Abstract
There is a scene in I May Destroy You (2020) where Arabella (Michaela Coel) reads out her visceral response to recognising that ‘woman’ is another category beyond class and race which operates in a system of oppression. Detailing in gross detail some of the forms of (everyday) violence women encounter across the world, she wonders if it is ‘time to serve a new tribe’. Her question seems to suggest an either/or answer: namely, in line with the Bible which she quotes, she has to choose to serve either the community of Black British people or the community of women. Of course, it has long been known that systems of oppression are not exclusive but instead intersect and, as bell hooks (1981) has shown, create specific conditions that determine the forms of discrimination. As I turn my attention to the category of woman, I want to emphasise that I do not want to detract from the critique of institutional racism which Black Lives Matter has highlighted, but only to add a further note. At this point, I feel compelled to draw attention to my race – I am white – and that my experience is therefore determined by relative privilege. I also need to emphasise that I write this provocation within the context of Anglo-American and European academia and do not feel qualified to comment on what goes on elsewhere -- and I’d invite further interventions from elsewhere in the world. So, when I generalise, I do so primarily in the context of the United Kingdom and Western Europe. What I want to discuss in the below though, is hopefully nevertheless relevant to our current reflections on power, discrimination and scholarship to which this provocation aims to contribute.
Academic life, particularly in the United Kingdom, is full of inequalities and discrimination that operate beyond race: red brick universities versus those from ‘the post-92 sector’, working-class versus middle-class students and staff, junior versus senior members of staff and women versus men. Importantly, we must recognise that these distinctions are largely based on three pillars: class, race and gender. Although the distinction between red brick versus post-92 university is usually understood in relation to class and, to a lesser extent, race, there are also gendered elements to it, considering that these post-92 universities often offer more vocational degrees such as nursing or teacher training. Similarly, status is not simply an element that adds to the intersectionality here (age, stage in the career); but status in the academy remains deeply gendered.
Research conducted by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) (2020) shows that women continue to be employed in positions, although increasingly full-time, at a lower status within the university. This includes clerical work, but also teaching-only positions. To make this evident I have taken the liberty of putting the numbers directly next to each other (see Table 1).
Gender inequalities in UK higher education positions. Source: HESA (2020).
The obvious figures many publications (see for example, Grove, 2015) have highlighted is the outrageous inequalities at professorial level: although there has clearly been a concerted effort to promote more women to professor since 2015, the imbalance remains staggering. But what strikes me is the systemic-ness of inequality. Note, for example, that the only academic employment function in which women outnumber men is in teaching-only contracts. In the 2015/16 academic year, this meant that these roles were filled to 52.5 per cent by women. In the most recent academic year, this number was pretty much the same: 52.4 per cent. Of course, we know it is research that continues to propel academics up the career ladder. So, if you are a woman on a teaching-only contract, this means research in your spare time. However, as a study by Alison Lacey et al. (2020) reveals, women overall have less spare time as they continue to take the lion’s share of household chores and caring responsibilities, a fact exacerbated by the recent lockdown (for experiences beyond the United Kingdom, see Benlloch and Aguado Boise, 2020; see also Zhou et al., 2020). Fundamentally, this means women will continue to struggle to the top of the profession – of professorship, particularly if they also behave in typically gendered ways once they secure more permanent positions: as a number of publications (Barrett and Barrett, 2013; Deiana, 2013; Morley, 1994, 2000) have highlighted, women in academia take on more pastoral and administrative responsibilities, providing significant emotional labour that involves a lot of time listening to personal narratives that are often draining and require follow-up intervention with attendant work. This often impacts on their own emotional and mental wellbeing, particularly exacerbating anxiety and stress levels. Furthermore, these pastoral care and organisational roles translate into the ones they perform in the home as well. I want to emphasise that this labour is predominantly performed by women, but that – partially as a result of this – it is also deeply gendered: it is perceived as ‘woman’s work’ and thus not valued, no matter who performs it. Indeed, for men, this might come with the additional burden of performing against their perceived gender. As long as seniority is primarily awarded with achievement in research, it is therefore unlikely that much will change as far as gender inequalities at professorial level are concerned. No Aurora or any other leadership development programme designed to empower women will fundamentally help them to gain the one thing they lack: time to conduct research. And this lack of time is what plagues women of colour even more: in addition to those roles named above, these women have to also perform ‘black admin’ as Daniel Lawrence Taylor (2020) recently called it, such as leading diversity initiatives, becoming the staff liaison officer for non-white students, etc. It is, then, perhaps not too surprising that at managerial level, of 540 people, we do find not a single (0) black woman (or man for that matter), and only 5 managers were mixed-race.
On closer inspection, our field of television studies looks, on the surface at least, somewhat more balanced or even more so in favour of women. Think of senior researchers in television studies in the United Kingdom and the names that come to mind include a significant number of women at professorial level, particularly if we include emeritus: Christine Geraghty (emeritus), Maire Messenger-Davies (emeritus), Charlotte Brunsdon, Roberta Pearson, Helen Wheatley, Catherine Johnson, Helen Wood, Rachel Moseley, Andrea Esser and Jeanette Steemers, to name but a few. This is mirrored elsewhere where women are often either leading, or have led, in the development of the subject area in their respective countries.
For the women who are now emeritus or close to retirement, when television studies developed in the 1970s and 1980s, this had a lot to do with the gendering of television studies, particularly if the study engaged with non-masculine genres: for example, genres other than the news (Brunsdon, 1996). Both Geraghty (2013) and Brunsdon (1996) have detailed that engaging with television, and specifically working on soap opera, at that time involved a negotiation and/or angry exchanges with colleagues. Television (for women – or children for that matter) remained an unworthy subject which, perhaps, was easier for women to study as it did not mean quite as much of a loss of face (particularly as they were, at that time, junior). Thus, the significant number of women in positions of seniority in our subject is perhaps the outcome of the initial gendering of the subject which led to a wider culture in which women were being nurtured. In many ways, because doing television studies was feminist and women’s work, it was conceived in contra-distinction, but also (happily) other to the more competitive areas of traditional academic subjects: subversively sat in opposition to traditional hierarchies of gender and class with its interest in the feminine, the domestic, the everyday, but also the working class and popular. It is interesting to note that at around the same time, film became a more legitimate area of study, perhaps now claimable as less working class and feminine, particularly when it could be distinguished against its ultimate other: television, a distinction that, of course, still haunts the discipline even now (Andrews, 2014). Perhaps this is why there has so often been a sense of comradery in our field: us against those others, us against those senior academics who fully exploit their gendered status, be it by dressing down junior academics at conferences or claiming for themselves work done by junior women, or indeed other abuses (including sexual, see Harrison, 2020).
There has been much focus on personal accounts of abuse, on the sexual elements, largely because these narratives fits into the knowledge horizon that #MeToo is offering, as Hans-Georg Gadamer (2011) would say: #MeToo has given us a framework to understand contemporary feminism as combating gender inequality by focusing on everyday sexual harassment and assault. But such an understanding can easily miss the larger picture: Alison Phipps (2020) reminds us that it shifts the focus too much onto ‘bad men’ rather than bringing about any actual real change, a point also made by Rose McGowan in her interview with Louis Theroux (2020). But most of all it misses the systemic-ness of inequalities that facilitate the abuse in the first place: rather than treating the illness (the continued devaluation of women’s work, the lingering male-centredness of systems of progression and thus the perpetuation of masculine values that dominate the whole of academic life), it treats the overt symptom. Here, I want to focus on the systems.
Our field of television studies might be operating at the margins of, and perhaps in contradistinction, to the system of higher education, yet it is nevertheless a prominently white environment, a fact that Ien Ang reflects on in her background questionnaire and interview with Brunsdon (2000). Indeed, Ang indicates how studying the integration of Dallas (1978–1991) into Dutch culture and its marginalisation within it reflects ‘some of the problems and tensions of [my and my family’s] desire for integration’ (cited in Brunsdon, 2000: 152). Television in Europe and Anglo-American countries, then, becomes the site where an identity of ‘passing’ is negotiated largely because, although marginalised within serious culture because of feminine associations, it nevertheless represents an imagined national unity which is based around white culture.
There is no doubt television has changed, however, if mostly in relation to gender, and intersected with class. Geraghty has already spoken about this matter in Women and Soap Opera (1991: 167), in which she asked: ‘Women’s Fiction No More?’, drawing attention to the increasing masculinisation of soap opera in the United States and the United Kingdom. In Britain, she pointed to social realist soaps such as Brookside (1982–2003) engaged with a politics conceived around manual labour and masculine values. Social realism was in the past profusely troubled by the inclusion of more feminine concerns (Suh, 2012), thus indicating how entrenched its aesthetics are with notions of masculinity. In relation to American television, Geraghty referred primarily to the primetime soap operas of Dallas, Dynasty (1981–1989) and others like those which combined narratives of personal relationships with ‘plot lines which deal more regularly with the public sphere and emphasise the male grip on themes of business and work’ (1991: 169). The word ‘business’ draws attention to the fact that these primetime soaps often glamorised the accumulation of money and emphasised the then-somewhat sneered-at world of the Yuppy. However, the primetime soaps were part of a much larger shift, discussed by Jane Feuer (1984) in relation to MTM Television serials, towards the middle classes as specific and specifically valuable audience groups. In addition to their adoption of serial narratives in traditional seasons, inflation of budgets and filmic production values (Weissmann, 2012), the primetime serials are also predecessors of the current glut of must-see, ‘complex’ (Mittel, 2015) or ‘quality television’ (McCabe and Akass, 2007) which continue – perhaps to the extreme – the masculinisation of television (Albrecht, 2020; Weissmann, 2012) as well as its shift towards middle-class tastes. As a result, some television no longer appears as the unworthy object and can be studied widely and without shame, particularly when differentiated from other television (Leverette et al., 2009; Newman and Levine, 2012), or brought into relation with film (Andrews, 2014; Watts, 2019) and/or technology (Jenner, 2018; Weissmann, 2012).
However, this has meant that scholarship in this area of television has proliferated. For some of us, it requires attention precisely to emphasise the problematic assumptions that public and, some, scholarly discourses betray in relation to these high-end TV dramas. But for others, the changing status of television in society has opened the medium up for study for the first time. In this regard, it is interesting to return to some of the responses I received 2 years ago by TV scholars in Europe (and beyond) in relation to their experiences of doing television studies. Several respondents drew attention to how ‘quality television drama’ has attracted scholars from other disciplines including film, theatre and literary studies. But generally, with the exception of one person, the responses suggested that television as a medium of the everyday encouraged people to talk about it, but mostly in ways that are disparaging or not taken too seriously. One respondent highlighted the continued focus on negative representations or concerns about effects. Stan Beeler, to whom I explicitly asked about his experience of telling people he published on Charmed (1998–2006), wrote that he continued to encounter academics (in North America) who took an attitude of ‘fachidiot’: denigrating the importance of studying ‘material that you consider light entertainment of no lasting cultural value’ (2018). David Levente Palatinus pointed to the type of content on Central European television as a reason for why TV studies is still disparaged: ‘there’s an abundance of talk shows, chat shows, game shows, and all the franchises…The other hugely dominant format/genre is the soap, of course’ (2018). Note that both respondents discuss the devaluation of anything traditionally considered feminine – talk and chat shows and soap operas or women-centred coming-of-age drama, which cannot be masculinised with recourse to the cult of authorship. But even in cases where the subject of publication is being considered as important by scholars outside of our discipline (as in the case of TV drama and the socialist state apparatus), everyday discrimination can occur: in one country, the head of the research assessment exercise panel presiding over our discipline decided that publications on television would automatically be dismissed, meaning scholars in our field had to make sure they published not just on television, but something else in order to remain visible as scholars in their country.
What does such an environment do to our scholarship? There is no question that it shapes the forms of television on which we focus. In the past, the news was of central interest, before the excellent research by women such as Geraghty, Brunsdon, Ang, Dorothy Hobson (1982) enabled the soap opera to become an important site of research (Brunsdon, 1995; Geraghty, 2009). Then, a concern about reality television’s impact on the ‘quality’ of television drew a significant number of scholars to the discipline. Now, the legitimation of some TV drama has led to an increase in publications on that topic – and I fully admit that I am part of this problem. I might work in a (national) environment where television studies is not derided to the extent that it is automatically excluded from research assessment exercises, but when I tell people I am working on a project about Gardener’s World (BBC, since 1968) or (worse) Beechgrove (BBC Scotland, since 1978), I prefix this with ‘I know, I am old’ and thus emphasise my unfashionableness (and indicate that in TV scholarship, sexism meets a good dose of ageism). Similarly, most of my research is on legitimised forms of TV drama. My decision (and probably other’s) is fully influenced by considerations of gender: my choice is driven by a wish to be able to look my family in the eye when I talk about my work. Otherwise I would have to constantly joke about it in order to emphasise my own ironic stance towards the subject. In other words, by researching the legitimate forms of television, I do not need to bring a good bit of masculine distance to a subject I love with all my feminine heart. Similarly, I decide to apply for funding for projects on this topic because I know unconsciously that a research grant application is more likely succeed if it combines a focus on globalisation with technological concerns. But this also means that I am largely following public debates that are dominated by those with power, i.e. those whom my subject is supposedly trying to stand against, and their obsession with high-end drama and certain ‘content providers’ rather than intervening differently, by drawing attention to the underlying gender bias that keeps other television out of the public eye.
However, for the editors at Critical Studies in Television this interest in high-end drama has become an issue of a different way. In the past, this was expressed with a sigh of ‘not another article on The Wire’ (2002–2008): scholarship is so focused on one topic that, although solid, it becomes repetitive and not driving knowledge forward. In addition, because some of the work was performed by newcomers to our field, it often arrived unprepared – unaware of a half-century of scholarship in our field. This lack of knowledge was, frankly, disrespectful. At the same time, such attitudes keep some forms of television, as Brett Mills put it so succinctly, ‘invisible’ (2010). Mills points to a number of reasons why television remains invisible in the academic debate. Although he never explicitly brings these into alignment with gender, these explanations often betray associations that need to be considered in light of them. They include how we as audiences as well as scholars respond to television (and here, our bias needs to be considered: we respond to feminised television differently than to masculinised forms because we have learnt over years and years of exposure that the masculine is more valuable than the feminine). It also relates to notions of mass audiences (the mass is still more often than not gendered feminine, because it operates in contradistinction to the rational liberal subject imagined, amongst others, two-and-a-half centuries ago as idealised political ‘man’ of the US constitution. In this respect, note the outrage that the word change to ‘people’ in Joe Biden’s op-ed for the 4th of July celebrations caused in some conservative quarters in the United States (see Fox News, 2020)). And of course, it includes the ordinariness of some television: Mills himself points to Frances Bonner’s book (2002) on lifestyle television and its concern with the domestic. But it is also the lack of the spectacular, the outstanding, the individualised: in other words, ‘ordinary television’ is imagined as unidentifiable mass object in distinction to the individualised subject of neoliberalism, a distinction that pits the perceived passive consumption of identity in relation to others (that television provides) against the active production of self that online technology supposedly offer. Thus, gender is at the heart of what keeps a lot of television invisible in our scholarship.
But what has this to do with the abuses of power so clearly visible in higher education? Seniority is about power, and by allowing ourselves to be ushered into a game of gaining seniority by following the traditional value judgements based on gender, we allow this power to be solidified around gender, race, class and gender-and-race-and-class inequalities. Thus, being a female early-career researcher becomes noticeably less powerful than a male-established researcher, and even more so if the early career researcher is also black and/or working class and the established one white and/or middle class. However, as Phipps (2020) highlights, these power dynamics change when the early career researcher is a white middle-class woman and the established researcher is black and/or from a working-class background. Of course, this requires that the academy first of all addresses its continued problem with the feminine and race and class, and not just by promoting women and black people to more senior positions, but by recognising the deeply entrenched value judgements made every day based on the devaluation of the feminine, the working class and the non-white. Louise Morley (2000) called for this realignment in thinking 20-years ago when she pointed to the micropolitics structuring Higher Education. At that time she defined micropolitics as ‘the irrationality of educational organisations’ and continued: ‘[policy interventions such as employment and career development] fail to confront the gendering of authority in which leadership, superiority, and academic excellence are characterized as masculine’ (2000: 233). This also includes, as Vivien E. Cree (1997) argues, the gendering of subjects which therefore devalues women’s research in larger institutional and cross-disciplinary contexts.
However, there is something we can contribute too: imagine what would happen if we did turn our attention to the invisible television Mills, Palatinus and others describe. It would undermine some of the power that is based on gendered, racial, class- and age-focused divides, which of course television itself has to address as well. However, such a turn to other genres would in addition open up the field of TV studies to a much wider range of subjects. We would do more justice to television and value it for its wonderful diversity. But it would also level out expertise: as senior researchers we would know about our specific field, but junior researchers would find their own voice with material we know only little about, meaning mining each other’s work would become less easy. Most of all, we would be able to recognise and value each other’s expertise more and so be able to undermine some of the inequalities facilitating the abuse. This, however, requires a radical shift. It requires that we stop devaluing that which is black, feminine, old and/or working class in all forms which means, as I hope to have shown, that we confront not just our unconscious biases regarding race and ethnicity, but also, and additionally, gender, class and age.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Rebecca Harrison for writing the blog which prompted this provocation. Also, thanks go to my colleagues Claire Parkinson, who has been a receptive listener, Hannah Andrews, inspirational in prompting further reading and discussion and Perelandra Beedles, a regular conversational partner about gender in Higher Education. I would also like to thank the editors of Critical Studies in Television for their continuing support and significant input without which I wouldn’t feel brave enough to write this, and to Karen Boyle and Christine Geraghty who opened my eyes to these things and continue to push me to challenge myself through the power of their examples.
