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Description: |
Is television a gendered medium? Given the prevalence of cop shows and male anti-heroes that characterize “peak” or quality TV (both past and present), many would assume that television is a “masculine” medium, made up of “masculine” genres. However, the history of television says otherwise. This course traces the numerous ways that television—as an institution, an industry, a narrative form, and a social space—becomes aligned with various notions of gender, in the form of femininity, domesticity, feminism, “women’s culture,” and the female consumer, all at different historical moments. What these different historical moments do share, however, is the assumption that the female television viewer is always coded as white, middle class, cisgender, and able-bodied. To examine how representations of gender have taken shape on television, we will study television chronologically, spanning television sitcoms and soap operas of the 1950s and 1960s, to the rise of feminist television (Julia, The Mary Tyler Moore Show) in the 1970s, to images of “working women” in the 1980s and 90s. In the final weeks of the seminar, we will discuss the rise of streaming television, “narrowcasting,” and contemporary attempts of intersectionality on television—and how new forms of television have created new ways of thinking about gender. |