Representations of Gender in the Austrian Television Culture of the 1970s

Hertha Firnberg Position T 57 Gender in the Austrian TV-Culture Monika BERNOLD 29.03.1999 The research project "Representations of Gender in the Austrian Television Culture of the 1970s" intends to historicize television as well as to open up historiography`s barriers with regard to audio-visual media. Television therefore has to be to be questioned and reconstructed in various contexts (including that of its theoretical conceptualisations). The research will develop a concept of culture, where television is not situated opposite to society, but rather as a central site for the production of meaning, through which power relations are produced and negotiated within political and institutional discourses and practices, systems of representation and practices of reception in complex and contradictory ways. The project focuses on television as a space of negotiation between competing interests and representations of gender and national identity during the 1970s. The two exemplary programmes that I have chosen for analysis, "women`s magazines", (e.g. Prisma) and the phenomenon of TV dragnet operation (Aktenzeichen XY) are significant for a period, when feminism entered the public discourses on politics, and when Austria became a "Television Nation" in the sense of a nationalised consumer society. The analyses of these extremely different types of programmes, as well as the reconstruction of various debates on the programmes` issues should reveal what those formats tell about the institutional and the representational settings of 1970s public broadcast television itself, and in which way processes of transformation and social conflict within Austrian society of the 1970s were represented and negotiated within television. The confrontation of discourses (feminism and `crime`) traditionally not seen together allows for innovative ways of exploring television culture as a field of synchronous differences with complex relation to unevenness, continuity and change.