Medierade minnen: radio, film och formandet av unga kvinnors kulturella identiteter

Abstract

The artide analyses ways in which the media may operate in relation to our memories: media may be means through which memories are preserved (e.g. family photographs), or media may be objects of specific memories (e.g. a particular film). Based on in-depth lifephase interviews with ten women born between 1917 and 1927, the study focuses on the importance of radio and film in memory since these were the two new mass media flourishing when these women were young. It is argued, in theoretical terms, that modernity and memory are closely linked and that if we adopt a inverse gendered perspective, young women emerge as "everyday pioneers of modernity" thus counterbalancing conventional, masculine discourses on modernity. In so far that we mostly analyse occurences after the event, I argue that, in epistemological terms, theories of memory are closely connected to interpretive forms of analysis. It is demonstrated that radio is lodged in the shared family space, its programs, irrespective of its contents, operates as an important window to the world. This is particularly true for young women from the working classes, which is a finding that serves to balance institutional analyses of public-service radio as a restrictive middle-class forum. The women in this study experience the cinema, operating as it does in a semi-public sphere, as one of the only havens of autonomy and romance - the latter not being limited to the screen. Films and film stars become venues for testing style and fashion thus creating an embodied space of experimentation. Many of the women see as this as a demonstration that their bodies can be formed, contoured. In other words, the results of the study serve to counterbalance received notions that the malleable body has only come to the forefront of women's own attention within the last generation or two.