1st Edition

Television for Women New Directions

Edited By Rachel Moseley, Helen Wheatley, Helen Wood Copyright 2017
    282 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    282 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Television for Women brings together emerging and established scholars to reconsider the question of ‘television for women’. In the context of the 2000s, when the potential meanings of both terms have expanded and changed so significantly, in what ways might the concept of programming, addressed explicitly to a group identified by gender still matter?

     

    The essays in this collection take the existing scholarship in this field in significant new directions. They expand its reach in terms of territory (looking beyond, for example, the paradigmatic Anglo-American axis) and also historical span. Additionally, whilst the influential methodological formation of production, text and audience is still visible here, the new research in Television for Women frequently reconfigures that relationship.

     

    The topics included here are far-reaching; from television as material culture at the British exhibition in the first half of the twentieth century, women’s roles in television production past and present, to popular 1960s television such as The Liver Birds and, in the twenty-first century, highly successful programmes including Orange is the New Black, Call the Midwife, One Born Every Minute and Wanted Down Under.

     

    This book presents ground-breaking research on historical and contemporary relationships between women and television around the world and is an ideal resource for students of television, media and gender studies.

    List of Figures

    Preface

    Acknowledgements

    List of Contributors

    Introduction: Television for Women - what new directions?

    Rachel Moseley, Helen Wheatley, Helen Wood

    Part I: Women and Work

    Chapter 1: Women’s History, Women’s Work: Popular Television as Feminine Historiography

    Moya Luckett

    Chapter 2: The Feminization of Contemporary British Television Drama: Sally Wainwright and Red Productions

    Ruth McElroy

    Chapter 3: "Women pushed their way forward and became quite a force within the BBC": Women’s roles in television production and the production of programmes for women

    Vanessa Jackson

    Part II: Women and Identity

    Chapter 4: Catfight! Camp and Queer Visibility in Orange is the New Black

    Dana A. Heller

    Chapter 5: Brown Girls Who Don’t Need Saving: Social Media and the Role of ‘Possessive Investment’ in The Mindy Project and The Good Wife

    Sujata Moorti

    Chapter 6: Watching One Born Every Minute: Negotiating the terms of the ‘good birth’

    Sara De Benedictis

    Chapter 7: Sex, Class and Consumerism: British Sitcom’s Negotiation of the Single Girl

    Vicky Ball

    Part III: Formations of Women's Television

    Chapter 8: Feminist Television or Television for Women? Revisiting the Launch of Canada’s Women’s Television Network

    Sarah A. Matheson

    Chapter 9: Tradition and Innovation: Italian Women’s Channels, Factual Entertainment and the Significance of Generation in Women’s Viewing Preferences

    Cecilia Penati and Anna Sfardini

    Chapter 10: Producing Domestic Abuse in Pakistani Television: Between Commerce, Ratings and Social Responsibility

    Munira Cheema

    Part IV: Women and the Home

    Chapter 11: Television in the Ideal Home

    Helen Wheatley

    Chapter 12: "I’ve Been Having Fantasies about Regan and Carter Three Times a Week": Television, Women and Desire

    Hazel Collie

    Chapter 13: Dreaming of the ‘Good Life’: Gender, Mobility and Anxiety in Wanted Down Under

    Jilly Boyce Kay and Helen Wood

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Biography

    Rachel Moseley is Director of the Centre for Television History, Heritage and Memory Research in the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. She has published widely on popular television and film, with a particular interest in questions of history, address and representation. She is the author of Hand-Made Television: Stop-Frame Animation for Children in Britain, 1961-1974 (2016).

    Helen Wheatley is Associate Professor (Reader) in Film and Television at the University of Warwick, UK, and co-founder of the Centre for Television History, Heritage and Memory Research. She has published widely on television history and aesthetics and is the author of Gothic Television (2006) and Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure (2016). She is also editor of Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography (2007).

    Helen Wood is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester and has published widely on television, audiences, class, and gender. She is author of Talking with Television (2009) and with Beverley Skeggs, Reacting to Reality Television (2012); she has also edited Reality Television and Class with Beverley Skeggs (2011) and is editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.