Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary Us Television

The book explores how gender is produced through television narratives by examining case studies of series such as Girls, How to Get Away With Murder, and The Walking Dead. It argues that gender performances are not limited to individual programmes but are also located in official paratexts and cultural sites, and seeks to understand how these narratives trigger and draw on viewer practices.

Format: Hardback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 28 February 2021
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Seriality and serial identity performance are significant themes in gender studies, feminist theory, and queer studies, although the explicit analysis of a serial enactment of gender is relatively rare. Media studies and cultural studies-based seriality scholarship often overlook gender as an ongoing process, but this book defines gender as a serial and discursively produced, intersectional entanglement of different practices and agencies. It argues that serial storytelling offers complex negotiations of identity that are never adequately considered as separate from the processes that produce them. Gender performances are not limited to individual television programmes but are also located in official paratexts, such as making-of documentaries, interviews with writers and actors, and cultural sites like online viewer discussions, recaps, and fan fiction. With case studies of series such as Girls, How to Get Away With Murder, and The Walking Dead, this book seeks to understand how gender as a practice is generated by television narratives in the overlapping of text, reception, and production and explores which viewer practices these narratives seek to trigger and draw on in the process.

Weight: 558g
Dimension: 162 x 240 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474473958