"Women's Genres" Annette Kuhn

In her article "Women's Genres" Kuhn endeavors to put television theory and film theory in dialogue with one another in order to examine questions that are central to spectatorship and the subject-object relationship that much of Feminist theory has acutely focused upon. This piece seemed particularly applicable due to my interest in the television series The Gilmore Girls, and interestingly, I have found that much of Film theory tends to ignore television, regardless of the fact that television relies upon many of the classical conventions that film does and seems, in some genres to be congruent with filmic texts. Kuhn draws parallels between Television soap operas and film melodramas- noting that not only have these two genres been pegged as "'gynocentric' genres" (437), but that these gender-specific categories do in fact appeal to a mass audience of women, who continue to respond and engage with these texts. Kuhn claims that "One of the defining generic features of the woman's picture as a textual system is its construction of narratives motivated by female desire and processes of spectatorship identification governed by female point-of-view" (437). Accordingly, while both genres engage with the aforementioned material, albeit in often conflicting ways, their main difference lies in the way in which they are theorized about. "In work on television soap opera as opposed to film melodrama, the dualism of text and context manifests itself rather differently, if only because- unlike film theory- theoretical work on television tended to emphasis the determining character of the contextual level, particularly the structure and organization of television institutions. Since this has often been at the expense of attention to the operation of TV texts, television theory may perhaps be regarded as innovative in the extent to which it attempts to deal specifically with texts as well as contexts" (441). I propose, as Kuhn hints towards at the end of her article (448), that it is essential to begin a more thorough analysis of Television text- considering the universality of the medium and its widespread appeal to a particularly feminine audience, I believe that such an examination would be invaluable to the trajectory of gender studies. Siegfried Kracauer, a philosopher of the Frankfurt School, maintains that popular culture provides a greater and more genuine insight into a society than does its high culture- which, in its awareness as "high" often times feigns authenticity. Accordingly, I believe that television texts, as the prevailing mode of communication and entertainment in today's society, deserve a more significant and profound analysis than is currently being afforded them... thus, I feel more justified than even to prevail with my analysis of The Gilmore Girls!

Kuhn, Annette. "Women's Genres." Feminism and Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print.