In this book, Anna Marie Bautista delves into the increased visibility of gender inequality, largely brought about by #MeToo, that has been incorporated into representations on television series, reflecting a 'conspicuous feminism' that is explicit, activist, and commodifying in its consideration of gendered power structures and inequality.
Covers the area of feminist media criticism. This edition discusses subjects including, alternative family structures, de-westernizing media studies, industry practices, "Sex and the City", Oprah, and "Buffy."
In less than a century, the flickering blue-gray light of the television screen has become a cultural icon. What do the images transmitted by that screen tell us about power, authority, gender stereotypes, and ideology in the United States? Television, History, and American Culture addresses this question by illuminating how television both reflects and influences American culture and identity. The essays collected here focus on women in front of, behind, and on the TV screen, as producers, viewers, and characters. Using feminist and historical criticism, the contributors investigate how television has shaped our understanding of gender, power, race, ethnicity, and sexuality from the 1950s to the present. The topics range from the role that women broadcasters played in radio and early television to the attempts of Desilu Productions to present acceptable images of Hispanic identity, from the impact of TV talk shows on public discourse and the politics of offering viewers positive images of fat women to the negotiation of civil rights, feminism, and abortion rights on news programs and shows such as I Spy and Peyton Place. Innovative and accessible, this book will appeal to those interested in women's studies, American studies, and popular culture and the critical study of television. Contributors. Julie D'Acci, Mary Desjardins, Jane Feuer, Mary Beth Haralovich, Michele Hilmes, Moya Luckett, Lauren Rabinovitz, Jane M. Shattuc, Mark Williams
"The story of the U.S. women's movement and television in the 1970s has been told primarily in two, often coordinating, ways: through feminist reform efforts that originated outside of the television industry and through feminist impact on on-air representations of women. Producing Feminism augments these accounts by exploring the effects of the women's movement on television production. Centering women who worked in television across a variety of occupations--including writers, producers, clerical staff, researchers, consultants, hosts, actors, and commentators--illustrates the changes they brought to workplace dynamics and protocols and norms of making television. These workers' interventions demonstrate the need to look at work processes and experiential qualities of television workplaces, along with onscreen representations that emerge from these sites of production, to understand more fully how feminism affected television. Research conducted for Producing Feminism features archival research and interviews; these materials reveal feminist influences on television that were not always visible to the public nor manifested onscreen, the conditions of television workplaces and experiences of women working in television, and the myriad strategies women workers used to reform the industry"--
The collection of essays outlines how feminists employ a variety of online platforms, practices, and tools to create spaces of solidarity and to articulate a critical politics that refuses popular forms of individual, consumerist, white feminist empowerment in favor of collective, tangible action. Including scholars and activists from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, these essays help to catalog the ways in which feminists are organizing online to mobilize different feminist, queer, trans, disability, reproductive justice, and racial equality movements. Together, these perspectives offer a comprehensive overview of how feminists are employing the tools of the internet for political change. Grounded in intersectional feminism––a perspective that attends to the interrelatedness of power and oppression based on race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and other identities––this book gathers provocations, analyses, creative explorations, theorizations, and case studies of networked feminist activist practices. In doing so, this collection archives important work already done within feminist digital cultures and acts as a vital blueprint for future feminist action.
The sexual politics of television culture is the territory covered by this ground-breaking book - the first to demonstrate the ways in which third wave feminist television studies approaches and illuminates mainstream TV. Leading voices in third wave feminism focus on innovative US television shows, including "The Sopranos", "Oz", "Six Feet Under", "The L Word" and the reality-TV show, "The Bachelor" to take a closer look at the contradictions and reciprocities between feminism and television, engaging as they go in theoretical and critical conversations about media culture, third wave feminism, feminist spectatorship, the sex wars, and the politics of visual pleasure. The book offers an exuberant and accessible discussion of what television has to offer today's feminist fan. It also sets a new tone for future debate, turning away from a sober, near-pessimistic trend in much feminist media studies to reconnect with the roots of third wave feminism in riot grrrl culture, sexradical feminism, and black feminism, tracing too the narratives provided by queer theory in which pleasure has a less contested place.
In this book an international team of contributors examines critically the relationship between television and women's culture. Although they recognize that television frequently distorts and oppresses women's experience, the authors avoid a simplistic manipulative view of the media. Instead they show how and why such different genres as game shows, police fiction and soap opera offer women opportunities for negotiation of their own meanings and their own aesthetic appreciation. Not for sale in Australia or New Zealand.
Critically analyzes the discursive relationship between cultural value and popular feminism in American television. While American television has long relied on a strategic foregrounding of feminist politics to promote certain programming's cultural value, Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television is the first sustained critical analysis of the twenty-first-century resurgence of this tradition. In Woman Up, Julia Havas'scentral argument is that postmillennial "feminist quality television" springs from a rhetorical subversion of the (much-debated) masculine-coded "quality television" culture on the one hand and the dominance of postfeminist popular culture on the other. Postmillennial quality television culture promotes the idea of aesthetic-generic hierarchies among different types of scripted programming. Its development has facilitated evaluative academic analyses of television texts based on aesthetic merit, producing a corpus of scholarship devoted to pinpointing where value resides in shows considered worthy of discussion. Other strands of television scholarship have criticized this approach for sidestepping the gendered and classed processes of canonization informing the phenomenon. Woman Up intervenes in this debate by reevaluating such approaches and insisting that rather than further fostering or critiquing already prominent processes of canonization, there is a need to interrogate the cultural forces underlying them. Via detailed analyses of four TV programs emerging in the early period of the "feminist quality TV" trend—30 Rock (2006–13), Parks and Recreation(2009–15),The Good Wife (2009–16), andOrange Is the New Black (2013–19)—Woman Up demonstrates that such series mediate their cultural significance by combining formal aesthetic exceptionalism and a politicized rhetoric around a "problematic" postfeminism, thus linking ideals of political and aesthetic value. Woman Upwill most appeal to students and scholars of cinema and media studies, feminist media studies, television studies, and cultural studies.
