Feminist avenues for listening in: amplifying silenced histories of media and communication

Abstract

This paper proposes a feminist critique of the media and communication field by offering a different soundtrack to guide future historical research. By shifting the focus from well-known protagonists, and acknowledging process and community rather than individuals, we aim to amplify ‘hidden’ domains of gendered labour and layers of media technologies and services. We propose the ‘listening in’ model as a different way to engage with histories of media and communication, providing four pathways for how the histories of film, radio and internet in particular have been theorised and researched. These pathways focus on multiplicities of expertise, layers of infrastructure, users, and the media canon. For the first pathway, we show how media production has always been a collective work of multiple expertise. The second pathway breaks with the distinction between media and communication and emphasises reciprocal processes of media production. For the third, we demonstrate how media theory and research have tended to assume specific ideal bodies while ignoring others. For the final pathway, we propose a rethinking of how media histories and theories are narrated via the usual protagonists and call for a new canon to achieve a richer and more nuanced understanding within the field.