GENDERING RADIO RESEARCH: The circuit of everyday culture

This paper sketches the establishment, consolidation and decline of the Australian Broadcasting Commission's (ABC) 'Women's Session'. I argue that radio programming aimed at, and presented by, women during the twentieth century was significant as cultural form unique to a particular stage in the constitution of a middle-class female subject. It opens up the question of how a new subject position for women was constructed in the challenge that public service radio broadcasting made to divisions between public and private spheres. Radio research offers a unique opportunity to combine archival research with analysis of media texts to investigate gender formation through media history. The application of contemporary gender theory to interaction between audience and institution questions notions of public broadcasting and the public sphere. Radio studies needs to interrogate 'the public ' as both traditional media theorists and broadcasters themselves have defined it. Analyses of audience responses to the programs demonstrate that women actively negotiated the meaning of the programs, and through their engagement with the medium, sought involvement in civic life during this period. I advocate the use a feminist cultural studies method in a media studies context to articulate 'the relationship between different sites ' of the production of gender and make connections between 'everyday practices, institutional inscriptions and cultural habits ' (Craik 1992, 89-98). Select a stream in which you wish to have your paper considered: Radio Studie