Gender and Family in Television’s Golden Age and Beyond

Abstract

Images of women, work, and family on television have changed enormously since the heyday of the network era. Early television confined women to the home and family setting. The increase in working women in the 1960s and 1970s was reflected in television’s images of women working and living nontraditional family lives. These images gave way, in the postnetwork era, to a form of postfeminist television in the 1990s when television undercut the ideals of liberal feminism with a series of ambiguous images challenging its gains. Women’s roles in the workplace, increasingly shown, were undercut by a sense of nostalgic yearning for the love and family life that they were seen to have displaced. Current television presents a third-wave-influenced feminism that picks up where postfeminism left off, introducing important representations more varied in race, sexuality, and the choices women are seen to make between work and family.

History and Place in Television Drama: Liverpool in Cilla and Boys From the Blackstuff

“…Blackstuff also dramatises the ideological differences between the Golden Age of British television and the first Golden Age of American television. Andrea Press dates this US Golden Age as spanning from the 1950s–1970s and suggests that images of the American family from this time in particular ‘have become cultural icons’ (2009: 140). These depictions ‘presumed a unified American majority identity’ structured around the white, suburban middle-class family (Press, 2009: 140).…”

“…Andrea Press dates this US Golden Age as spanning from the 1950s–1970s and suggests that images of the American family from this time in particular ‘have become cultural icons’ (2009: 140). These depictions ‘presumed a unified American majority identity’ structured around the white, suburban middle-class family (Press, 2009: 140). Traditional family structures are also central to Blackstuff , which depicts all its main characters as part of a family unit.…”

Novos usos e desafios para os videojogos: streaming, questões de género e assédio online

“…Mas há sinais de mudança, que se notam por vezes na própria televisão (Press, 2009), embora não tanto na informação na Internet (Cullity & Younger, 2009) ou em mobile location-based services (Hjorth, 2013). Na área dos videojogos têm surgido mais iniciativas, há mais profissionais a falarem sobre a hostilidade e a discriminação nas comunidades de jogos e a aplicarem medidas, que embora ainda embrioná-rias, são um primeiro passo para tornar melhores as experiências online para todos os participantes.…”

Mothers and Antiheroes: Analyzing Motherhood and Representation in Weeds, Sons of Anarchy, and Breaking Bad

“…These characters often engage with the multifaceted realities of mothering in a climate that simultaneously takes for granted the gains made by feminist activists and erases the real need for additional social change. Andrea Press explains that this attribute of postfeminism often appears in popular culture as a series of contradictions “with a culture that remains decidedly ambivalent about feminism for women, the most successful cultural products will reflect this ambivalence” (148). In its revision and rejection of many second‐wave feminist ideals, postfeminist scholarship has raised legitimate questions about narrow and pessimistic visions of women's sexuality, as well as its dichotomous vision of feminine and feminist.…”