Re-bordering UK Feminist Video in the 1980s. Cross-border Exchanges and Reflexivity in a Digital and Archive-based Project

1.1 Transnational Contexts and Feminist Debates during the UN Decade of Women

The programmes included in the selection of case studies (APPENDIX 1) were produced and broadcast between 1983 and 1987 and present several thematic connections with the debates surrounding the UN Decade of Women (1975-1985). The Decade was inaugurated at the United Nations’ World Conference of the International Women’s Year (Mexico City), which set a Plan of Action for governments to ensure that women had equal access to resources such as education, employment, housing, and family planning. The Plan crucially assigned to the media a strategic role, by promoting the inclusion of women professionals in the industry, calling for a diversification of representations, and sponsoring the production of content to educate the public on development issues.⁴

The Decade’s emphasis on development marked also the increasingly intense conversations between women’s organisations from different parts of the world, which led to a growing problematization of top-down and Western agendas at international women’s meetings.⁵ These exchanges benefitted from media infrastructures that began to flourish during the Decade thanks to a combination of top-down and bottom-up efforts. The role played by the circulation of media in this phase of feminist history is still underexplored, perhaps due to the variety of initiatives and actors involved, who worked in publishing, journalism, broadcasting and filmmaking, among many others.⁶ To better illustrate their importance, I will briefly discuss two feminist media artefacts somehow emblematic of the heterogenous production of the period: Helena Solberg’s film La Doble Jornada/The Double Day (1974) and Robin Morgan’s anthology Sisterhood is Global (1984).⁷

The Double Day was a collaborative film made by an all-women crew under the name of International Women’s Film Project. It portrayed the struggles of women’s workers in Latin America and was funded by, among others, the United Nations Development Fund, and the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish Development Authorities.⁸ The film emblematically premiered at the Conference in Mexico City, demonstrating the potential of media to bridge and communicate women struggles from different parts of the world.

The publication of Morgan’s Sisterhood is Global, instead, was symptomatic of the conclusion of this period. Like The Double Day, Morgan’s anthology attempted to create new coalitions by collecting the writings of activist groups from all-over the world and was funded by a variety of sources, including NGOs, the Ford Foundation, and divisions of the Methodist Church. However, by the time it was published, Robin’s notion of global sisterhood was already coming to terms with the situated experiences of Third World women who refused Western assumptions of commonality that neglected the role of class, race, and culture in gender inequality. This criticism stemmed also from the failure of the Decade to address the reproduction of neo-colonial relations in development plans as well as among women organisations.⁹

As such, in the second part of the 1980s, Third World feminists proposed new approaches to development and activism centred on women’s empowerment and collective leadership,¹⁰ with reflections also on contemporary feminist critiques to development media. The often marginal and submissive representations of Third World women in development films and media packages¹¹ stimulated responses from activists who advocated for grass-roots initiatives and the strengthening of feminist transnational networks.¹² Notably, this period coincided with a so-called process of ‘NGOisation’ of feminism,¹³ in which the project-based nature of filmmaking and the possibility to use audio-visuals as educational, training and advocacy materials well suited with the increasing professionalisation of gender equality activism.

To sum up, top-down efforts guided by the UN, development agencies and other organisations coexisted and converged with bottom-up, grass-roots initiatives, which promoted the use of media to build feminist networks, while making visible the increasingly complex power and geographical relations within the movement.

1.2 Feminist and Development Media Meet UK Television

In many ways, the local context in the UK reflects these international trends. In the 1980s, UK women’s production companies and grass-roots groups found broadcasting sources of funding and outlets for projects with a feminist agenda, with a clear reference to questions raised during the Decade. The opening of these opportunities was the result of feminist campaigns initiated in the 1970s which called for a greater inclusion of women professionals in the audio-visual industry and a diversification of representations,¹⁴ with a particular impact on the institution of Channel 4 (1982).¹⁵ The appointment of the Guardian’s editor of the women’s page, Liz Forgan, as Senior Commissioning Editor facilitated the hiring of two women-only independent companies, Broadside Productions and Milne and Gambles, to produce actuality programmes with a female perspective ‘accessible to mainstream television audiences’.¹⁶ Such opening to women’s contributions went hand in hand with the network’s aim to support independent producers and the workshop movement¹⁷ to develop innovative content for a diverse, multicultural audience.¹⁸

While women and other minorities achieved more visibility, Channel 4 also supported the production of programmes dealing with issues of global development, as part of its offer of educational and socially engaged programmes.¹⁹ These productions mostly consisted of documentaries, often commissioned to NGOs, educational trusts, or local companies. Not surprisingly, then, around the end of the Decade of Women, the network sponsored a series of productions explicitly dealing with development and gender equality, by supporting feminist practitioners, but also collaborating with NGOs and international partners.

The selection of case studies for this project reflects this magmatic and experimental context. For instance, the series Promised the Earth (3 Episodes, 1985), consisting of three documentaries on the Decade of Women, was produced for Channel 4 by Diverse Productions and the International Broadcasting Trust (IBT) – a consortium of over 60 NGOs. The series A Woman’s World (7 Episodes, 1987) was produced by Gillian McCredie for Thames Television and employed content from Channel 4 and other broadcasters, while the six episodes of Female Focus, produced by Broadside Productions for Channel 4 (1985) was a multi-national collaboration of women’s producers funded by the United Nations.

Even more heterogenous is the range of independent productions that Channel 4 sponsored or broadcasted in different slots of its programming to showcase the work of local and international filmmakers. Among these, Broadcasting UK Feminist Video includes the documentary Words in Action, by the feminist production company Pictures of Women, and recorded at the first International Feminist Book Fair in London in 1984; and the series of films directed and produced by Betty Wolpert, which were made in collaboration with activists (Joyce Seroke, Ellen Kuzmayo) and grass-roots groups of black women (Maggie Magaba Trust, Zamani Soweto Sisters Council) from Soweto, South Africa.

Complementary to these case studies are two films that exemplify a strand of productions sponsored by Channel 4 and funded by local grants, like Impressions from Exile (Wide Angle, 1985) and Madjar (Retake Video & Film Collective, 1984), which focus on the experiences of women migrants in the UK and were sponsored by the Greater London Council and Greater London Arts Association.

The heterogenous nature of these productions somehow demonstrates that, at the time, UK independent networks afforded a space of relative pluralism and experimentation, in which a variety of perspectives and practices at the cross-roads of activist, independent and educational media could coexist or converge as the result of creative, economic, and political circumstances. At the same time, the recurrence of topics like development, migration, and gender equality confirms an attention to transnational debates and current events that will lead to cross-border collaborations and circulation.

1.3 Studying a Niche Production through the Lenses of Global History and Feminist Historiography

As fairly low-budget, current events programmes, most of the case studies analysed by Broadcasting UK Feminist Video belong to the peripheries of the mainstream, while maintaining an uncertain status in the realms of activist and feminist media. On the one hand, they struggle to fit within established notions of ‘television for women’, on the other their informative style is at odds with radical politics and experimental aesthetics. Despite this, their attempt to diversify the representation of women on and off screen, as well as their link to local and transnational feminist debates, is undeniable.

In this respect, their preservation history adds some interesting elements for evaluating the relevance of these productions in the context of UK television and feminist media history. The presence of recordings at the National Television Archive (the BFI) dates to a period when the institution began to purchase or record off-air a selection of programmes considered ‘typical output’ or worthy of archival relevance from independent terrestrial channels.²⁰ This means that these programmes were already perceived as representative of the content commissioned and aired by Channel 4 and ITV at the time, meaning that there was an understanding of their possible relevance already in that period. Moreover, complementary sources indicate that some of these programmes found a public both inside and outside of the UK in feminist and educational circuits. Most of them appear in diverse sources like ‘British National Film Catalogue’ (BFI, 1977-1987), the ‘Circles. Women’s Film + Video Distribution’ (1987), and ‘Powerful Images. A ‘Women’s Guide to Audio-visual Resources’ (1986), documenting their distribution in VHS or 16mm for activists, educational trusts, schools, and NGOs.²¹

In other words, these productions found a variety of generalist, activist, and niche publics, and as such one of the aims of Broadcasting UK Feminist Video is understanding their link to multiple ‘cultures of circulation’. As Benjamin Lee and Edward Li Puma argue, circulation is a cultural process built by interpretative communities equipped with a specific collective agency and their own self-reflexive structures.²² Unpacking these flows means identifying the ‘scattered hegemonies’²³ characterising this phase of feminist media history, marked by a problematisation of the inequalities among women. Indeed, by being broadcast in the UK for a generalist public, and at the same time distributed among activists in different national contexts, many of these programmes circulated notions of difference and otherness. By acknowledging the risks of essentialism inherent to cross-cultural representations, the project finds inspiration in Chalpade Mohanty’s suggestion to move from individual herstories to interconnected histories that articulate women’s differences and recuperate their situated political agencies.²⁴

With this in mind, Broadcasting UK Feminist Video adopts a feminist perspective on global history’s ‘attention to units of analysis that go beyond national frameworks, [and] cross-border phenomena [resulting] in thus-far overlooked movements and connectivities’.²⁵ Indeed, global history has already contributed to challenge the prevailing of Western agendas in feminist historiography by recuperating the stories of travelling women, ideas, and objects.²⁶ However, as recent decolonial critiques to the field suggest, global historians should be aware of the geopolitics of knowledge that they reproduce, as most of these scholarly projects originate in Anglo-American academia. As Gabriela De Lima Grecco and Sven Schuste point out, we should always be aware that ‘historiographical practices are not disconnected from the ‘being (the historian) and the ‘power’ (from where it is written and for whom it is written)’.²⁷ As such, while this project aspires to an historiography that challenges methodological nationalism and essentialism, I am also aware of the epistemological and material implications inherent to the location (UK) and language (English) in which it was conceived and communicated. From this point of view, by adopting a critical approach to transnationalism,²⁸ the project openly discusses the asymmetrical geographies and power relations emerging from the historical sources as well as in the research process.

2.1 Digital Methods for a Holistic Analysis: Textual Analysis and the Power of Data

Given the project’s concern with relations and space, the study uses digital tools to process spatial, temporal, and biographical information gathered from the close reading and production history of the programmes. In other words, the project adopts an ‘interpretivist approach’ that combines ‘contextual and textual analysis [to achieve] a critical interpretation of television as both a witness to and an actor in economic structures, social change, political power and cultural meaning’.³³ In a context of vast gendered gaps in television archives,³⁴ the unique opportunity to access all the sources as they were broadcasted further encouraged the use of textual analysis as a primary method of data collection, to be cross-referenced with secondary sources, particularly with catalogues.

In this respect, as Nanna Bonde Thylstrup et al. suggest, it is especially important that in the process of using archives as generative sources of data, we pose attention to the continuities between analogue archival regimes and digital data sets.³⁵ Indeed, analogue archives’ tendency to invisibilise and reproduce hegemonic power relations may persist also in digital assemblies of information, requiring the researcher to be critical at every stage of the study. In the context of this project, the many representations of gender, race, and inequality appearing in the sources called for a specific attention to the criteria for inclusion and exclusion of information, which involved the use of reflexivity as a critical tool to avoid the appropriation or suppression of identities, tropes and narratives. As Miriam Posner and Lauren Klein point out, ‘data is as much an orientation toward one’s sources as it is a primary category of knowledge’,³⁶ therefore adopting a feminist stance to data entails posing a particular attention to positionality. Since the data was processed to produce visualisations to reproduce the scale, location and direction of the representations and collaborations similar considerations were applied in the analysis of these outputs. Indeed, since their massive incorporation into mainstream communication, data visualisations have been increasingly associated with objectivity, as they provide a seemingly self-contained, omniscient viewpoint.³⁷ Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein argue that this rhetorical power can be re-oriented towards social justice, by means of feminist principles, like the refusal of binarism, the embracing of pluralism, and the examination of power, to give visibility to the context, affects, and labour involved in their making.³⁸ Indeed, the work of data extraction and the use of digital tools are often intertwined with the invisibilisation of the labour of research assistants, archivists and technicians.³⁹

While some of these issues persist in this project, in the remainder of this essay, I will share some considerations about the tools and criteria of data collection, as an attempt to challenge some of these dynamics.

2.2 The Software

Key to a digital project is the choice of the software. This research utilises Palladio, a digital humanities package developed by Stanford’s Humanities + Design Lab, to produce a series of maps and network analysis. This tool was selected primarily for matters of access: it is open-source and completely on-line and allows for the import of data directly from an Excel workbook. It is specifically designed for historians, making it particularly effective for the analysis of historical information with many attributes. However, despite these advantages, it also has limitations: the visualisations can be shared only in static, non-interactive form, so they can be exported only as screenshots or pdfs; the map and graph functions are not suitable for sophisticated customizations and detailed network analysis; and there are very limited options to customise the colours and patterns of the visuals. Moreover, it tends to be a bit buggy and requires a stable connection, as the loss of connectivity may entail losing the progress on the project. However, considering the relatively small scale and exploratory nature of this study, Palladio offers a great deal of options to explore the data, refine it, and evaluate options for future research.⁴⁰

2.3 The Data Set and Categorization: Mapping Relations and Repositioning the Centre

The data set consists in a principal table containing the core information on each programme (title, number of episodes, type of production, sponsor, production company, broadcaster, year of production, country, date of broadcasting) and its content (locations, people, and groups featured, plus the thematic keywords). These categories are expanded in separate, secondary sheets, providing biographical, temporal, and geographical data (including coordinates). Another one is dedicated to the practitioners working on the programmes with information on their role, production company, country of activity, and gender. The assemblage of data was complex, as the sources available particularly on practitioners or the locations featured in the programmes were fragmentary, leading to issues of categorization.

A good entry point to discuss these questions is the spatial data, which was systematized by privileging a national scale. This choice was dictated by the impossibility to identify some locations as they appeared in the programmes, but also by the ways in which nationality organizes audio-visual production. While this generalization entailed a loss of detail, it also confirmed the persistent centrality of the nation in the making and circulation of film and television. To understand the consequences of this choice on the “politics of location” of this research, I will briefly discuss the visualisation in MAP 1, which displays all the recognisable locations featured in the programmes. Here there is a clear concentration of data in three areas: Northern Europe – mainly the United Kingdom; Africa – especially the Western and Southern parts of the continent; and a handful of countries in Latin America (Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Guyana).

Figure 1

In MAP 2, which visualises the Countries of production, the United Kingdom still represents the main cluster of data, along with a handful of European countries (France, Germany, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Sweden and Norway). Only six non-European countries are featured in this map: Senegal, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Japan, Canada and Peru. An immediate comparison between these two maps suggests an uneven relation between ‘who represents’ and ‘who’s represented’, which is critical in relation to the developmental and gendered focus of this production.

Figure 2

In this respect, the visualisation MAP3 pictures a more complex situation. By using Palladio’s point-to-point function, I linked the Countries of production with the Locations featured, obtaining a sense of the directionality of these movements. While this map confirms the North to South nature of most of the exchanges and the centrality of the UK, it is also possible to appreciate connections with and between a variety of other countries, including a South-to-South link, and instances where the geographical focus of the programme corresponds to the country of production (signalled by a bigger cluster), meaning that local companies had been involved in the making of content about their own country.

2.3. Transnational Networks of Practitioners and Weak Authorship

The geographical extension of the networks of professionals offers a glimpse into women’s participation in the audio-visual industry in very different parts of the world. These contributions were mapped through the compilation of a data set with the names of each identifiable practitioner, along with their role, gender, production company, country of activity,⁴¹ and the title of the programme. This information was obtained from the credits, and for this reason is only partially reliable: credits, especially in television, are often cut, also omitting the names of many crew members, particularly of those employed in technical roles.

Figure 3

At the same time, programmes purchased and re-edited, like episodes in the Thames Television series A Woman’s World, or projects developed with international partners like Female Focus (Broadside for Channel 4/United Nations), display very minimal credits for the external crews. To quote Nanna Bonde Thylstrup et. al, ‘one of the archive’s most important powers is that of omission’;⁴² despite this, it is possible to make absences and omissions visible in data visualisations, becoming sources of knowledge instead of limitations and boundaries to the research.

In this case, despite credits represent the main source available on the practitioners, it was possible to triangulate part of this data by cross-referencing the names of the practitioners in digital repositories like IMDB and the BFI catalogue, enabling the reconstruction of some filmographies and verify the countries of activity. The most difficult aspect was the attribution of gender, which often entailed a guess on the sole basis of a name, with evident risks of essentialism. To address this problem, when further information was not available or the practitioner adopted a gender-neutral name or pseudonym, no gender was assigned to that person. As a result, some data visualizations display a third pole, reflecting the attempt of the project to challenge the binarism characterising this data and make visible the fallacies of the archive and data gathering. For all these reasons, this information is presumably inconsistent with the effective workforce involved in these productions, yet it still outlines the scale and extension of these networks, as well as of the gendering of some professions.

Overall, indeed, no programme was entirely produced or made by men, as the majority features professionals of both genders. At the same time, a remarkable number of companies listed only women, meaning that many were produced by women-only crews. However, as we can appreciate in the visualisation NA1, which matches the gender of the practitioners with their technical roles, the traditional gendering of audio-visual professions persists in areas like sound (M), costume design (F), and production assistant (F). This doesn’t detract from the equal representation of men and women in key creative and managerial roles like direction, photography, production, and editing.

Figure 4

As the network analysis NA2 shows – which connects each episode to the country of activity of the crew members, the UK is again the centre/main area of activity, yet most of these productions feature international professionals.

Figure 5

Only a handful of episodes appear produced by UK-only crews. Interestingly, among them there are three documentaries with a prominent focus on global development: The Impossible Decade (Promised the Earth, International Broadcasting Trust/Diverse Productions for United Nations and Channel 4, 1985), Less Equal than Others (Promised the Earth, International Broadcasting Trust/Diverse Productions for United Nations and Channel 4, 1985) – which however concentrates entirely on the UK, and Half the World’s People (A Woman’s World, Thames, 1987). This aspect can be interpreted also through their re-use of clips from other programmes, which in the case of The Impossible Decade are credited to documentaries previously broadcasted by Channel 4.⁴³ At the same time, footage from The Impossible Decade itself was re-edited for Half the World’s People. In this respect, another interesting result is provided by NA2 and NA3, which link the Country of activity with the Profession.

Figure 6

NA2, which shows the top 10 most credited roles, confirms the prominence of UK-based professionals, yet NA3, which concentrates the data on Directors and Producers and the roles with only UK professionals, pictures a variety of Countries of activity on those two key professions. This result illuminates the contribution of women in apical roles usually precluded to them in very different industrial contexts. Indeed, these programmes were made by directors and producers from countries like Egypt, Denmark, Peru, Nigeria, and Sweden, opening to a much wider geography of feminist and women producers. At the same time, the ways in which these productions were re-edited and re-used throughout the years suggest the low-budget and “weak authorship” afforded to these practitioners.

Figure 7