Abstract
Domestic destinies: Public service radio and the governance of the intimate sphere
This paper explores relations between broadcast institutions and the audience through a case study of public service programming for women in Canada and Australia during the mid-twentieth century. It shows how such programming connected domesticity with nation-building projects through imaginaries of a 'national domestic' space and the figure of the woman listener. The problematic of 'intimacy' between broadcaster and audience, as a particular quality and potential of radio in this ideal space, is investigated as a key site of discussion and contestation between programmers and management. The politics of the intimate, that is, a critique of the public/private distinction from the standpoint of feminist and postcolonial theory, is used to understand how and why intimacy became an issue in radio at the exact historical moment of the institution of public service radio's address to women. As my analysis of women's programming shows, the category of the domestic as elaborated by the ABC and CBC demonstrates that radio in the home and the home in radio created the conditions for a renegotiation of the public/private divide. This was reinscribed within a framework in which the public sphere was identified as masculine, yet in which cultural technologies such as radio redefined the intimate sphere in the national interest. Public service radio programming for women therefore can be understood as a key site of the production of an imaginary of governance of and through the everyday that reveals powerful and ongoing connections between 'everyday practices, institutional inscriptions and cultural habits' of media reception (Craik 1992). The paper thus develops the notion of radio as a cultural technology to tease out the ways in which radio has been intimate with domestication, and to better comprehend the construction of racialised, classed and gendered subjectivities of settler societies such as Canada and Australia .
Justine Lloyd
University of Technology, Sydney