Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary Us Television - Paperback

by Maria Sulimma (Author)

The notion of seriality and serial identity performance runs as a strong undercurrent through much of the fields of gender studies, feminist theory and queer studies, although the explicit analysis of a serial enactment of gender is surprisingly rare. Whereas media studies and cultural studies-based seriality scholarship can often overlook gender as an ongoing process, this book defines gender as a serial and discursively produced, intersectional entanglement of different practices and agencies. It argues that serial storytelling offers such complex negotiations of identity that it is never adequate to consider the 'results' of televisual gender performances as separate from the processes that produce them. As such, gender performances are not restricted to individual television programmes themselves, but are also located in official paratexts, such as making-of documentaries, interviews with writers and actors, as well as in 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.

Back Jacket

The notion of seriality and serial identity performance runs as a strong undercurrent through much of the fields of feminist theory, gender studies and queer studies. Defining gender as a serial and discursively produced entanglement of different practices and agencies, this book argues that serial storytelling can offer such complex negotiations of identity that the 'results' of televisual gender performances are rarely separate from the processes that produce them. As such, gender performances are not restricted to individual television programmes themselves, but are also located in official paratexts, such as making-of documentaries, interviews with writers and actors, and in 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 the viewer practices that these narratives seek to trigger and draw on in the process. Maria Sulimma is an American Studies scholar working in the intersecting areas of cultural studies, urban studies, feminist media studies, and gender studies. Based at the University Duisburg-Essen, she is the Postdoctoral Researcher in the Research Group City Scripts.

Author Biography

Maria Sulimma is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Anglophone Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen.