Sex, Money, Media: A Tribute and Political Reflection

Abstract

Ellen Riordan & Eileen Meehan’s Sex and Money: Feminism and Political Economy in the Media (2001) haunts the imagination of many women drawn to the study of communication today. Their edited volume is the best-known comprehensive overview of feminist political economy in Anglo-American scholarship from the past 10 years and includes the work of several Canadian feminist scholars. The volume identified profound problems in regulatory regimes, audience research, and employment advocacy that remain largely unanswered to this day. When filmmaker and activist Rina Fraticelli brought her organization Women in View to Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication in 2008 as a potential partner, she was looking for a catalyst to revive discussions of a glass ceiling in the media and persistent (and new) problems in the representation of women. She was alarmed by the silence in Canadian policy research and failure of policy advocacy to raise any serious gender critique of existing film and TV institutions, interests, or actors. A steering committee, including Fraticelli, Marsha Newbery (a documentary filmmaker and doctoral candidate at SFU), and the authors (both SFU Communication professors), Sara Diamond (president of the Ontario College of Art and Design University), Beth Seaton (adjunct professor in women’s studies at the University of British Columbia), and over 50 other advisors, pulled together an international conference in Vancouver October 14 to 16, 2010, attracting 170 attendees from the media, academy, and not-for-profit sector. The conference won seed funding from SFU’s School of Communication and Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology, British Columbia Film, the City of Vancouver, the Centre for Policy Studies on Culture and Communities at SFU, and the Ontario College of Art and Design University. Sara Diamond also led a successful application to win Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada conference funds for the digital-themed panels. Formal buy-in from the major policy institutions—the Department of Canadian Heritage, CBC, or Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission— was never achieved. However, many organizations ultimately provided support for