When Lieutenant Uhura took her place on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek, the actress Nichelle Nichols went where no African American woman had ever gone before. Yet several decades ...passed before many other black women began playing significant roles in speculative (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, and horror) film and television—a troubling omission, given that these genres offer significant opportunities for reinventing social constructs such as race, gender, and class. Challenging cinema’s history of stereotyping or erasing black women on-screen, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before showcases twenty-first-century examples that portray them as central figures of action and agency. Writing for fans as well as scholars, Diana Adesola Mafe looks at representations of black womanhood and girlhood in American and British speculative film and television, including 28 Days Later, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Children of Men, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Firefly, and Doctor Who: Series 3. Each of these has a subversive black female character in its main cast, and Mafe draws on critical race, postcolonial, and gender theories to explore each film and show, placing the black female characters at the center of the analysis and demonstrating their agency. The first full study of black female characters in speculative film and television, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before shows why heroines such as Lex in AVP and Zoë in Firefly are inspiring a generation of fans, just as Uhura did.
The unremitting explosion of reality television across the schedules has become a sustainable global phenomenon generating considerable popular and political fervour.
The zeal with which television ...executives seize on the easily replicated formats is matched equally by the eagerness of audiences to offer themselves up as television participants for others to watch and criticise. But how do we react to so many people breaking down, fronting up, tearing apart, dominating, empathising, humiliating, and seemingly laying bare their raw emotion for our entertainment? Do we feel sad when others are sad? Or are we relieved by the knowledge that our circumstances might be better? As reality television extends into the experiences of the everyday, it makes dramatic and often shocking the mundane aspects of our intimate relations, inviting us as viewers into a volatile arena of mediated morality.
This book addresses the impact of this endless opening out of intimacy as an entertainment trend that erodes the traditional boundaries between spectator and performer demanding new tools for capturing television's relationships with audiences. Rather than asking how the reality television genre is interpreted as 'text' or representation the authors investigate the politics of viewer encounters as interventions, evocations, and more generally mediated social relations.
The authors show how different reactions can involve viewers in tournaments of value, as women viewers empathise and struggle to validate their own lives. The authors use these detailed responses to challenge theories of the self, governmentality and ideology.
A must read for both students and researchers in audience studies, television studies and media and communication studies.
The Makeover Sender, Katherine
10/2012, Letnik:
26
eBook
Watch this show, buy this product, you can be a whole new you! Makeover television shows repeatedly promise self-renewal and the opportunity for reinvention, but what do we know about the people who ...watch them? As it turns out, surprisingly little.The Makeover is the first book to consider the rapid rise of makeover shows from the perspectives of their viewers. Katherine Sender argues that this genre of reality television continues a long history of self-improvement, shaped through contemporary media, technological, and economic contexts. Most people think that reality television viewers are ideological dupes and obliging consumers. Sender, however, finds that they have a much more nuanced and reflexive approach to the shows they watch. They are critical of the instruction, the consumer plugs, and the manipulative editing in the shows. At the same time, they buy into the shows' imperative to construct a reflexive self: an inner self that can be seen as if from the outside, and must be explored and expressed to others. The Makeover intervenes in debates about both reality television and audience research, offering the concept of the reflexive self to move these debates forward.
Is reality TV a coherent genre? This book addresses this question by examining the characteristics, contexts and breadth of reality TV through a history of its programming trends. Paying attention to ...stylistic connections as well as key concepts, this study breaks reality television down into three main 'generations': the camcorder generation, the competition generation and the celebrity generation. Beginning with a consideration of the applicability of the term 'genre' for this televisual hybrid, the book takes a transnational approach to investigating the forms and formats of reality TV framed by relevant popular and critical discourses.
Key Questions
What formal characteristics broadly define reality TV?Can reality TV be considered a genre when it relies so heavily on mixing together elements of established television genres, film practices and even industries unrelated to television, such as pop music and modelling?How can the genealogy of reality TV programming trends help us to understand the cultural discourses and concepts with which reality TV is associated for example surveillance, performance, voyeurism, celebrity and even reality itself?
Gladiators in Suits Simone Adams, Kimberly R. Moffitt, Ronald L. Jackson / Simone Adams, Kimberly R. Moffitt, Ronald L. Jackson
2019, 2019-08-21
eBook
One of the most popular shows to come out of Shondaland, Shonda Rhimes's production company, is ABC's political drama Scandal (2012–18)—a series whose tremendous success and marketing savvy led LA ...Times critic Mary McNamara to hail it as "the show that Twitter built" and Time magazine to name its protagonist as one of the most influential fictional characters of 2013. The series portrays a fictional Washington, DC, and features a diverse group of characters, racially and otherwise, who gather around the show's antiheroine, Olivia Pope, a powerful crisis manager who happens to have an extramarital affair with the president of the United States. For seven seasons, audiences learned a great deal about Olivia and those interwoven in her complex world of politics and drama, including her team of "gladiators in suits, " with whom she manages the crises of Washington's political elite. This volume, named for both Olivia's team and the show's fans, analyzes the communication, politics, stereotypes, and genre techniques featured in the television series while raising key questions about the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and viewing audiences. The essays range from critical looks at various members of Scandal's ensemble, to in-depth analyses of the show's central themes, to audience reception studies via interviews and social media analysis. Additionally, the volume contributes to research on femininity, masculinity, and representations of black womanhood on television. Ultimately, this collection offers original and timely perspectives on what was one of America's most "scandalous" prime-time network television series.
What does it mean to be modern outside the West? Based on a wealth of primary data collected over five years, Reality Television and Arab Politics analyzes how reality television stirred an explosive ...mix of religion, politics, and sexuality, fuelling heated polemics over cultural authenticity, gender relations, and political participation in the Arab world. The controversies, Kraidy argues, are best understood as a social laboratory in which actors experiment with various forms of modernity, continuing a long-standing Arab preoccupation with specifying terms of engagement with Western modernity. Women and youth take center stage in this process. Against the backdrop of dramatic upheaval in the Middle East, this book challenges the notion of a monolithic 'Arab Street' and offers an original perspective on Arab media, shifting attention away from a narrow focus on al-Jazeera, toward a vibrant media sphere that compels broad popular engagement and contentious political performance.
Black Television Travels provides a detailed and insightful view of the roots and routes of the televisual representations of blackness on the transnational media landscape. By following the ...circulation of black cultural products and their institutionalized discourses - including industry lore, taste cultures, and the multiple stories of black experiences that have and have not made it onto the small screen - Havens complicates discussions of racial representation and exposes possibilities for more expansive representations of blackness while recognizing the limitations of the seemingly liberatory spaces created by globalization. - Bambi Haggins, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University A major achievement that makes important contributions to the analysis of race, identity, global media, nation, and television production cultures. Discussions of race and television are too often constricted within national boundaries, yet this fantastic book offers a strong, compelling, and utterly refreshing corrective. Read it, assign it, use it. - Jonathan Gray, author of Television Entertainment, Television Studies, and Show Sold SeparatelyBlack Television Travels explores the globalization of African American television and the way in which foreign markets, programming strategies, and viewer preferences have influenced portrayals of African Americans on the small screen. Television executives have been notoriously slow to recognize the potential popularity of black characters and themes, both at home and abroad. As American television brokers increasingly seek revenues abroad, their assumptions about saleability and audience perceptions directly influence the global circulation of these programs, as well as their content. Black Television Travels aims to reclaim the history of African American television circulation in an effort to correct and counteract this predominant industry lore.Based on interviews with television executives and programmers from around the world, as well as producers in the United States, Havens traces the shift from an era when national television networks often blocked African American television from traveling abroad to the transnational, post-network era of today. While globalization has helped to expand diversity in African American television, particularly in regard to genre, it has also resulted in restrictions, such as in the limited portrayal of African American women in favor of attracting young male demographics across racial and national boundaries. Havens underscores the importance of examining boardroom politics as part of racial discourse in the late modern era, when transnational cultural industries like television are the primary sources for dominant representations of blackness.Timothy Havensis an Associate Professor of television and media studies in the Department of Communication Studies, the Program in African American Studies, and the Program in International Studies at the University of Iowa.In theCritical Cultural Communicationseries
Television was one of the forces shaping the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when a blockbuster TV series could reach up to a third of a country’s population. This book explores ...television’s impact on social change by comparing three sitcoms and their audiences. The shows in focus – Till Death Us Do Part in Britain, All in the Family in the United States, and One Heart and One Soul in West Germany – centered on a bigoted anti-hero and his family. Between 1966 and 1979 they saturated popular culture, and managed to accelerate as well as deradicalize value changes and collective attitudes regarding gender roles, sexuality, religion, and race.
Reality first appeared in the late 1980s-in the sense not of
real life but rather of the TV entertainment genre inaugurated by
shows such as Cops and America's Most Wanted ; the
daytime gabfests of ...Geraldo, Oprah, and Donahue; and the tabloid
news of A Current Affair . In a bracing work of cultural
criticism, Eric Harvey argues that reality TV emerged in dialog
with another kind of entertainment that served as its foil while
borrowing its techniques: gangsta rap. Or, as legendary performers
Ice Cube and Ice-T called it, "reality rap."
Reality rap and reality TV were components of a cultural
revolution that redefined popular entertainment as a truth-telling
medium. Reality entertainment borrowed journalistic tropes but was
undiluted by the caveats and context that journalism demanded.
While N.W.A.'s "Fuck tha Police" countered Cops ' vision of
Black lives in America, the reality rappers who emerged in that
group's wake, such as Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur, embraced
reality's visceral tabloid sensationalism, using the media's
obsession with Black criminality to collapse the distinction
between image and truth. Reality TV and reality rap nurtured the
world we live in now, where politics and basic facts don't feel
real until they have been translated into mass-mediated
entertainment.
It is virtually impossible to watch a movie or TV show without preconceived notions because of the hype that precedes them, while a host of media extensions guarantees them a life long past their air ...dates. An onslaught of information from print media, trailers, internet discussion, merchandising, podcasts, and guerilla marketing, we generally know something about upcoming movies and TV shows well before they are even released or aired. The extras, or "paratexts," that surround viewing experiences are far from peripheral, shaping our understanding of them and informing our decisions about what to watch or not watch and even how to watch before we even sit down for a show. Show Sold Separately gives critical attention to this ubiquitous but often overlooked phenomenon, examining paratexts like DVD bonus materials for The Lord of the Rings, spoilers for Lost, the opening credits of The Simpsons, Star Wars actions figures, press reviews for Friday Night Lights, the framing of Batman Begins, the videogame of The Thing, and the trailers for The Sweet Hereafter. Plucking these extra materials from the wings and giving them the spotlight they deserve, Jonathan Gray examines the world of film and television that exists before and after the show.
