2026/01/01 by Helena Shaskevich · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Gender, Feminism, and Media #Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes #Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology
paper · doi:10.1525/fmh.2026.12.1.125
openalex publication_date 2026/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/01/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
This article examines Julie Gustafson’s groundbreaking feminist video, The Politics of Intimacy (1972), as a pivotal case study in the relationship between intimacy, sexual politics, and diverging scales of televisual media between the 1970s and mid-1980s in the United States. Using the medium of early portable video, Gustafson captured candid conversations among women about sexuality, desire, and orgasm—creating an informal, consciousness-raising space that linked personal experience to collective feminist politics. While the tape’s aesthetic and affective intimacy challenged dominant visual regimes of both pornography and medicine, efforts to scale this intimacy to a national television audience encountered resistance. Initially censored by public television in 1974, the video would not air until 1979 on Manhattan Cable’s Womenvision, a short-lived program committed to broadcasting content by and for women. This trajectory reveals the technological, institutional, and ideological barriers feminist media faced in the transition from local to national distribution. Contrasting Gustafson’s work with Dr. Ruth’s 1980s televised sex education program on Lifetime, this article argues that feminist politics were ultimately domesticated within an “intimate public sphere” shaped by Reagan-era neoliberalism. As feminist visions of collective liberation gave way to individualized therapeutic discourse, The Politics of Intimacy remains a powerful archive of a moment when intimacy still held radical political potential, and media itself was seen as a tool for transformative feminist belonging.