Abstract
Feminist policy reform efforts and advocacy initiatives are frequently advanced by and alongside of media productions concerned with the issue of sexual violence. From the earliest days of broadcasting, feminist activism has piggybacked off of the publicity of high-profile trials and social movements to advance specific social, cultural, and political agendas. For example, much of the early literature concerning the relationship between feminist activism, policy movements, and television representation has engaged with “popular” mid-century network TV genres (i.e., prime-time television, network news, talk shows, soap operas, and made-for-TV movies) that were especially prominent from the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s onwards (Moorti, 2002; Cuklanz, 2000; Levine, 2007; Projansky, 2001). While several scholars have explored how mass media has been wielded as a tool by activists and media makers, few have considered how various representational modalities in the digital era are converging to create new spaces for feminist advocacy and social reform. I ask: how do documentaries produced for televisual streaming platforms intersect with new forms of “advocacy journalism” in the “post-truth” digital era? More precisely, how are feminist documentarians and activists harnessing these emergent (and increasingly overlapping) digital and televisual spaces to foreground generative policy-oriented discourses? To answer these questions, I explore how contemporary U.S. advocacy-inspired journalism and documentary television constitute distinct public spheres for examining feminist social issues, with each containing unique affordances and limitations regarding their advancement of social change, resulting from their different associations with the notions of “objectivity” and “truth.”
Presenters
Amber HardimanPhD Candidate, Film, Television, & Media, University of Michigan, Michigan, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2022 Special Focus—Democratic Disorder: Disinformation, the Media and Crisis in a Time of Change
KEYWORDS
Feminist Activism, U.S. Television, Broadcasting, Journalism, Documentary, Disinformation, Post-Truth
