Feminine Desire in the Age of Satellite Television

Television texts around the world increasingly feature female characters who resist or reformulate conventional gender roles. This trend seems to defy expectations that the concentration of media ownership leads to a conservative, homogeneous flow of popular imagery. Such an apparent contradiction can be explained by close analysis of the strategies, operations, and discourse of culture industries in the neo-network era of satellite and cable media. This era is paradoxically characterized by corporate conglomeration and by strategies of flexibility and decentralization. Consequently, media firms actually benefit for the transnational circulation of multiple and alternative representations of feminine desire. Although this does not necessarily democratize media, in most societies it significantly expands the range of feminine imagery available in popular culture.