Dead women litter the visual landscape of the 2000s. In this book, Clarke Dillman explains the contextual environment from which these images have arisen, how the images relate to (and sometimes contradict) the narratives they help to constitute, and the cultural work that dead women perform in visual texts.

Dead women litter the visual landscape of the 2000s. In this book, Clarke Dillman explains the contextual environment from which these images have arisen, how the images relate to (and sometimes contradict) the narratives they help to constitute, and the cultural work that dead women perform in visual texts.

This edited collection from leading scholars in the fields of media, communications, cultural studies and a number of aligned areas looks to the intersection of capitalism, crime and the media. The text is founded on the principles of cultural criminology – that how we determine and understand crime lies in the social world and that the determination of crime and its mediation in popular culture have a political basis. The book consists of eleven chapters and is divided into three sections. Section one considers the intersection of crime and capitalism in a range of contemporary cultural texts. Section two examines how various power systems influence the operation of the media in its role of reporting crime and holding the powerful to account. Section three considers how texts in a variety of formats are used to conduct politics, communicate politics and enact political decision making.

This edited collection focuses on gender and contemporary horror in film, examining how and if representations of gender in horror have changed.

Bringing together well-established scholars of media, political science, sociology, and film to investigate the representation of Washington politics on U.S. television from the mid-2000s to the present, this volume offers stimulating perspectives on the status of representations of contemporary US politics, the role of government and the machinations and intrigue often associated with politicians and governmental institutions. The authors help to locate these representations both in the context of the history of earlier television shows that portrayed the political culture of Washington as well as within the current political culture transpiring both inside and outside of "The Beltway." With close attention to issues of gender, race and class and offering studies from contemporary quality television, including popular programmes such as The West Wing, Veep, House of Cards, The Americans, The Good Wife and Scandal, the authors examine the ways in which televisual representations reveal changing attitudes towards Washington culture, shedding light on the role of the media in framing the public’s changing perception of politics and politicians. Exploring the new era in which television finds itself, with new production practices and the possible emergence of a new ’political genre’ emerging, Politics and Politicians in Contemporary U.S. Television also considers the ’humanizing’ of political characters on television, asking what that representation of politicians as human beings says about the national political culture. A fascinating study that sits at the intersection of politics and television, this book will appeal to scholars of popular culture, sociology, cultural and media studies.

Photographic stills of women, appearing in both press coverage and relief campaigns, have long been central to the documentation of war and civil conflict. Images of non-Western women, in particular, regularly function as symbols of the misery and hopelessness of the oppressed. Featured on the front pages of newspapers and in NGO reports, they inform public understandings of war and peace, victims and perpetrators, but within a discourse that often obscures social and political subjectivities. Uniquely, this book deconstructs – in a systematic, gender-sensitive way – the repetitive circulation of certain images of war, conflict and state violence, in order to scrutinize the role of photographic tropes in the globalized visual sphere. Zarzycka builds on feminist theories of representations of war to explore how the concepts of femininity and war secure each other’s intelligibility in photographic practices. This book examines the complex connections between photographic tropes and the individuals and communities they represent, in order to rethink the medium of photography as a discursive and political practice. This book interrogates both the structure and transmission of contemporary encounters with war, violence, and conflict. It will appeal to advanced students and scholars of gender studies, visual studies, media studies, photography theory, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and trauma and memory studies.

So, the film or television lesbian character dies. It seems to happen frequently. But does it really? If so, is it something new? Surveying the fates of numerous characters over decades, this study shows that killing off the lesbian is not a new trend. It is a form of symbolic annihilation and it has had an impact in real life. When more women are working behind the scenes, what appears on-screen also becomes more diverse--yet unhappily the story lines don't necessarily change. From the Xenaverse to GLAAD to the Lexa Pledge, fans have demanded better. As fan fiction migrates from the computer screen to the printed page, authors reanimate the dead and insist on happy endings.

This book examines the central significance of sexualized female corpses in modern and contemporary Hispanic and Anglophone crime fiction. Beginning with the foundational detective fictions of the nineteenth century, it draws from diverse subgenres to describe a transatlantic tradition of necropornography characterized by lascivious interest in female cadavers, dissection, morgues, femicide, and snuff movies. Hard-boiled and police procedural classics from the U.S. and the U.K. are juxtaposed with texts by established Spanish and Spanish American genre masters and with obscure works that prefigure the contemporary transmedial boom in corpse-centered fictions. The rhetoric and aesthetics of necropornographic crime fiction are related to those of popular crime journalism and forensic-science television dramas. This study argues that crime fiction has long fixated disproportionately on the corpses of beautiful young white women and continues to treat their deaths and autopsies as occasions for male visual pleasure, male subjective self-affirmation and male homosocial bonding.

This edited collection provides an intersectional and transnational exploration of representations of sexual violence and rape within films, television shows, and digital media in the contemporary context of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. Drawing upon sociology, gender studies, cultural studies, media studies, and Black feminist studies, chapters focus on women and texts at the margins of mainstream culture’s depictions of sexual violence. The editors and contributors examine the dominant narrative of the thin, cisgender, heterosexual white female victim, and the ways in which social and cultural conversations around race and gender impact and are impacted by depictions of sexual violence in media. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in sociology, gender studies, and media studies, particularly those interested in the intersectionality of race and gender. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Women in television news have made great strides in the past twenty-five years. No longer limited to being the token pretty face on the nightly newscast, women have taken their places as working journalists in newsrooms, on the campaign trail, in war zones, and in the highest echelons of network news management. Barbara Walters and Connie Chung have even occupied the coveted network anchor's chair, if only briefly. In this book, 70 of the foremost women in television news reflect on their professional successes, the personal and professional sacrifices that often bought those successes, and the barriers that still confront women in the news business. Weaving their interviews into a compelling text, Judith Marlane covers a wide range of issues, including looks versus ability and experience, sexual harassment, the resistance to women news anchors, the difficulties of balancing work and family life, women's and men's salaries, and the willingness of women to help other women in the business. This book builds from Marlane's 1976 work, Women in Television News. Interviews with many of the same women highlight the gains that women have made in broadcast journalism. Simultaneously, Marlane has expanded her range of informants to include fifteen of America's most famous male anchors and correspondents to gather their assessments of the role of women in broadcasting today.