Difference on Screen. Representations of Gender and Nations in the Austrian Television Culture of the 1970s.

The project conjoins a historical case study of selected television programs broadcasted by the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) during the 1970s with theoretical and methodological basic research on the complex relationship of television, nation and gender. Programs are analyzed that work with (semi-) documentary forms and explicitly claim to educate, inform and enlighten the public, thus influencing a affluence society that first became established as a television nation in the 1970s. The research focuses on various cultural historical and media historical questions in selected paradigmatic "settings" of Austrian television culture (women`s magazines, television dragnet programs and television programs about television): the question of transformations of the self-understanding of the medium and thus of a historiography of television itself. The question of the beginnings and the forms of representing social movements (the women`s movement) in national public television in the context of the constitution of television. Finally, the question of televisual representations of alterity, order and crime is to be examined using the example of the television dragnet, which is linked with the establishment of television as a dispositive of surveillance. Through the combination of historical discourse analysis, semiological and narrative imageext analysis on the one hand, and a phenomenological approach to television as a media dispositive on the other, a conceptual and methodological set of instruments for a historical analysis of television is to be developed and exemplified.According to a fundamental methodological research result, historical perspectives of television are to be undertaken as a combination of media-theoretical approaches on the one hand and studies of television`s concrete historical forms of articulation on the other. The habilitation project aims to make a contribution to the audio-visual history of the Second Republic and to introduce a media-historical perspective in contemporary history research. The project seeks to counter a very common tendency to write media history without gender and gender history without media. The objective of the project is to successfully conclude the preliminary work carried out in the framework of the Hertha Firnberg Project T57 (FWF) on a historicization of television from a gender political perspective.