Media,Culture & Society

This article focuses on an open-air museum established in Budapest in 1993 as a repository for the city's communist monuments. Following Raymond Williams's emphasis on the importance of studying the material processes through which culture is constructed, the Statue Park Museum is analyzed as an arena for the formation of collective memories about Hungarians' 40 years of experiences with communism. The article explores the political climate within which the decision was reached to transfer the monuments from their original sites to a museum, offers a discursive reading of the museum as a space that contributes to an emerging post-communist discourse of history and society, and argues that despite some public skepticism about its value, the museum provides a symbolic space for the common recollection of diverse narratives.

This article explores the rise and decline of daily labour and industrial journalism in Britain from the 1930s to the present day. This represents the loss of an important arena within the public sphere for the discussion of work-related issues. Conventional explanations for the decline in this specialism point to the diminishing newsworthiness of trade unions. However, this is an oversimplification. While changes in the political and economic environment are clearly important, attention also has to be paid to the relationships or power-webs, involving journalists and members of the political and labour movement elites, which sustain or block crucial information flows and support or undermine particular categories of knowledge. The hierarchical ordering and instability of categories of knowledge for journalists is intimately connected to particular forms of governmentality.

Drawing on Martin-Barbero's insistence on analysing the media's complex processes of social `mediation' and Scannell's insistence on grasping the phenomenal complexity of the media frame and how people interact with it, it is argued that an important, relatively neglected, dimension of the disruptive power of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (1981-) has been its challenge to the terms of the media frame, the `struggle for visibility' it represents. This struggle for visibility is examined in two stages - in relation to the early years of intense media coverage and in relation to the later years of media silence. In the concluding section, connections are opened up between Greenham Common and recent, more obviously `mediated' forms of protest action.

Since the mid-1970s, Helen Gurley Brown has been a cultural icon as well as the editor of the hugely profitable Cosmopolitan magazine. Following a cultural studies approach to media historiography, this article traces Brown's rise to fame and analyzes her early advice to women as a `cultural discourse' that managed some of the social and economic tensions of the early 1960s and early 1970s, while also offering certain women the symbolic material to think about themselves as historical subjects in new ways. Brown is often remembered as the feminine piper in the `sexual revolution' of the 1960s, but I suggest that her girl-style American Dream promised transcendence from class roles as much as sexual ones. Brown's early advice to women offers a case study in the cultural construction of class as a fragmented, socially constituted and sexualized identity.

This article examines the symbolic power of the concept of community in American culture by analyzing its use as a marketing device within the retail book trade. Drawing on data gathered from interviews with book industry members and bookstore customers, and from the book industry trade literature, the article explores how the appeal to community has arisen within the context of competition between independent and chain booksellers. It discusses the limitations of positing a for-profit business as a centre of community life, but also argues that retail businesses do have consequences for a locale's economic and cultural life.

This article takes as its starting point the statistics surrounding female authorship on the BBC Wednesday Play: these statistics reveal that women writers, always under-represented in the strand, gradually contributed fewer and fewer plays to it until female authorship was finally eliminated from the series entirely. The debate presented here analyses this situation, intersecting archive material and textual examples with theoretical debate. Considering issues such as androcentric discourses propagated by television as an institutional and cultural hegemony, television drama as a male-defined cultural practice, and film technology as an expression of the dominant ideology, the debate culminates in a comparative analysis of two dramas presented in The Wednesday Play series. This analysis provides evidence of the impulses detected throughout the discussion by demonstrating that the strand prioritized a specifically gendered vision of dramatic and representational `relevance' that effectively eliminated female articulation in this influential genre.