of oppositional movements, like feminism, into relief. Oppositional media play a two-step role within this literature. First, they provide a focal point for the creation of new forms of political consciousness and community. Second, they become tools of publicity that carry the counterpublic's agenda to broader audiences.

Scholarship on women's suffrage and advocacy media has shown how the alternative publications these social movements produced helped create a modern political consciousness among women (DiCenzo et al., 2011; Tusan, 2005). Likewise, in her discussion of African American newspaperwomen, Lutes (2006) suggests that journalists like Wells “acted as conduits for and representatives of a black counterpublic that was being nurtured by an abundance of black newspapers in the late nineteenth century” (p. 43). Recent work on the rise of LGBTQ weeklies, magazines, and radio programs like Rodger Streitmatter's Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America (1995) and Phylis Johnson and Michael Keith's Queer Airwaves: The Story of Gay and Lesbian Broadcasting (2001) do not explicitly deploy Habermasian formulations, but nonetheless demonstrate the critical role alternative media have played in articulating LGBTQ identities and fostering alternative political communities.

Some scholars have critiqued Habermas and Fraser from the perspective of feminist media studies. Lacey (1997), for instance, suggests that in appealing to reason, Habermas offers a limited model of truth-bearing practices. He “falls back on universal principles in the contention that all particularized motives and interests are bracketed out in order for this discussion to take place, reproducing the dichotomy between reason and sentiment or interest, reinforced by the emphasis on verbal discourse to the exclusion of physical or emotional expression, rhetoric or gesture” (p. 225). Lisa McLaughlin (1993) fears that analyses of oppositional enclaves suggested by the notion of counterpublics will overshadow a sustained analysis of the ways the mainstream media complicate the ability to attain oppositional identities. She argues that in much feminist work on the public sphere the media are given short shrift in that they are viewed only as tools of publicity. Within feminist media studies the oppositional may become overly valorized while the mainstream, which wields ever more power, gets lost in the analysis.

Indeed, the concept of the public sphere is at its best when chronicling media produced by alternative movements and these groups' attempts to bring critical political issues to the attention of broader national audiences. The notion of publics or counterpublics has been less useful for analyzing the material and ideological effects of mainstream media content that utilizes gender, race, and sexuality as its “raw material.”

I would add to the above critiques that approaches that both draw on and critique Habermas presume that debates and discussions that occur in mainstream or countermedia take a similar form and are shaped by similar forces as conversations that occur between individuals in primary publics. That is, the question of who is being represented and what is being said is determined solely by who is speaking and how much power they have. This begs the question of how media function as institutions, and how these institutions are embedded within and interact with political groups, economic and financial institutions, and social movements. Thus these arguments run the risk of reducing the complexity of social conflict, and of the relationship between power and knowledge. To further understand how discourses are shot through with power, one must turn to the relationship between media institutions and representations.

Gender and Sexuality as Media Content

Feminists have been concerned with representations of women in the mainstream media since at least the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (2001). While the vast majority of feminist scholarship in this area focuses on contemporary media texts, media historians have also shown an interest in this topic. Works that analyze representations of women and women's issues in the media from a historical perspective include Katherine Adams, Michael Keene, and Melanie McKay's Controlling Representations (2009) which looks at 50 years of the New York Herald (later the Herald Tribune) to see how women were depicted in that newspaper. The authors find that in each decade studied the paper put forth shifting and often contradictory representations of the ideal woman. Barbara Freeman's The Satellite Sex (2001) analyzes media coverage of women's issues between 1966 and 1971 in the English Canadian media covered. The author demonstrates that even in this seminal five-year period in Canadian history, the press favored domestic-minded women as sources and authoritative voices and sought to discredit the views of activist women.

Works that critique dominant representations of women provide useful fodder for anti-sexist struggles, but they tend to appeal to a kind of identity politics that ignores the experiences (and media representations) of women of color. There a germinal but fruitful field of media history promises to expand our understanding of the role gender, sexuality, and race (as mutually imbricated categories) have played in both the rise of social institutions like journalism, medicine, and law enforcement and also in the production of marginalized and policed identities. This work draws, implicitly or explicitly, on the understanding of intersectionality advanced by critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, who noted that anti-sexist and anti-racist (and we could add class) struggles treat gender and race (and class) as separate categories. Crenshaw (1991) points out that the “intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women's lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately” (p. 1244).

An anthropological study that considers race and gender in mass media that could in these terms be classified as intersectional is Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins's Reading National Geographic (1993). Through a detailed content analysis and analysis of visual forms found in National Geographic, the authors find that though the magazine purports to broaden viewers' understanding of non-Western peoples and cultures, its content and imagery are predominantly presented from the perspective of the White male gaze. In a similar vein, Ella Shohat and Robert Stamm's (1994) voluminous interrogation of the history of Hollywood films reveals that the history of filmmaking is rife with ethnocentric and orientalist imagery. In particular they look at sexualized tropes in which gender and race are combined through exoticism.

The project of theorizing the ways in which press narratives of gender, race, and sexuality are constitutive can even be seen in the 1890s in the work of Ida B. Wells (1997), whose crusading anti-lynching journalism indicted trumped-up narratives of White women's sexual victimization at the hands of Black men, which were used by White newspapers to justify vigilante attacks on Black men. The lynching of Blacks by White mobs was a way to punish those Blacks who dared resist the Jim Crow laws that had sprung up across the South in the 1890s, yet White men rationalized their violence through an appeal to the preservation of White womanhood. Wells not only demonstrated how the mainstream Southern press was a vehicle for promoting a White male vantage point as universal, but she also critiqued antimiscegenation laws that posited that mutually desiring relationships between Black men and White women were unnatural and therefore criminal. Wells documented cases in which White men who sexually assaulted Black women (and young girls) were rarely charged with a crime and those who were tended to be acquitted by juries composed of White men.

More recently, intersectional approaches in media history scholarship have provided fertile ground for understanding how mainstream media have historically produced narratives that weave together race, gender, and sexuality in ways that promote elite male interests. Lisa Duggan's Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (2000) considers the sensationalistic serialized 1892 newspaper coverage of the trial of Alice Mitchell, who killed her lover Freda Ward in Memphis (not coincidentally, Duggan argues, the same year Wells was run out of that city for distributing her anti-lynching work). She argues that the overlapping of the “lynching narrative” and the “lesbian love murder story” revealed “a threatened white masculinity concerned to reconfigure political, economic, and domestic order in the face of change and challenge in race and gender relations.” While she does not argue that these stories were in any way commensurable, given the overwhelming violence the lynching narrative incited, Duggan does suggest that as these narratives proliferated in US mass culture, they shifted the ground of debate over same-sex desire and lynching “away from the grounds of politics and citizenship and [toward] those of morality and normality” (Duggan, 2000, p. 155). The stories the Mitchell affair and the lynching narrative generated helped to delineate the boundaries of citizenship in the 1890s through the production of sexual and racial deviants who stood as outsiders to the public sphere.

Carol Stabile's White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in US Culture (2006) looks at the central role crime coverage has played in constructing the Black villain as a salient political category. Her analysis of newspapers from the 1840s to the 1990s demonstrates that if crime reporting cast Blacks as perpetrators of crime, it simultaneously constructed victimhood as a status that could only be held by Whites, particularly White women. Throughout her analysis gender and race are culturally produced in relation to one another and within fields of power. Stabile (2006) writes that “race and gender are among the most important sites for struggles over the historical meanings assigned to deviance. Indeed, the powerful efforts on the part of social orders to strictly police the boundaries of these categories [...] speak to the strenuous ideological and cultural work required to construct categories of gender and race and manage their meanings” (p. 5). This work demonstrates that current understandings of gender and race are always the product of historical residues.

Helen Benedict's Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes (1992) also considers the production of worthy and unworthy victims by the media. After a chapter chronicling the depiction of rape in the press from the nineteenth century through 1970, Benedict offers detailed analysis of four high-profile rape cases occurring in the 1970s and 1980s. She finds that in all of these cases the press effectively put the female victims on trial, either deeming them worthy as victims through an appeal to their innocent, virginal status, or incriminating them by prying into their lives and asserting their prior sexual promiscuity. In the view of the press, the promiscuous “vamp” cannot be raped. Benedict's book constitutes not only an analysis of past and present coverage but also an argument for how journalists should cover sex crimes. The author proposes that “rather than feeding fears, myths, and misconceptions” reporters should create balanced news coverage that places individual cases in the context of statistics about rape and explanations of why the crime of rape occurs from “researchers, literature, and other victims” (261). Further, reporters, often harried by deadlines, should not resort to exploiting “the victims or their families by . . . including prurient, irrelevant, or unattributed facts about their family lives” (Benedict, 1992, p. 162).

The Gendered Audience and Consumer

Within the literature on women as audience members and consumers, there are a number of significant studies about the rise of a mass consumer culture at the turn of the last century. Kathy Peiss's Cheap Amusements (1986) focuses on how the rise of commercialized leisure establishments in New York City altered the social landscape for first- and second-generation working-class immigrant women. Peiss argues the rise of affordable, heterosocial amusements like dancehalls, theaters, and amusement parks reconfigured public space and carved out a space of autonomy for working-class urban women that they did not possess before. A number of works consider the construction of women readers or viewers (Beetham, 1996; Butsch, 2000; Flint, 1993; Garvey, 1996; Harp, 2007; Lacey, 1997; Mehaffy, 1997). Ellen Gruber Garvey's The Adman in the Parlor (1996) proposes that late nineteenth-century women readers had to be “trained” by reduced-cost mass-circulation literary magazines to pay attention to their advertisements. Her fascinating study looks at consumer-advertiser interactions in order to understand the “complex interplay between fictional narrative and advertising” (Garvey, 1996, p. 184). One chapter examines women's scrapbooks, many of which contained clippings of advertisements from magazines, as a window into how advertisements were read and interpreted in the 1880s. Another chapter considers the dual use of “advertising contests” in the 1890s, which were intended to both capture women magazine readers' interests and also serve as proof by magazines that women were actually reading the back-page ads placed in literary magazines.

Dustin Harp's Desperately Seeking Women Readers (2007) traces the ways in which the US newspaper industry has sought to court readers from the 1890s to the present. In particular it looks at the rise of the woman's pages, sections in newspapers devoted specifically to “women's content” – news of fashion, gossip, and tips on childrearing and household management. Originally intended to capture a new readership in the 1890s, by the 1970s debates were underway about whether these pages in fact marginalized women and prevented this important demographic from identifying with the paper in its entirety. Beginning in the 1970s, feminists began arguing that the women's pages were demeaning to women, confining them to a largely household role that did not mirror women's actually expanding opportunities in public and political life. As a result of their agitations, but also as a strategy for drawing more women in as readers, newspapers abandoned the women's sections. Harp notes that these women's news sections reemerged in the 1990s in papers like the Lexington Herald-Leader and the Chicago Tribune. Ultimately, Harp (2007) argues for integration as opposed to segregation of women's news, arguing that the redirection of some news items out of general-interest sections and into special women's sections “reinforces age-old stereotypes about gender and a gendered public/private dichotomy” (p. 109).

Susan Douglas's cultural history, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (1994), focuses on the effects of media on women audiences. Douglas contends that popular culture, described in much of the literature in this chapter as a site for the production of deviance and reactionary or apolitical social actors, and particularly as an anti-feminist force, in the 1950s and 1960s actually contained the seeds of the women's liberation movement. Without the films, television programs, and pop music of the 1950s and early 1960s, Douglas contends, the second wave of feminism would never have occurred. She claims, “the war that has been raging in media is not a simple war against women but a complex struggle between feminism and antifeminism that has reflected, reinforced, and exaggerated our culture's ambivalence about women's roles for over thirty-five years” (Douglas, 1994, pp. 12–13). While Douglas points to the anti-feminist news clips about bra-burning feminists and the valorization of housewives' voices over activist ones, she argues that the terrain of popular culture is more contested and reflective of social life and the everyday challenges women face. While the mainstream media may not have created the oppositional publics of the 1960s and 1970s, Douglas argued that they played a role in promoting them.

Though it is not explicit on this score, Douglas's work suggests that there is an interdependent, but at the same time oppositional and productive relationship between mainstream and social-movement media. Indeed, there is often a reciprocal relationship between social movements, the media they produce, and the mainstream media in which the two seek not only to defy one another but to court one another. Thus mainstream media target feminist social movements as potential mass audiences, while social movements target mass media alternately as villains, sites of activism, and nodal points for the promulgation of their points of view (Soderlund, 2012).

Conclusion

What are the critical elements of a media history that is responsible to gender and sexuality? First, gender should be central to all histories. It cannot be a separate and marginalized topic because, as Scott has shown, even traditionally masculine discourses are shot through with gendered imagery, concepts, and assumptions. There needs to be an increased awareness among all historians that the process of signification through which narratives are constructed is heavily gendered. Second, more work needs to be done on histories of the media and sexual identity. The paucity of historical works on LGBTQ media suggests that this is the most serious deficit in the subfield. Third, there is a need for work on the history of feminist, women's, and other social movements and their relationship to mainstream and “alternative” media. Specifically, this work should consider the interplay between these two competing media as oppositional but also synergistic entities. The kinds of messages that are produced should not be treated in isolation, but in relation to media institutions and broader political and legal events.

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