Speaking Bitterness: Rethinking the Televisual Nag

This chapter considers the history of the ‘nagging wife’ trope, and how this is insidiously mobilised to discredit women’s political speech. It analyses the 1973 television debate series No Man’s Land, paying particular attention to the ways that it was critically received and reviewed. It shows how the programme’s explicitly feminist politics was typically interpreted as an egregious affront to television’s gendered modes of address and that the talk of its feminist participants was understood as a form of televisual nagging. While much scholarship argues that television has democratised public speech because it tends to be friendly and non-didactic, this chapter argues that we must account for the gender politics of ‘friendliness’—and that women’s speech that is angry, complaining, ‘nagging’ or ‘rude’ should not be precluded from being considered ‘democratic’.