The situation comedy (sitcom) as a televisual text specifically encourages one type of decoding through its own encoding. Through the reciprocity of encoding to decoding, feminist sitcoms accord a privileged position to the dominant code, while acknowledging deviance or opposition to it through a highly demarcated female subject position. Relying upon a large intertextual discourse for feminine subject identification, the sitcom articulates to its female audience a feminist subject on the local level while it contains its subject within television hegemony of passive consumerism on the global level. Feminism is a sign of a political practice regarded as oppositional and troublesome in some conservative spheres. Feminism's widescale absorption of social, political, and psychological issues has engendered a community of fractured responses so that there is not one monolithic feminism but many feminisms. Because this model offers a framework of explanation for how polymorphic philosophies united under one rubric may be encoded in a unified discourse, it may also be viewed as a theoretical model which allows for multiple types of decoding in the consumption process. The interpretation of those sitcoms is representative of the television industry's attempt to draw upon feminist consciousness raising as a contextual framework that can be carried out through application of the model. (20 end notes) (CGD)