Periodicals and the new media: Women and imagined communities

Abstract

This article offers a theoretical and speculative exploration of the idea of “Women and Political Communication” in relation to two revolutions in mass media: the growth of the periodical press in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and the explosion of the world wide web in the late-twentieth, early twenty-first century. In the first section, this article explores the seriality of the periodical press, its heterogeneity of voice and genre, and the place of gender in the serial press. In its second section, the article explores the democratisation of information and access represented by the world wide web, as well as the challenge to embodied subjectivity of the internet chatroom, blog or website. This article considers the implications of these different communication forms for a politics built on the assumption of embodied subjects defined as ‘women’.