Women's inclinations to identify with television characters varies with their assessment of the realism of these characters and their social world.

In this book an international team of contributors examines critically the relationship between television and women's culture. Although they recognize that television frequently distorts and oppresses women's experience, the authors avoid a simplistic manipulative view of the media. Instead they show how and why such different genres as game shows, police fiction and soap opera offer women opportunities for negotiation of their own meanings and their own aesthetic appreciation. Not for sale in Australia or New Zealand.

In the 1990s, American televison audiences witnessed an unprecedented rise in programming devoted explicitly to women. Cable networks such as Oxygen Media, Women's Entertainment Network, and Lifetime targeted a female audience, and prime-time dramatic series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Judging Amy, Gilmore Girls, Sex and the City, and Ally McBeal empowered heroines, single career women, and professionals struggling with family commitments and occupational demands. After establishing this phenomenon's significance, Amanda D. Lotz explores the audience profile, the types of narrative and characters that recur, and changes to the industry landscape in the wake of media consolidation and a profusion of channels. Employing a cultural studies framework, Lotz examines whether the multiplicity of female-centric networks and narratives renders certain gender stereotypes uninhabitable, and how new dramatic portrayals of women have redefined narrative conventions. Redesigning Women also reveals how these changes led to narrowcasting, or the targeting of a niche segment of the overall audience, and the ways in which the new, sophisticated portrayals of women inspire sympathetic identification while also commodifying viewers into a marketable demographic for advertisers.

In less than a century, the flickering blue-gray light of the television screen has become a cultural icon. What do the images transmitted by that screen tell us about power, authority, gender stereotypes, and ideology in the United States? Television, History, and American Culture addresses this question by illuminating how television both reflects and influences American culture and identity. The essays collected here focus on women in front of, behind, and on the TV screen, as producers, viewers, and characters. Using feminist and historical criticism, the contributors investigate how television has shaped our understanding of gender, power, race, ethnicity, and sexuality from the 1950s to the present. The topics range from the role that women broadcasters played in radio and early television to the attempts of Desilu Productions to present acceptable images of Hispanic identity, from the impact of TV talk shows on public discourse and the politics of offering viewers positive images of fat women to the negotiation of civil rights, feminism, and abortion rights on news programs and shows such as I Spy and Peyton Place. Innovative and accessible, this book will appeal to those interested in women's studies, American studies, and popular culture and the critical study of television. Contributors. Julie D'Acci, Mary Desjardins, Jane Feuer, Mary Beth Haralovich, Michele Hilmes, Moya Luckett, Lauren Rabinovitz, Jane M. Shattuc, Mark Williams

The Warrior Women of Television examines contemporary representations of the female action hero in three series: La Femme Nikita, Aeon Flux, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Detailed readings focus on the ways the structure and content of each series work to create specific understandings of the body that are in contrast to those of male-centered action texts. Arguing that television texts mediate larger cultural concerns, this book considers the feminist implications of the series and uses insights from critical writings on contemporary culture and the body to discuss the ways the female hero functions as a potent contemporary cultural symbol.

A Companion to Television is a magisterial collection of 31 original essays that charter the field of television studies over the past century Explores a diverse range of topics and theories that have led to television’s current incarnation, and predict its likely future Covers technology and aesthetics, television’s relationship to the state, televisual commerce; texts, representation, genre, internationalism, and audience reception and effects Essays are by an international group of first-rate scholars For information, news, and content from Blackwell's reference publishing program please visit www.blackwellpublishing.com/reference/

This book is unique in its critical inquiry into the new woman warrior's appropriation of violence and the Western war narrative. Informed by feminist theoretical debates regarding women's new roles, the authors delve into the meaning of that appropriation for alternative storytelling. To date, television's "ferocious few" have received little scholarly attention. By inviting a variety of perspectives, editors Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy provide a cutting-edge forum to recognize women's increasing role in popular culture as they are cast as action heroes. As a timely and accessible work, this book will appeal to scholars, feminists, cultural critics, and the general reader.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Dow discusses a wide variety of television programming and provides specific case studies of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, One Day at a Time, Designing Women, Murphy Brown, and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. She juxtaposes analyses of genre, plot, character development, and narrative structure with the larger debates over feminism that took place at the time the programs originally aired. Dow emphasizes the power of the relationships among television entertainment, news media, women's magazines, publicity, and celebrity biographies and interviews in creating a framework through which television viewers "make sense" of both the medium's portrayal of feminism and the nature of feminism itself.

Television talk shows have fueled debates about television's faltering role as a medium for social interaction, but this book points out that many viewers don't just absorb the shows; they react to them and even talk back to their televisions. By observing and analyzing the daily viewing habits of a dozen women viewers, Helen Wood interprets these experiences as daily rituals of self-reflexivity, focusing on the performance of gender as a doubling of place in contemporary conditions of modernity. Directly challenging the fundamental assumption that new media forms are uniquely interactive, Talking with Television reveals that televisual styles, particularly talk-based TV, have always sought to encourage a participatory relationship with viewers at home.

Portrayed in Western discourse as tribal and traditional, Afghans have in fact intensely debated women's rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam as part of their nation building in the post-9/11 era. Wazhmah Osman places television at the heart of these public and politically charged clashes while revealing how the medium also provides war-weary Afghans with a semblance of open discussion and healing. After four decades of gender and sectarian violence, she argues, the internationally funded media sector has the potential to bring about justice, national integration, and peace. Fieldwork from across Afghanistan allowed Osman to record the voices of many Afghan media producers and people. Afghans offer their own seldom-heard views on the country's cultural progress and belief systems, their understandings of themselves, and the role of international interventions. Osman analyzes the impact of transnational media and foreign funding while keeping the focus on local cultural contestations, productions, and social movements. As a result, she redirects the global dialogue about Afghanistan to Afghans and challenges top-down narratives of humanitarian development.