Feminist Eventfulness, Boredom and the 1984 Canadian Leadership Debate on Women's Issues

Abstract

This study seeks to dispel the cultural amnesia surrounding a feminist-organized televised leadership debate on women's issues during Canada's 1984 federal election, by articulating a parallel history of the debate's creation and staging, one that foregrounds the concept of feminist eventfulness. I distinguish contemporary ideas about eventfulness from scripts of media spectacle by locating political eventfulness in the less glamorous, more tedious work of feminist organizing. Drawing on archival records, feminist historical accounts, and print news media coverage of the debate's planning and implementation, I examine the organizational strategies used by the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) to stage the 1984 federal leaders' debate on women's issues. The negotiations with the political parties over venue, audience constitution, media numbers and NAC's overriding determination to preserve the “publicness” of the debate demonstrate the ways the women's group approached a long-standing struggle facing feminist organizing within the mainstream: how to accommodate or manage the difference between staging a feminist media event as opposed to a normative media event. Contrary to mainstream media reports which characterized the debate as a “boring non-event,” I argue that NAC carried out the unprecedented appropriation and transformation of a “masculine” political ritual into a feminist media event that captured a larger audience share than that year's Stanley Cup ice hockey finals.