Lessons from Lilian: is transnational (media) history a gendered issue?

Abstract

Scholarship has long since demonstrated both the ways in which a focus on women’s roles reveals vital new elements of broadcasting history, adding critical perspectives on institutional, aesthetic, communicatory and participatory narratives of the media. This article asks: what happens if we stop looking at the stories of women in broadcasting as ‘media history’? What other interpretive lenses and disciplinary traditions might we draw on, and how might we insert media fruitfully within them? This paper derives from work done on the early years of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT), as read from the correspondence of founder Lilian Posthumus-van der Goot (1897-1989). The article builds on the IAWRT example to develop a series of methodological considerations for writing entangled transnational histories of gender and broadcasting, that take in insights from studies of international organizations, collective biographies, and reconsiderations of the archive in the digital age.