How many kinds of feminist media are there?
If there are hundreds of different ways to be a feminist, are there an equal number of ways for media to be feminist? This makes it difficult to pin down one thing that makes media "essentially feminist," in fact it would be very un-feminist to say that there is a single thing that unites feminist media other than the label of feminist. So in one way, feminist media is only a label. However, not everything can be labeled as feminist media. I think we can agree that there are certain things that are not feminist, The Man Show, spaghetti westerns, Fox News. I think something that these kinds of media share is an unwillingness to surrender hetero-normativity at all. Shows like Top Model and Queer Eye, while overwhelmingly counterproductive, still have some small element of subversion– even if it has been coopted by "the man." They have something in them that could be construed as feminist. Defining feminism by the goal of removing the good/bad qualities from binaries like man/woman, white/not white– with the desire to eventually dissolve the binary. Any kind of media that in some small way challenges an anglo-centric heteronormative world view, is in my opinion feminist.