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For a number of years now, the battlelines have been drawn between cultural studies and critical political economy. By the time that the debaters have finished hurling epithets and the spectators have chosen sides, it is easy to forget that, since the inception of British cultural studies, a number of scholars have recognized the importance of a steady stream of systematic dialogue between the approaches (Meehan 1986; Mosco 1996). An interesting development in recent years is that allusions to feminist sites of conflict appear to have become a vehicle for disagreement, as cultural studies and political economy are described as separate spheres, each requiring “its own methodologies and theoretical frameworks” (Fiske 1994b, 469). In one memorably caustic exchange, Nicholas Garnham and Lawrence Grossberg address the disharmony between the two approaches within a framework reminiscent of “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism” (Hartmann 1981), in various configurations involving marriage, divorce, and reconciliation.1 I wish to argue that references to “the unhappy marriage” and “separate spheres” indicate more than that scholars have borrowed a convenient framework for expressing their differences. In fact, these allusions point to a gendering of the cultural studies/political economy debate, a formation of “separate spheres” in which the greater number of Western feminists have occupied the sphere associated with cultural studies. As cultural studies and political economy have broken down into two sides of an “academic apartheid” (Murdock 1995, 90), this division also reflects and reinforces something of a “gender apartheid.” Mosco (1996, 231) notes that although some leading political economists have begun to recognize that the incorporation of gender relations within the political-economy perspective is long overdue, “one observes remarkably little effort to theorize gender within a political economy approach to communication.” There is not a substantial body of research in North American or European political economy on the relationship of gender to cultural industries (111). A large number of feminists recognize the importance of political economy to the analy30 3. Something Old, Something New: Lingering Moments in the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism Lisa McLaughlin sis of communication and culture. Yet, among First World feminists, only a very few have pursued a research agenda that involves a sustained consideration of both feminist and political-economic concerns; among those who do are Gallagher (1980, 1985, 1992), Martin (1991), Spigel (1989), Roach (1993), and Meehan (1994). Historically, cultural studies has provided a more amicable environment for considerations of gender and patriarchy than has political economy, but to note this is to return to where we began, with the substantial feminist presence within cultural studies, for feminists were instrumental in creating—not simply inheriting or borrowing— the field.2 In cultural studies, as elsewhere, the feminist interrogation of difference was effective, if not transformative, in ameliorating the orthodox Marxist tendency to think in terms of a single structure of domination, exposing the gendered assumptions of Marxism, and rendering women visible within the Marxist analysis of class dynamics. Although British cultural studies was never populated by devout disciples of orthodox Marxism, much of its early work focused on working-class culture and tended toward silence on questions of the ways in which “popular racism” and “popular sexism” were expressed through the cultural practices of the working class (Tester 1994). Feminists helped to break this silence by challenging male-oriented models and assumptions and gender-biased practices, particularly within ethnographic studies. McRobbie’s (1978a, 1978b, 1980, 1982, 1984) studies of working-class “girl culture,” through which she challenges the primacy of class considerations, have had an enormous impact on cultural studies, and for feminists in particular, as one of the first of many responses to the masculinist bias of British cultural studies. In providing a concerted challenge to many of its genderbiased practices, particularly within ethnographic studies, feminists became integral to the trend in which British cultural studies turned away from class as a key structural determination in relations of domination and began to take up questions regarding the articulations of multiple social dimensions that included gender, race, class, and youth culture. There are distinct ties that bind the cultural studies/political economy dispute to the “Unhappy Marriage” debate, notably through questions of whether class is the central structure of domination, with differences in gender, race, and sexuality following from the mode of production, or whether these differences constitute alternative structures of domination undetermined by class. Any attempt to explain the Something Old, Something New / 31 [13.58.82.79] Project MUSE (2024...

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