Motherhood and Myth-making : Despatches from the front-line of the US mommy wars

Commentary and Criticism SectionPeer reviewe

Sex and the City : The Finales

This chapter looks at the finales of the globally successful HBO series 'Sex and The City'. While the original series ended in 2004, in 2006 three more endings surfaced on Youtube and, of course, there were two more endings of the subsequent films. This chapter asks that with so many endings freely available: Has Sex and the City every truly ended

The Gendered Politics of a Global Recession : A News Media Analysis

This journal article looks at the gendered angle taken by journalists when reporting the recession in North American and British newspapers and how the emphasis on gender hides issues of race and class

Mothers on American television: the relationship between representation and economic oppression in a neoliberal patriarchal society

This PhD by Publication focuses on the representation of motherhood on ‘quality’ American television and how that is intrinsically linked to women’s political and economic oppression in society. Although this study focuses on contemporary television series, it is grounded in a history of how motherhood has been theorized, its cultural positioning and how this informs the representations of maternity, motherhood and mothering in quality American television drama. Arguing that, in order to understand how patriarchy subjugates women, we need to expose the way patriarchal norms related to motherhood work as, while ‘we know that difference exists, … we don’t understand it as constituted relationally’,1 I propose that cultural attitudes expressed through televisual representations betray a deep-rooted misogyny that ties women to their reproductive potential thus impacting their positioning in society, their employment prospects and a lifetime’s wage prospects. With so many meshes of ideological carriers at work, I conclude that it is urgent to bring them into consciousness and wield that knowledge politically.2 My work brings what is invisible into discourse, what is unconscious into consciousness and teaches us much about the ingrained attitudes of a neoliberal western patriarchal society, how it views motherhood and the impact that has on women in society more broadly. My original contribution to this field acknowledges ‘quality’ television’s soap opera roots, and, by analysing series from a feminist perspective, shows that much can be revealed about the patriarchal unconscious, how it views its mothers and how women are inevitably linked to their reproductive potential

Who Said Crime Doesn’t Pay? : Introduction to Dossier FoxCrime and the CSI franchise in Italy

This dossier focuses on FoxCrime and its acquisition of the internationally successful CSI franchise. Based on transcripts from presentations given at a two-day conference, entitled 'lo schermo Globale: presente e futuro della televisione' ('The Global Screen: present and future of television'), held at the Triennale di Milano in April 2008, it gives insight into how US acquired fictions function in the Italian television marketplace. The transcripts are followed by commentaries, which seek to locate FoxCrime within a longer history of the crime genre in twentieth-century Italy

The One with the Feminist Critique: Revisiting Millennial Postfeminism with Friends

In the aftermath of its initial broadcast run, iconic millennial sitcom Friends (NBC, 1994–2004) generated some quality scholarship interrogating its politics of gender. But as a site of analysis, it remains a curious, almost structuring absence from the central canon of the first wave of feminist criticism of postfeminist culture. This absence is curious not only considering the place of Friends at the forefront of millennial popular culture but also in light of its long-term syndication in countries across the world since that time. And it is structuring in the sense that Friends was the stage on which many of the familiar tropes of postfeminism interrogated across the body of work on it appear in retrospect to have been tried and tested. This article aims to contribute toward redressing this absence through interrogation and contextualization of the series’ negotiation of a range of structuring tropes of postfeminist media discourse, and it argues for Friends as an unacknowledged ur-text of millennial postfeminism

HBO and Its Legacy

This keynote seeks to explore what lessons we can learn from HBO, and how the company functions as a cultural site as it systematically sets about legitimatizing a discourse of television as art. So successful has HBO been in creating a particular restricted field of cultural TV production, set outside the mainstream TV networks—driven as they are by advertising revenue and ratings—and explains how HBO has incorporated artistic norms and principles of evaluation as their main model; and one which has had a profound and lasting impact on ways of thinking and doing television in the marketplace. In short we want to “follow up” on the legacy, of how the HBO brand has legitimized television