Invocations of feminism: cultural value, gender, and American quality television

This thesis examines the emergence of a trend in American post-millennial television often described in journalistic discourses with the term ‘feminist quality TV’. While the strategic reliance on feminist politics is a historically established method in American television to promote certain programming’s cultural value, the cultural specificities of the early 21st century deem this phenomenon unique enough for an in-depth study. The emergence of ‘feminist quality television’ is governed by the rhetorical subversion of two phenomena simultaneously: the much-debated development of the era’s masculine-coded ‘quality television’ culture on the one hand, and the dominance of ‘postfeminist’ popular culture on the other. Post-millennial ‘quality television’ culture cultivates the idea of aesthetic-generic hierarchies among different types of scripted programming. This category’s development has facilitated academic interest in television texts’ evaluative analysis based on aesthetic merit, an approach that other strands of TV scholarship contest for sidestepping the gendered and classed processes of canonisation informing the phenomenon. By the mid-2010s, the debate between aesthetic versus political analysis had intensified in television studies. The thesis intervenes in this by arguing for a synthesis of approaches that does not further foster already prominent processes of canonisation, but interrogates the cultural forces underlying them. Via detailed analyses of four programmes emerging within the ‘feminist quality TV’ trend, namely 30 Rock (2006-2013), Parks and Recreation (2009-2015), The Good Wife (2009-2016), and Orange Is the New Black (2013-), it seeks to understand how they mediate their cultural significance by negotiating formal-aesthetic exceptionalism and a politicised rhetoric around a ‘problematic’ postfeminism, thus linking ideals of political and aesthetic value. The ultimate purpose of this research is to demonstrate the necessity in television analysis of unpacking both the specific genderedness of television’s cultivation of aesthetic value, and the context of aesthetics and form in which the programmes’ political implications emerge

Through the Gaps of My Fingers: Genre, Femininity, and Cringe Aesthetics in Dramedy Television

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI linkConcentrating on the series “Girls” (2012–2017), “Fleabag” (2016), and “Insecure” (2016–), this article examines the female-centered dramedy as a current genre of U.S.-American television culture with specific investments in gendered value hierarchies. The article explores the format’s dominant narrative and aesthetic practices with specific focus on prestige dramedy’s “cringe” aesthetics. Cringe is increasingly mobilized as a mode of political expression following the format’s privileging of female subjectivities. As such, cringe is tasked with negotiating the tensions between drama and comedy on one hand and intersectional relations of identity politics on the other. Character “complexity,” embedded in ideological themes around identity, modifies the “comedy” in cringe and becomes associated with the more prestigious dramatic mode, this way governing the texts’ appeal to cultural value. The article demonstrates the ways the female-centered cringe dramedy expresses its politicization and “complexity” via disturbing gendered expectations of mediated femininity, and specifically body and sexuality politics

Beasts from the East: Fantasies of Eastern Europeanness in Brexit-era BBC Drama

This article examines enduring racist-nationalist imaginings of the Eastern European other in British television fictions, demonstrated via Brexit-era BBC prestige dramas broadcast on UK television before international release via Netflix. We begin our discussion by briefly flagging up some of the key issues in the BBC1 miniseries The Salisbury Poisonings (2020), itself not our main object of study. This detour even before we begin our analysis proper is justified by the transparency of The Salisbury Poisonings’ nationalistic rhetoric, which conjures up with no subtlety the toxic-beastly menace of Eastern Europe. We will then move on to three case studies, each focused on a drama series celebrated in critical and scholarly responses as progressive/joyous fictional representations of minoritized and/or marginalized bodies, to demonstrate the presence of the same imaginings of the Eastern European foreign other in our selected programmes, and to highlight how such dehumanizing representations can nestle within ostensibly empowering and positive discourses of identity. That is to say, the key claim we make is not that UK imaginings of the Eastern European other are newly xenophobic, nor do we pretend to draw attention to negative portrayals of Eastern Europeans in UK popular culture for the first time. Rather, we make the important point that ostensibly progressive fictional representations accommodate racist-xenophobic discourses of Eastern Europeanness, which remain unnoticed – or at least unremarked upon in celebratory critical responses – despite the obvious reproduction of age-old narratives of Eastern European savagery, barbarism and pathological threat in the Brexit era. The article is informed by a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on racialized European imaginings of Europe’s margins, which it proposes to enrich with a theoretically and historically informed close reading of key examples of the BBC’s internationally distributed prestige television drama output

DERBI: A Digital Method to Help Researchers Offer “Right-to-Know” Personal Exposure Results

Summary: Researchers and clinicians in environmental health and medicine increasingly show respect for participants and patients by involving them in decision-making. In this context, the return of personal results to study participants is becoming ethical best practice, and many participants now expect to see their data. However, researchers often lack the time and expertise required for report-back, especially as studies measure greater numbers of analytes, including many without clear health guidelines. In this article, our goal is to demonstrate how a prototype digital method, the Digital Exposure Report-Back Interface (DERBI), can reduce practical barriers to high-quality report-back. DERBI uses decision rules to automate the production of personalized summaries of notable results and generates graphs of individual results with comparisons to the study group and benchmark populations. Reports discuss potential sources of chemical exposure, what is known and unknown about health effects, strategies for exposure reduction, and study-wide findings. Researcher tools promote discovery by drawing attention to patterns of high exposure and offer novel ways to increase participant engagement. DERBI reports have been field tested in two studies. Digital methods like DERBI reduce practical barriers to report-back thus enabling researchers to meet their ethical obligations and participants to get knowledge they can use to make informed choices

Netflix Feminism: Binge-watching Rape Culture in 'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt' and 'Unbelievable'

Female-centred serial programming that combines aesthetic exceptionalism and a rhetoric of progressive gender politics is a popular trend of Anglo-American television in the 2010s, tapping into a Zeitgeist of popular feminism as described by Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018). In some incarnations of the trend – and doubtlessly reflecting on the Trump and MeToo era – sexual violence, rape culture, and the psychological aftermaths of sexual abuse become focalised in ways that highlight the systemic nature of sexual violence and its key role in the makeup of the patriarchal social order; see, for example, the series Orange is the New Black, Jessica Jones, Alias Grace, Big Little Lies, The Handmaid’s Tale, 13 Reasons Why, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Fall, Unbelievable or Top of the Lake. As this list indicates, a large portion of this programming originates in “binge-able” Internet television, and is prominently featured on Netflix. Following from Susan Berridge’s (2017) observation, such prominence may speak to the allowances of the immersive binge-watching practice that Netflix encourages for its programming’s consumption, with the capacity to offer the viewer a sustained exploration of rape culture’s systemic nature, rather than treating sexual violence as a series of individualised and isolated incidents. This book chapter explores to what extent Netflix’s binge-able programming strategy and its effect on serialised narrative structures open up new avenues for interrogating rape culture in popular storytelling. Taking two Netflix original series (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Unbelievable) as case studies to analyse the binge-able serial format’s engagement with rape narratives, it also considers how this thematisation is shaped by factors such as the company’s branding logic, critical discourses around the cultural value of binge-watching, and the current political mainstreaming of feminist concerns around women’s bodily autonomy

Netflix Feminism: Binge-watching Rape Culture in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Unbelievable

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Tina Fey: "Quality" Comedy and the Body of the Female Comedy Author

This book chapter examines the television authorship of comedy producer-performer Tina Fey. It takes Fey’s comedy as case study for the examination of the ways in which American “quality” TV comedy of the early 21 st century accommodates thematisations of gender politics and popular feminist discourses. Fey’s work is particularly relevant for this investigation, since her celebrity and comedy mobilise popular discourses around female authorship, liberal feminism, performance, and body politics in the context of American prestige comedy. In the chapter I unpack media controversies around her star text and comedy – particularly as presented in her series "30 Rock" (2006-2013) – which originated in her mobilisation of a “feminist” comic persona and in this persona’s reflection on the gendered dualism of comedy performance and authorship. As I argue, a discursive dichotomy of “writer” versus “performer” of female-centred comedy, much influenced by the postfeminist cultural paradigm, shapes and dominates Fey’s public image, helping to negotiate her presence in the higher echelons of American comedy

Dream On Princess: Cultural value, gender politics and the Hungarian film canon through the documentary Pretty Girls

In 1985, Hungary held its first post-World War II “Miss Hungary” beauty pageant, an event with the unspoken premise to symbolise communist authoritarianism’s decline and western capitalist culture’s growing influence in the country. Attracting unprecedented attention in popular and high culture, the contest’s reputation soon turned into public repudiation, initially due to the organisers’ reported exploitation of contestants behind the scenes, then following the widely publicised suicide of seventeen-year-old pageant winner Csilla Molnár on 10 June 1986. Beauty queen Molnár’s suicide instantly became a point of national trauma still resonating in Hungarian popular consciousness, in large part thanks to the intense cultural production that it (and the pageant itself) instantly inspired. The array of both high and low cultural artefacts about Molnár includes works of diverse genres from fine art to investigative reportage, poetry, popular music, and documentary filmmaking; sharing, alongside their topic and involvement in Molnár’s mythologization as martyr and fairy-tale princess, the fact that all were produced by male artists. Among these are: a sculpture by conceptual artist Gyula Pauer, Sándor Homonyik’s hit song Álmodj királylány (Dream on Princess, 1989), journalist Sándor Friderikusz’s oral history/investigative report book Isten óvd a királynőt! (God Save the Queen!, 1987); and crucially here, the documentary film Szépleányok by András Dér and László Hartai, which follows the contest’s events from its inception to the controversial creation process of the Pauer sculpture depicting a naked Molnár, to the organisers’ behind-the-scenes schemings, to the cultural reverberations of Molnár’s suicide. Mainly focusing on the documentary and its position in Hungarian public discourses as both historic evidence and artistic achievement, this chapter investigates notions of gender and authorship that are brought into sharp relief in the specific historic-cultural moment of Hungary’s cultural production shortly before and around the fall of communism. While, as western feminist scholarship has shown (Bronfen 1992), western patriarchal tropes around the beautiful female body/corpse as ideal topic of (male) artistic representation are evident in the case study, the analysis contextualises this tradition in late socialist Hungarian auteur cinema’s purported role in the ideological criticism of both the Hungarian socialist regime and western capitalism. If, as Banet-Weiser argues (1992) in relation to the US context, the beauty pageant is a unique site on which a particularly feminised ideal of national identity (“Miss Hungary”) is contested and packaged for consumer entertainment, how does the film’s (and its cultural surroundings’ then and since) political critique of the contest engage with its gender politics, including Molnár’s historic mythologization as prime victim of 1980s Hungary’s murky political and economic conditions

Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television

This book examines the emergence of the American post-millennial ‘feminist quality TV’ phenomenon. While American TV has long relied on a strategic foregrounding of feminist politics to promote certain programming’s cultural value, this book is the first sustained critical analysis of the 21st century resurgence of this tradition. Woman Up’s central argument is that post-millennial ‘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. Post-millennial 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 programmes considered worthy of discussion. Other strands of TV scholarship have criticised this approach for sidestepping the gendered and classed processes of canonisation informing the phenomenon. Woman Up intervenes in this debate by re-evaluating such approaches and insisting that rather than further fostering or critiquing already prominent processes of canonisation, we need to interrogate the cultural forces underlying them. Via detailed analyses of four programmes emerging in the early period of the ‘feminist quality TV’ trend, namely 30 Rock (2006-2013), Parks and Recreation (2009-2015), The Good Wife (2009-2016), and Orange Is the New Black (2013-), this book demonstrates that such series mediate their cultural significance by combining formal-aesthetic exceptionalism and a politicised rhetoric around a ‘problematic’ postfeminism, thus linking ideals of political and aesthetic value. The book also demonstrates the necessity in television analysis of unpacking both the specific genderedness of television’s cultivation of aesthetic value, and the context of aesthetics and form in which the programmes’ political implications emerge

"I have a Particular Set of Skills that Not Every Detective Possesses. For Instance, I Am a Woman." Socialist Superwomanhood and Policing the Nation in "Linda" (1984-89)

open access articleLinda was a hit crime procedural of late-socialist Hungary, its success reverberating transnationally upon its circulation across the Eastern Bloc (Pavlova 2016). It follows the eponymous young police detective who in her episodic crime fighting adventures deploys her Taekwondo mastery against Hungary’s criminal underworld. Inspired by Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies – themselves Westernisations of East Asian martial arts genres – series producer György Gát blended US-American, East Asian and Eastern European popular cultural influences. Linda’s resultant generic hybridity encapsulates late socialism’s politically-culturally transitional period: the episodic procedural / martial arts combination is channelled through Hungarian comedy traditions manifested in an ensemble cast recognisable from local cabaret and film/TV comedy, domesticating stock characters of American crime genres. But as detective heroine, Linda (Nóra Görbe) is marked by an overdetermined exceptionalism and nonconformity linked to her gender and its ambiguous corporeality. Androgynously slim and fit, sporting a mullet and little make-up, the threat of sexual violence follows her everywhere in her investigations, occasioning regular beatings-up of groups of men twice her size. For Imre (2016), she is a culmination of 1980s television’s socialist superwoman foreshadowing post-socialist postfeminism. I contextualise Linda in its temporal-territorial-ideological distance from Western/Anglophone feminist theorisations of transnational crime TV’s female detective, which examine the ‘deterritorialised’ feminisation of the genre’s ‘defective detective’ figure (Klinger 2018, Coulthard et al. 2018, Turnbull 2014). Avoiding a putatively emancipatory gesture of excavating nominally obscure media products/representations, I analyse Linda to demonstrate the female detective’s key-yet-conflicted role in mediating the police procedural’s relationship to gendered idea(l)s of national law enforcement as state-sanctioned policing of belonging. Drawing on Garland-Thomson’s (2011) concept of the misfit, I argue that extra/textual contexts like Linda’s femininity, physical prowess, and Görbe’s star narrative trouble the series’ articulation of this role, helping us nuance the ‘defective detective’ trope’s analysis in important ways