Television, gender and space: an overview of Lynn Spigel

Lynn Spigel, the Frances E. Willard Professor of Screen Cultures at the School of Communications at Northwestern University, is a feminist media scholar who works on television and cultural history. Over the past two decades, she has produced a body of work that has been highly influential in the fields of television studies and cultural studies, and she has long-standing interests in sf and discourses about television in relation to public and private space, gender and technology. Spigel was a co-editor of the feminist media journal Camera Obscura for ten years and is one of the founders of the Console-ing Passions conference, a biannual international conference on feminism, television, audio and video. She is the editor of the Console-ing Passions book series for Duke University Press.

Spigel is primarily concerned with feminist approaches to television in relation to place and urban, suburban, domestic and outer space, particularly in the postwar period. In order to provide an understanding of the cultural and historical contexts of media culture, Spigel primarily uses an interpretive method based on archival research. Indeed, her work has largely been concerned with uncovering details about the cultural contexts of television that have often challenged our thinking about the history of the medium. Much like television studies itself, Spigel's work is interdisciplinary, drawing on feminism, art history, architecture and design, geography, urban planning, cultural theory and sf studies, which has allowed her to ask questions that she might not have asked within the confines of her own field (Spigel, 'Theorizing the Bachelorette' 1211). Television studies, like sf studies, shares a history of marginalisation within the academy, and Spigel was one of the first scholars critically to examine television in relation to other 'low' or 'debased' forms of culture, such as women's magazines, dismissed by cultural hierarchies within the academy and popular criticism as undeserving of serious attention. Spigel has published three major works – Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (1992), Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (2001) and TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (2008) – that have expanded our understanding of television history. In addition, she has co-edited several influential anthologies: Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction (1991), Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer (1992), The Revolution Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict (1997), Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader (1997) and Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (2004) – that have mapped key developments in the field.

Spigel emerged as a key figure in the early 1990s with Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, a cultural history of American television that focuses on discourses surrounding television's installation in the domestic sphere following World War II. At the time the book was published, the focus of television studies was largely confined to understanding the medium in terms of industry regulation and technology. In contrast, Spigel offered a social and cultural historical study that examined what was said about television in postwar America. In order to account for how television was understood as a new technology entering the home, Spigel used popular sources such as magazines, advertisements, newspapers, television shows and films that revealed 'a general set of rules that were formed for thinking about TV in its early period' (9). Importantly, Spigel examined sources such as Better Homes and Garden, Ladies Home Journal and House Beautiful that addressed women and domestic issues that had been previously ignored in histories of the medium. This technique reinserted women into the history of television in terms of their 'subjective experiences and the way those experiences might, in turn, have affected industry output and policies' (5). Throughout the book, Spigel traces the connections between television viewing and constructions of gender and family life, and the often contradictory responses to television in popular media.

In Make Room for TV, Spigel draws our attention to how television's growth in the 1950s was connected to the mass construction of the suburbs. As she explains, the postwar housing...