Hidden Feminist Histories of American Network Television

Panel Abstract The choice of what texts are studied, chronicled, and taught shapes our collective understanding of TV history. In the case of feminist histories, we continue to lack critical understanding of myriad texts whose production, representations, and/or audiences shifted the course of American television. Instead, there is often an established canon of go-to TV series referenced when media scholars write or teach about TV and feminism in twentieth-century America, focusing almost entirely on white, heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied women (I Love Lucy, MTM, Roseanne). This panel seeks to expand the canon of TV history to expose the hidden histories of feminist network TV with a focus on intersectional analysis. The panelists are also all a part of an in-progress special issue of Television and New Media that is focused on this topic. Our panel begins with Adrien Sebro, who challenges traditional readings of Sanford and Son by centering his analysis on the series’ Black women and observes that Aunt Esther exhibits a “radical ambiguity.” Next, Elizabeth Ellcessor rereads iconic 90s sitcoms (Golden Girls, Saved by the Bell) through the lens of their one-off characters, who appear primarily through the trope of the “disability date.” Kyra Hunting argues for the place of 80s and 90s “kidcoms” (Punky Brewster, Sister/Sister) in the canon of feminist TV heroines. Finally, Suzanne Leonard and Amanda Ann Klein discuss the process of conceptualizing a journal issue centered on these “hidden feminist histories” and how we might rewrite the history of TV studies to be more diverse, inclusive, and reflective of the voices and audiences that have always been there. Paper #1: Adrien Sebro, Radical Ambiguity: Black Women and Embodiment in Sanford and Son In the 1970s, Black women played an important role in the cultural production of the television industry, specifically in Black sitcoms. Through interviews and comments in mainstream magazines, Black actresses like Ester Rolle in Good Times (1974-1979) and Isabel Sanford in The Jeffersons (1975-1985) participated in a culture of resistance by critiquing television’s often masculine imagery and the industry’s approach to race. Inspired by previous accounts of agency of Good Times’ Esther Rolle, this paper focuses on giving voice to the labor and embodiment of Black women on Sanford and Son (1972-1977) onscreen and in other medias and diagrams how their presence worked to foreground and complicate the embodiment of Black women in the sitcom genre. Through charting the invisibility of Fred Sanford’s late wife Elizabeth, Fred’s unwavering love interest Donna (played by Lynn Hamilton), and, most importantly, the radical ambiguity of Aunt Esther (played by LaWanda Page), the traditional masculinist readings of Sanford and Son can be made whole—expanding the conversation of this sitcom’s pivotal role in television history. Paper #2: Elizabeth Elcessor, “Disability Dates and Disasters: Romance, Stereotypes, and Special Episodes in 1980s and 1990s Television” Issues of gender, sexuality, and romance were historically central to feminist television studies (Rabinovitz, 1989; Haralovich and Rabinovitz, 1999). This paper revisit these issues by applying the intersectional lens of feminist disability studies (Garland-Thomson, 2002) to episodes from six classic sitcoms that feature single-episode narratives in which a main character goes on a date with a disabled person. I argue that this episodic trope, evident in Saved by the Bell, The Golden Girls, and Frasier among others, must be situated in the broader context of the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) and the backlash that followed. These episodes often preach inclusion but portray stereotypical, hostile, and offensive ideas about disability and accommodation, revealing some of the limits of neoliberal and feminist televisual discourse. Paper #3: Kyra Hunting, From Punky Brewster to Pepper Ann: Feminism in the Everyday in Children’s Sitcoms of the ‘80s and ‘90s. With a focus on school drama, dating, and growing pains, sitcoms for tweens and teens are rarely considered emblems of feminist television. Indeed, some scholars have used them as exemplars of the failure of televisual feminism (Projansky and Vande Berg, 2000). I argue that despite their apparently “frivolous” themes, at their core many tween sitcoms feature girls as powerful self-advocates who are efficacious in their world. The seemingly stereotypical or mundane problems can be productive because television programs may provide social modeling for children (Mares and Woodard, 2005) and can offer templates for self-efficacy. In the ‘80s and ‘90s sitcoms targeted at children often differentiated themselves from contemporaneous family sitcoms and by centering on children and their independence; facilitated in many cases by placing main characters in non-traditional families. This paper looks at how Punky Brewster, Sister/Sister, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Pepper Ann provide a depiction of young women with non-traditional families as advocates for their own needs and effective problem solvers, allowing tween girls to appear as authors of their fates. I argue that these programs become a model for the female centered tween kid-com that dominated children’s cable channels in the early ‘00s. Paper #4: Amanda Ann Klein and Suzanne Leonard, “Thinking Through The Hidden Histories of Feminist Television” As the Chair and Secretary of the Board of Console-ing Passions, respectively, we spend considerable time pondering feminism media studies’ past, presents, and futures. The idea to propose and edit a special journal issue on Feminism’s Hidden Histories was born in part from our feeling that, as leaders in Console-ing Passions, we bear responsibility for helping to chart that course. From the projects that the organization supports to the events that we put on (including, of course, the CP conference), we felt an urge to look backwards, not just at the history of a singular organization, but rather at television studies itself. Though it has changed considerably, CP was born as a group devoted to the study of television, a medium that had historically been sidelined in the greater field of film and media studies. This presentation will explain not merely the process of putting together our special issue, but also how its values and interventions are linked to our own, and to our work with CP. In our proposal, we noted that there are myriad omissions in television history, including in the arenas of race, sexuality, class, and ability. As we wrote, “These gaps matter deeply to our field, not least because the choice of what texts are studied, chronicled, and taught shapes our collective understanding of TV history.” As white women, we recognize that we also bear some responsibility for this problem. Our special issue, and our panel today, is an attempt to use the intuitional power that we have to open new doors so that those histories can be more inclusive and more accurate