The “Feminization” of British Television and the Re-Traditionalization of Gender

This article explores shifts that have taken place in British television and British forms of feminine-gendered fiction from the late 1990s. These shifts will be discussed with reference to discourses of the “feminization of television” circulating in British culture during this period. This article contests the suggestion that discourses of the “feminization of television” and texts such as the female ensemble drama produced in this postfeminist period represent unproblematic “narratives of progress” for women (Georgina Harris 2006, Beyond Representation: Television Drama and the Politics of Identity, Manchester University Press, Manchester, p. 1). Rather, this article will suggest that accounts of the “feminization of television” found in the popular press along with contemporary examples of the female ensemble drama re-traditionalize women in relation to the spaces and discourses associated with twentieth-century femininity.     

Television crime series,women police,and fuddy-duddy feminism

This essay argues that Prime Suspect has become a canonical text for feminist television studies and that Helen Mirren's performance of Lynda La Plante's creation has provided an influential template for television, and the broader culture, to imagine what a senior female police officer is like. So Jane Tennison is important not only within the depicted world of the “canteen culture” of the police in Prime Suspect, but also within the broader context of television production where she has demonstrated that crime shows with female leads can be extremely successful. Juxtaposing Prime Suspect with two later “girly” British TV police series, I ask how we might approach the “daughters of Jane Tennison” found in series such as Ghost Squad (2005) and Murder in Suburbia (2004–2006). Are these “postfeminist” shows? I argue that attention to these programmes can productively inform our understanding of what is entailed for women in not being “fuddy-duddy,” and my comments thus engage, in the continuing debate about the utility and periodisation of the notion of “postfeminism.”     

Women are angry!

This essay examines the BBC comedy pilot Lizzie and Sarah as a dissonant account of contemporary femininities. With reference to work on the grotesque, and to contemporary television comedy's use of the grotesque as a strategy, I argue that this uncommissioned pilot episode offers an incisive critique of contemporary anxieties about middle-aged women and teenage girls. While the narrative employs parody and hyperbole to humorous ends, critical commentary around the show, from its producers and from broadsheet journalists, indicates that it overstepped boundaries in terms of its account of heterofemininity. Comparing Lizzie and Sarah to makeover shows on British television, the episode constitutes an ironic feminist makeover, with its protagonists choosing to kill their oppressors rather than submit to the disciplinary regime of heterofemininity. A close analysis of the dialogue, costumes and mise-en-scene is deployed to read this comedy as a scathing commentary on the continuing limitations of television femininities.     

Buffy's Voice

This paper studies the narrative use of popular music in the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) in order to open the primary television text to feminist analysis. Perhaps in no other way are the implications and contradictions of presenting BtVS's feminist narrative on television more obvious than that revealed in the analysis of the popular music soundtrack     

Unraveling the Enigma of the Russian Mortality Crisis: A Review Essay on Charles M. Becker and David Bloom (eds.), The Demographic Crisis in the Former Soviet Union*

Richard Stone , Some British Empiricists in the Social Sciences , 1650–1900 Arup Maharatna , The Demography of Famines: An Indian Historical Perspective Timothy W. Guinnane , The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in Ireland, 1850–1914 Gail Kligman , The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania Rosalind P. Petchesky and Karen Judd (Eds.) , Negotiating Reproductive Rights: Women's Perspectives Across Countries and Cultures     

Invisible golden girls? Post-feminist discourses and female ageing bodies in contemporary television fiction

Abstract

The popular television series The Golden Girls (1985–1992) seems to be an exception in the history of the representation of third-age women femininities and bodies in television fiction. This series about four mature women living in the same house in Miami made ageing women visible in television representations. Older women are generally invisible in popular television fiction. Despite this absence, a discourse on ageing and femininities is present in all sorts of popular media texts. We will question post-feminist discourses on ageing bodies and femininities. Are the post-feminist claims regarding ageing bodies present in popular television fiction? Moreover, are these discourses represented by the portrayal of ageing bodies? We will analyse the representations of ageing femininities in television fiction labelled as “post-feminist television fiction.” The series Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, and Girls will be studied using a textual analysis to look for discourses on ageing female bodies and their particularities in relation to post-feminism. We distinguished a limited set of three sets of discourses (losing femininity, masking of ageing, and the wisdom of ageing) on ageing femininities. Although ageing feminine bodies are absent, a discourse on ageing, “good” ageing, and acceptance of ageing is present in the narration in all three series. The discourse on the masking of ageing, however, is predominant.     

Olivia Pope: a black post-feminist subject? Analyzing Scandal’s intersecting post-feminist and colorblind discourses

Previous analyses of Scandal have focused on how colorblind discourse in the series influences the representation of lead character Olivia Pope’s Blackness. Less has been written about how dominant discourses of race and gender intersect in the series. Correspondingly, post-feminist scholarship has overwhelmingly concentrated on discourses of gender in depictions of white women. This article seeks to bridge the gaps between scholarship on representations of race and gender on television. Situating Scandal within the context of post-feminist and colorblind discourses of gender and race that have been prominent on mainstream television since the early 2000s, this article takes an intersectional approach to interrogate how Olivia Pope, a Black woman, is incorporated into post-feminist discourse. Rhetorical analyses of episodes of Scandal’s seasons 1 through 5 uncover how colorblind and post-feminist discourses provide at their junction a restricted space for a Black post-feminist subject. Olivia Pope’s post-feminist characterization comes at the expense of obfuscating how her Blackness affects her identity as a woman, and effectively “posts” her Black womanhood. The visibility of the Black post-feminist subject in colorblind post-feminism is thus paradoxically contingent on the concurrent invisibility of Black women’s experiences and Black feminist concerns.     

From Beatles Fans to Beat Groups

While much is written about the cultural influence of the vocalist-driven girl groups and female singers of the early-to-mid-1960s, an air of mystery continues to shroud this era's all-girl rock bands—in the UK, US, and worldwide—that performed, recorded, and often wrote their own material. Influenced by the Beatles and the British beat boom that followed, these bands are an important missing link in rock music history, as they epitomize a less overtly gendered, if short-lived, period of the genre. In an era between Betty Friedan's 1963 Feminine Mystique and the changes to come with 1970s second-wave feminism, a handful of musically minded young women were determined to transform their Beatles fandom in order to become co-creators of what was not yet a resolutely masculinist music scene.     

“I'm Nobody”

Television and film writer Joss Whedon has produced a number of popular culture works which explore representations of what female bodies are seen to be capable of and how these representations affect what female bodies can do. Texts such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Serenity (2005), and Dollhouse (2009–2010) are as much celebrated for subverting gender and genre conventions as they are criticized for reinforcing sexualized images of women and violence. Instead of approaching Whedon's texts in terms of their representations of gender, and how feminist or otherwise these representations are, this paper explores the ways in which Whedon's texts suggest that subjectivity is textually and discursively constructed. In particular, I will stage a reading of his latest television program, Dollhouse, as a representation of the somatechnical construction of bodies and identity. Somatechnics refers to the inextricable connection between the soma, the material corporeality of bodies, and the techne or techniques and technologies through which bodily being is produced and lived. By making visible the somatechnics of bodily being and the ways gender and embodiment are experienced through and produced by cultural and discursive technologies, Dollhouse emphasizes the role of power in the construction of embodied identity rather than something which always or inevitably oppresses and constrains bodies gendered as female.     

The Biology of Behavior and the Study of Human Fertility: A Review Essay*

Books reviewed in this article: Paul‐André Rosental L'intelligence démographique: sciences et politiques des populations en France (1930–1960) James R. Carey Longevity: The Biology and Demography of Life Span Susan Scott and Christopher J. Duncan Demography and Nutrition: Evidence from Historical and Contemporary Populations Laura R. Woliver The Political Geographies of Pregnancy     

Discursive manoeuvres and hegemonic recuperations in New Zealand documentary representations of domestic violence

This article examines the production and promotion of A&;E's Rollergirls (2006), a US docu-soap featuring the Texas Roller Derby Lonestar Rollergirls (TXRD), the league that revived roller derby as a sport for female amateurs. Focusing on the representation of TXRD skaters in Rollergirls, as well as A&;E's promotional campaign for the series, this analysis is contextualized in relation to the role of female athleticism in contemporary US commercial culture. Relying on practices long used to trivialize women sports figures, Rollergirls' portrayals of TXRD skaters suggest ambivalence towards female athleticism as well as a desire to contain the gender-bent and sexually agential performances at the heart of women's roller derby. In addition to revealing the challenges television producers face in the representation of female athletes and other nonconformist women, the research offered here hopes to expand feminist television criticism beyond its conventional focus on fictional texts while also broadening feminist studies of sports media, which have centered primarily on news coverage.     

"Having it Ally ": Popular Television (Post-)Feminism

This article analyzes the impact of the built environment on the narrative development of two contemporary television series, 24 (2001–2010) and Alias (2001–2006). The analysis begins with the primary sets used in 24 and Alias, paying particular attention to the ways that these sets establish the series within the genre of espionage dramas, and to the ways that they establish a particular set of gender relationships. This is followed by an examination of broader spatial concepts, showing how the two series negotiate the gendered boundaries between the domestic sphere and the professional sphere. By highlighting the connections between architecture, space, and gender in these series, this essay will demonstrate how the analysis of on-screen spaces can reveal the ideologies of individual media texts and the genres of which they are a part.     

Remaking Charlie's Angels

From their initial appearance on US broadcast network television in the mid-1970s to their feature film incarnations in 2000 and 2003, the characters known as Charlie's Angels have been at the center of American popular culture's negotiations over feminism, femininity, and the relationship between the two. This article analyzes the “remaking” of Charlie's Angels over the past 30 years as a means of considering the “remaking” of discourses of feminism and femininity in a changing historical context. In addition to considering the original television series, this analysis also examines attempts to “clone” the series in late 1970s TV, parodies of and homages to the series in 1990s television and film, and the twenty-first-century feature films. I argue that analyzing the various re-imaginings and remakes of Charlie's Angels can be a means of revealing how post-feminism, as a series of cultural responses to feminism, has wound its way through American popular culture over the past 30 years, achieving an increasingly naturalized, and thereby more hegemonically entrenched, position over time.     

What can television do? Cultural representations of border violence in FX’s The Bridge

FX’s The Bridge uses the two decades of violence against women in Juárez, Mexico, as a backdrop for a crime procedural drama about a serial killer. While there is a long history of cultural activism about the murders, The Bridge is the first mainstream television show to address the violence. I argue that while the show repeatedly centers police and journalists rather than community organizers, and thus limits the possibility of representing the social geography of the US–Mexico border, its moments of contradiction open up more complicated ways to understand the violence.     

A New Class of Cyclists: Banham’s Bicycle and the Two-wheeled World it didn’t Create

Abstract

While not uncommon for innovator and innovation to merge into a single identity, it is more unusual for this to occur between object and critic. But it did happen in the 1960’s with a novel small-wheeled bicycle, the Moulton, and the British architecture and design critic Reyner Banham. Banham believed the Moulton would give rise to a new generation of middle-class urban radical cyclists who would eventually come to rely on bicycles for their transport needs. While this did not happen, the Moulton’s attention-getting technology did lead to a revived market in for bicycles among young, newly affluent consumers who bought small-wheeled utility bicycles as fashion statements and status symbols.     

The “smart” body politics of Lena Dunham’s Girls

Since its 2012 debut Girls has received an extraordinary amount of attention and criticism from both academic circles and popular culture critics. It has been critiqued for its depiction of female nudity and its portrayal of female sexual subjecthood. At the center of these debates is how author–star Lena Dunham’s body is positioned and utilized aesthetically and politically. This essay examines the brand of body politics and mode of female sexual subjecthood that the series creates and performs. In order to track how Girls produces this body politics and female sexual subjecthood I position it in relation to earlier feminist television series and indie cinema. This essay argues that Girls’ particular brand of body politics and the mode of female sexual subjecthood it depicts is characterized by emotional intimacy, irony and reflexivity. Furthermore I contend that Girls’ gender politics is enabled by the series’ utilization of a low-key aesthetic and the “smart” tendency, more commonly discussed in relation to American indie cinema.     

Feminist Discourse and the Hegemonic Role of Mass Media

There has been a notable cultural trend in which feminist concerns are conveyed through many popular culture texts in South Korea since the early 1990s. Many different social groups and organizations have been engaged in the formation of feminist discourse in popular culture, among them the mainstream media. To broadly address the role of media in incorporating feminist discourse within the dominant ideology in specific socio-economic contexts, the research sought to identify the ways in which feminist discourse was generated and/or assimilated into the dominant ideology in newspaper content about the messages in the two television dramas Lovers (1996) and The Woman Next Door (2003) and other socio-cultural phenomena surrounding the dramas. Newspaper content became more favorable to the sexually liberated female characters and acknowledged changing gender roles as a current socio-cultural trend. However, it never questioned the nuclear family system itself—which occupies the hegemonic realm in patriarchal capitalist society.     

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess: Reception of the Texts by a Sample of Lesbian Fans and Web Site Users

This qualitative study of television reception examined the ways in which a sample of lesbian fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess incorporated their experiences as viewers, fans, and Internet users with relation to their sexual identity as lesbians. Specifically, this study examined the ways in which participants used these television programs to inform their sexual identity development. Results indicated that participants used television and the Internet to normalize and affirm lesbian experience, to decrease negative feelings regarding their lesbian identities, and to decrease social isolation.     

Feminism and women's film criticism in post-war Britain, 1945–1959

Feminist film criticism is widely thought to have started in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the “Images of Woman” debate associated with critics such as Marjorie Rosen provided the foundation for later developments in feminist film theory. Antonia Lant has recently claimed the immediate post-1950 period to be a barren time for female-authored publications on film and cinema. This article argues that, contrary to received wisdom, the post-war period (1945–1959) in Britain was a time when women's film criticism flourished, with writers such as Dilys Powell, C.A. Lejeune, Catherine de la Roche and E. Arnot Robertson enjoying high-profile careers. Moving beyond a simple recovery of women's “hidden histories,” this article highlights the points of connection between the post-war period and later film criticism informed by second wave feminism. Through a case study of de la Roche and Robertson this article explores how women critics in this period were similarly preoccupied with screen representations of women and women's roles within the film industry, anticipating the later concerns of Rosen and others. I argue that a cross-media focus is a productive method for generating insights into women's critical agency at this time, and conclude that women's film criticism demonstrates something of the wider shifts taking place in gender relations in British society.