Feminist Television Criticism: Notes and Queries

"Vampires Don't Age, But Actors Sure Do"

“…The Older Woman in Desperate Housewives ROS JENNINGS AND MARICEL ORÓ-PIQUERAS Desperate Housewives (ABC 2004(ABC -2012) is a successful US-produced television text that focuses on the lives, concerns, and struggles of a group of American women living in the fictitious suburban enclave of Wisteria Lane. Generically hybrid, the series encompasses elements of drama, comedy, soap opera and even gothic (Lancioni; Hill) and together with Ally McBeal (Fox 1997(Fox -2000 and Sex in the City (HBO 1998(HBO -2004, Desperate Housewives forms part of a trio of key television texts that have received close attention with regard to issues of postfeminism, femininity and female identities (Chicharro Merayo;Kaufer Busch;McCabe and Akass 2006;Akass and McCabe 2006a). The narrative struggles of the four central female characters in Desperate Housewives -Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman), Susan Mayer/Delfino (Teri Hatcher), Bree Van der Kamp/Hodge (Marcia Cross) and Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria) -represent, as Elizabeth Kaufer Busch argues " [t]he unfeasibility of the twenty-first century happy housewife heroine" (95).…”

Serializing Age

“…The Older Woman in Desperate Housewives ROS JENNINGS AND MARICEL ORÓ-PIQUERAS Desperate Housewives (ABC 2004(ABC -2012) is a successful US-produced television text that focuses on the lives, concerns, and struggles of a group of American women living in the fictitious suburban enclave of Wisteria Lane. Generically hybrid, the series encompasses elements of drama, comedy, soap opera and even gothic (Lancioni; Hill) and together with Ally McBeal (Fox 1997-2000 and Sex in the City (HBO 1998(HBO -2004, Desperate Housewives forms part of a trio of key television texts that have received close attention with regard to issues of postfeminism, femininity and female identities (Chicharro Merayo; Kaufer Busch;McCabe and Akass 2006;Akass and McCabe 2006a). The narrative struggles of the four central female characters in Desperate Housewives -Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman), Susan Mayer/Delfino (Teri Hatcher), Bree Van der Kamp/Hodge (Marcia Cross) and Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria) -represent, as Elizabeth Kaufer Busch argues " [t]he unfeasibility of the twenty-first century happy housewife heroine" (95).…”

Women, soap opera and new generations of feminists

“…However, within our discipline of TV studies, we can perhaps tell a different story. Ten years ago, for the inaugural issue of Critical Studies in Television , Janet McCabe and Kim Akass laid out some of the contributions of feminist TV studies to the discipline as a whole and concluded that ‘feminist television criticism has played a crucial role in setting an agenda for television studies’ (2006: 119). Aspects of (early) feminist TV studies have continued to make an important contribution to this journal and few others dedicate so much space to those elements of TV which engaged those early feminist scholars: the invisibility of some forms of TV ( Critical Studies in Television , 2010), issues of representation (Wilde, 2009) or the specifics of scheduling ( Critical Studies in Television , 2014).…”