by Carol A. Stabile, Director, CSWS
I suspect that I sound like a dinosaur when I talk to my students about typing my undergraduate honors thesis on a Smith-Corona electric typewriter—a model that boasted a cartridge with built-in correcto-tape. I was reminded of the gap between my students’ experiences of media and mine last year, when I showed my students an episode of the sitcom The Goldbergs from 1951, and Gertrude Berg made a sales pitch for RCA televisions based on the product’s ability to eliminate “snow.” Certainly, one of my students piped up (keep in mind that this was Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where real snow is frequently on people’s minds), even back in 1951, a pitchwoman couldn’t claim that televisions were capable of eliminating snow.
I have to admit that this is an exciting time to be a feminist media scholar. My students live and breathe in wireless worlds with never a hint of snow on their screens—worlds in which the word “digital” is fast becoming redundant, where cell phones and handhelds and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are transforming their work and social lives. Interactive media technologies are allowing girls and women to imagine themselves as active producers of media content, and not just consumers of content produced elsewhere. YouTube is allowing amateur producers to distribute content not just within fan communities, or communities defined by how far a signal can reach, but around the world. These new media appear to be novel, unprecedented, and revolutionary; the motors that seemingly drive the many changes we experience across the course of our lifetimes.
Perhaps because my research has required bringing a gender lens to the study of media and culture in order to understand how gender, race, and class have affected media industries, access to media production, the content of the media products we consume, and political agendas around the world, my own enthusiasm for this new media world of ours has been tempered by what I know about the history of media institutions in the United States in particular. The book I’m finishing this year, for example, grew out of research on the dominance of the nuclear family model (and the sexist and racist stereotypes that accompanied it) on television across the second half of the twentieth century. I began to think about who was writing the content for these very conservative representations of gender and family—a question that led me very quickly to the role of the blacklist in broadcasting that began in June 1950. Because of the blacklist, writers, producers, and even actors whose creative work and political views diverged from conservative understandings of gender and family were either eliminated from the industry or silenced. The first two instances of blacklisting involved women who were politically active in the Civil Rights Movement (Hazel Scott and Jean Muir) and whose views on gender, as women balancing careers and family, were quite different from those that eventually dominated television screens. The ranks of the blacklisted also included a significant number of feminist writers whose viewpoints and creative work would never see the light of day, like composer and author Shirley Graham DuBois, screenwriter and novelist Vera Caspary, screenwriter and actor Ruth Gordon, and television writer Joan LaCour Scott.
This archival project, which seeks to recover the creative work of women whose careers and contributions were erased from the history of television by the Red Scare, constantly reminds me how difficult it has been for feminists and progressives in general to influence media institutions and production in this country. Reading through the letters, papers, and unpublished scripts and manuscripts of this cohort of writers, I saw parallels in their optimism and enthusiasm about the possibilities for television in the late 1940s. They believed that television could serve a positive role in fighting racism, sexism, antiimmigrant sentiment, and promoting economic equality. They wrote novels and scripts about the role that people of color and women had played in U.S. history, they wrote warm representations about immigrant life, they wrote about the division of labor in the household and environmental degradation and animal rights. And they fatally underestimated the power of the forces arrayed against these ideas.
As I’ve been researching new media technologies, I’ve been reminded of these writers’ now forgotten hopes and dreams for what was then the new medium of television. Several years ago, I decided to begin playing massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). MMOs are games played against the backdrop of a persistent virtual world, full of maps, quests, and other characters, many of whom are other players. The most popular MMO, World of Warcraft, includes over 6 million players from around the world, who encounter each other against the background of the game world and who play with each other over the course of hours, days, months, and in some cases years. Sometimes, grandparents play with grandchildren as a way of staying connected over distances; families create guilds in order to play the game with each other; still other individuals meet each other in the game and form friendships and sometimes romantic relationships. “Sappersbride” told me that she began playing in order to spend time with her husband, who is stationed in Iraq, as the game allows them to talk (using one of the voice communication software packages now available or using the game’s text-based chat function), and to maintain a sense of connectedness that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. “Shammycow,” a twenty-two-year-old college student, web designer, and self-identified “girl geek,” plays the same game with her father, an emergency room doctor, who lives thousands of miles away.
The virtual environments of MMOs offer repeatable experiences for females and males alike that differ in significant ways from most commercial media content in the United States. Where television (both cable and network) and film content still emphasize women’s vulnerability and continue to stress women’s need for male protection, MMOs are beginning to allow female players to act, travel, and play in a world that does not represent them as potential victims. When compared to so-called “pink” games like Webkinz, Barbie games, and dress-up games that are organized around shopping and relationships, or film and television content that features women primarily as passive victims of violence rather than active protectors or defenders, MMOs can offer novel and in some ways radical experiences of gender for players. Not only do MMOs allow female players to imagine themselves as powerful agents, game-playing also encourages facility and ease with the new media technologies that are becoming ever greater parts of women’s everyday lives in the United States. Freed to a large degree from a form of spectatorship that was based on the intrinsic passivity of readers, consumers, and listeners whose only power over content was the ability to interpret, MMOs allow players to experiment with identity, challenging the negative self-objectification that philosopher Iris Young (1990) understood to result in “throwing” or “playing like a girl.”
Part of what has been motivating research on this specific game is my growing sense that the future of media lies in the forms of interactivity, world-building, and immersion that are key characteristics of MMOs. Scholars, teachers, and institutions like NASA and the U.S. military are already considering the potential of games to educate and to indoctrinate. The U.S. Army created an online game called America’s Army to teach the values of militarization and to identify potential recruits. The Minnesota Zoo and Eduweb have partnered to create WolfQuest, an immersive game that teaches wolf behavior and conservation. School of Journalism and Communication graduate student Sonia de la Cruz is researching a game called Against All Odds, created by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to teach players about the plight of refugees. America’s Army enables forms of identification that encourage gamers to see themselves as white, gun-wielding heroes, fighting against villains who are clearly designed to fit the war on terror’s profile of terrorists. In contrast, WolfQuest and Against All Odds encourage players to consider life from standpoints not represented in mainstream media and political discourse.
Like earlier moments of media change and development, ours is rife with peril and with possibilities. Even those games created for commercial rather than educational purposes are turning out to have wildly unintended uses: gamers are playing on servers that use languages other than English in order to acquire new languages or practice language skills; educators are thinking about how the more playful and pleasurable aspects of gaming might be incorporated into classrooms; and gamers themselves are developing communities that defy previous media limitations of geography, age, ability, race, and gender. If these new media are in any way to be real alternatives to the old—if the kinds of creative practices that players are bringing to these games are to be encouraged rather than eliminated—feminists and their allies need to be part of the conversations that are taking place about interactive media and their futures.