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108 MEDIA STUDIES

audience. This has gone hand in hand with a renewed concern for the missing
dimension of gender in much media analysis and therefore a growing
preoccupation with types and genres of TV programmes more ‘popularly’
addressed, and hence with a more substantial representation of women and their
concerns. Nationwide already represented a shift in this direction. And this has
been strengthened and underpinned in the recent work of the Group, which has
returned—but now from a different theoretical perspective—to the area of
‘popular’ TV: the mass program ming addressed to the popular TV audience in
peak-viewing times, which functions very much under the sign not of
‘information and education’ but of ‘entertainment and pleasure’. Work in this
area has taken the TV zones of light entertainment, situation comedies, crime
drama, domestic serials, quiz shows and sport as its main focus. It has also
focused on a new set of preoccupations—broadly, the way ‘popular’ TV handles
and manages the contradictions of everyday life and popular experience; the
manner and effect of the intervention which such programmes make in popular
common sense; and the ways in which common-sense knowledge of social
structures and situations are transformed through the intervention of television.
This work has been much influenced by theoretical derivations from the work of
writers like Gramsci and Laclau and their concern with the ideological work of
transformation, ideologies as the sites of popular struggle and ‘popular common-
sense constructions’ as the stake in those struggles. Central to this have been the
representations of gender, class and ethnicity, the importance of ‘the domestic’
and of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ as the privileged discourse into which
other social contradictions are condensed. Much of this work is still to appear in
published form, but indications as to the shift of emphasis can be found in
different places in this collection: for example, in Janice Winship’s article
‘Subjectivity for sale’ and in Dorothy Hobson’s work on the media and young
working-class housewives at home.
The area of film and Media Studies has become a privileged one for the
construction of new theoretical approaches, and the work of the Centre in these
different concrete areas of research has been considerably influenced by these
developments. One can think, here, of the critique of early semiotics mounted by
psychoanalysis, especially in its Lacanian version, and the rethinking of ideology
substantially in terms of the way in which texts construct subject positions; of the
extensive critique of ‘realism’ and its narrative modes—an argument already
present in our work on the ideological process of naturalization and
‘transparency’ but since taken much further; of the rethinking of the concept of
ideology in terms of Foucault’s theses on ‘discourse’ and discursive practices—
an innovation which has played some role in how our work on popular TV was
conceptualized. In many of these theoretical areas feminist concerns have played
a crucial role and have proved least amenable to being inserted into either
existing or new frameworks. The Centre Media Group undertook a long
engagement with these new theoretical positions, in the form of a critique of the
theories being developed in film studies in and around the journal Screen: this