Media’s Domestication as Intimate Geography

ABSTRACT

In December 1922 the US magazine Radio Broadcast published a beautifully written article by Alice R. Bourke. Bourke’s short account of the installation of radio in her family home heralded a set of complex and transformative potentials that were about to be realised within her own work and home life. The story of her career as a journalist, newspaper proprietor and army signals expert and ham radio operator demonstrates how everyday knowledge of radio as a medium of communication provided women with new sets of skills that contested dominant gender and national ideologies. This arrival of radio within the modern home, and the ripples it created in dominant formations of gender, class and nation bring attention to the ways that individual experiences intersect with broader social changes. This article is organised in three sections: the first briefly explains how I have reconstructed Bourke’s work in radio from available sources; the second explains how configurations of biography and history can be read through the concept of intimate geographies; and the third reflects on what Bourke’s encounter with radio tells us about intimate geographies that are still with us today.

KEYWORDS:

• Domestication
• radio
• intimate geographies
• Alice Bourke

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Justine Lloyd is a Senior Lecturer in sociology at Macquarie University. She has published in the areas of feminist cultural history and media studies, and her most recent book is a feminist history of intimate geographies of radio (Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age: Women’s Radio Programming at the BBC, CBC, and ABC, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). She is coediting a special issue of Feminist Media Studies on the theme of ‘Transnational Media and Gender’ (forthcoming in 2021) with Jilly Boyce Kay, Leicester University, and a special issue of Space and Culture on ‘Critical Perspectives on Sites of Conscience’ (also 2021) with Linda Steele, UTS. In 2019 she was visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta.

Notes

1 Covering police rounds rather than court reporting was extremely dangerous in prohibition-era Chicago, a situation highlighted when Capone organisation-connected Tribune journalist Jake Lingle was shot by a fellow gang member in June 1930 (Fantaskey 2013, 2), and while Bourke did not comment on this aspect of her work later, it must have been a crucial factor in editorial practices of leaving off bylines and keeping information about sources to a minimum.

2 As detailed by Carter in her 1997 study of the mission, Remenih, as a radio expert and journalist, had been part of the US Army Observer Group (USAOG), known as the Dixie Mission, which acted as a liaison with the Chinese Communists in their wartime headquarters in Yenan, Shensi Province, China. From 1944 the USAOG was involved in supporting US forces within China in the war against Japan, and Remenih had returned to work at the ‘Metropolitan Section’ of the Tribune in late 1945. The mission’s purpose was to develop relations, and later gather intelligence on, the Communist Party of China and the People’s Liberation Army but also at the close of the war to host diplomatic missions to negotiate a unification between Communists and Nationalists. Remenih’s role as an OSS officer was as a military intelligence agent. This article about Bourke was outside his usual reporting round of theatre and radio reviews, and perhaps signals their shared experience as wartime international communications experts returning to a very different context in the anti-Communist climate of the postwar USA. Carter poignantly concludes that ‘Contrary to what the Yenan leadership intended, however, the Observer Group’s reports became part of the fuel for the McCarthy era. These reports harmed most of the former observers [such as Remenih], whose political thinking ranged from ultraconservative to socialist. Their positive attitudes must be evaluated within the context of the time in which the Mission functioned, even though the events and actions of Mao’s regime after the Communists gained power let critics, including some of the participants, to believe that they had been oversold’ (1997: 224).