Amanda D. Lotz

Postfeminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and Identifying Postfeminist Attributes

Confusion and contradiction mark understandings of feminism in US popular culture at the turn of the 21st century. Surveying the terrain of both feminist theory and popular discussions of feminism, we seem to have entered an alternate language universe where words can simultaneously connote a meaning and its opposite, where labels are more signi® cant than theory behind the label. This is the contemporary theoretical context in which scholars deliberate feminism, anti-feminism, postfeminism, third-wave feminism, women-of-color feminism, and power feminism, to name but a few. Although not new formations, second-wave feminist perspectives, such as liberal feminism, radical feminism, cultural feminism, and socialist or Marxist feminism, persist as well. Variant uses of the same term, sometimes as a result of the national context of the writer, further confound contemporary confusion about what the term feminism means and its many modi® ers indicate. Members of the academy and activist organizations mainly debate the complexity of the contemporary profusion of feminist perspectives, although popular media also address the general public with some of these permutations of feminism, such as a reference to postfeminism on the dramatic teen television series Dawson’s Creek or in a People magazine article. These media outlets are able to distribute their messages widely, but rarely acknowledge the signi® cance of invoking a term such as postfeminism or describe its meaning to readers unfamiliar with theoretical debates. Such confusion over terminology may signify one of the key obstacles facing feminist advances at the dawn of the 21st century, but despite terminological confusion, feminism remains a vital perspective for recognizing and addressing contemporary oppressions and inequities (see Sarah Gamble 1999). This theoretical confusion over what one means when invoking the term feminism results mainly from evolution in the theoretical perspectives and the lived experiences of women since the height of second-wave feminism. Such change and development is only to be expected. For feminist media scholars, not only have the theories changed, but so too have the objects of study. For many years academic analyses of feminist representations focused on the a new womano character type, with US critics commenting most expansively upon Mary Richards of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. But feminist critics writing on the television characters and programs emerging at the end of the 1990s need new tools and perspectives to explain US television phenomena such as Xena: Warrior Princess (1995± ), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997± ), Ally McBeal (1997± ), Sex in the

Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television

Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television pushes understandings of the business of television to keep pace with the considerable technological change of the last decade. It explains why shows such as Orange is the New Black or Transparent are indeed television despite coming to screens over internet connection and in exchange for a monthly fee. It explores how internet-distributed television is able to do new things – particularly allow different people to watch different shows chosen from a library of possibilities. This technological ability consequently allows new audience behaviors and new norms in making television.

Toward Ethical Cyberspace Audience Research: Strategies for Using the Internet for Television Audience Studies

This article examines the possibilities for qualitative audience study afforded by the Internet, carefully detailing both the benefits and dangers o f such research. In answer to methodological issues resulting from online communication with subjects, the essay calls for the application o f various feminist and anthropological methodological practices, and considers methodological dilemmas related to perceived privacy, natural data and lurking, informed consent procedures, balancing anonymity, and data accessibility. In the course o f outlining methodological considerations especially salient when finding audiences through Internet spaces, we reflect on our own dilemmas in designing studies that meet the ethical standards of feminist methodology.

What Is U.S. Television Now

This article explores the institutional adjustments that have altered the operation of the U.S. television industry over the past twenty years. The author first chronicles those industrial norms that characterized television during its “network era” (1952 to mid-1980s) and upon which most ideas about the role of television in society are based. She then explores the ways in which adjustments in technologies, industrial formations, governmental policies, practices of looking, and textual formations have redefined the norms of television in the United States since the mid-1980s. Analysis of the shifts in the institutional and cultural functions of television reveals the articulations between the dominant industrial practices and the forms, texts, and cultural role of the medium. Such a conception of shifts of the medium allows us to understand recent changes as an evolution of this central cultural medium rather than its demise.

Beyond prime time: Television programming in the post-network era

The death knell for the nightly network newscast has been ringing for over twenty years now. Even seventeen years ago, in 1992, CBS Washington bureau chief Barbara Cohen noted, “It has become fashionable to predict the demise of network news in general and the evening news broadcasts in particular,” as she then added to the chorus she described while making some exceptions.1 Perhaps this phenomenon can be dated to an even earlier moment, but refrains forecasting the end began with considerable regularity by 1986, the year Fred W. Friendly, former president of CBS News and professor emeritus at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, publicly opined that, “Unless the networks make their product appreciably and dramatically superior, I doubt there’s much of a future for network news.”2 More than two decades later these newscasts remain on daily schedules, and arguably not as a result of the appreciable improvement he suggested. Since then, the newscasts, the networks, and even television-at-large has come to be challenged in ways these commentators could not have imagined...

How to spend

This article explores the relatively unstudied practice of the US ‘upfront’ buying process in which advertisers make multimillion-dollar commitments to buy 70 to 90 percent of the commercial time in the upcoming year in just a few days. Using observation of a media buying agency during the 2005 upfront buying period, attendance at a number of upfront presentations in 2003, and interviews with media buyers and planners, this article explains and analyzes the importance of the upfront buying process to the cultural production of the US television industry. I examine the causes of the durability of this significant economic practice, suggestions of its demise and its consequences for cultural production during a time of substantial industry reorganization. Access to industry workers and processes reveals important information about the actual operation of commercial media structures that add valuable insight to established understandings of economic practices.

9.3 billion in three days: examining the upfront buying process in the production of US television culture

Feminist study of media encompasses a variety of media forms, each of which possesses a distinct set of issues determined by the medium and how it is used, as well as by the variant theoretical and methodological traditions through which scholars have studied the medium. US feminist film and television criticism have maintained distinct methodological and theoretical emphases—yet the two areas of study are closely related. For example, feminist television studies developed from a synthesis of theoretical and methodological work in a range of fields, including feminist film criticism and theory, and remains at once connected to and distinct from feminist approaches to studying film...

Bridging media‐specific approaches

Across the industry, television underwent massive changes during the first years of the twenty-first century. Both the trade and popular press prognosticated loudly about the imminent death of this or that aspect of the medium, often reporting with unrestrained certainty of the revolution that the development of the moment (DVR, product placement, online video, etc.) would bring to the industry and by default, American culture. Such coverage nearly always excerpted the bright shiny object or development from the complicated and interconnected practices of the broader circuit of television production that variably might be affected, as if a change in a practice such as advertising would not too bring changes in production or distribution practices. The consequences of each new technology or shift in practice were inextricable from adjustments throughout the production process though, and the critical study of television required an approach that avoided the revolutionary prophesies of isolated “developments of the moment” and instead necessitated examining the interconnections among new technologies and practices. Such a situation warranted a production study of the television industry.

Industry-level studies and the contributions of Gitlin's Inside Prime Time

This article considers the ideological significance of homophobic discourse as part of a sophisticated interrogation of homophobic outlooks in the FX series Rescue Me. It posits that a variety of narrative features enable a strategy of “working through” in which characters’ frank conversations and evolving perspectives depict the process of experiencing ideological challenge. Working through emphasizes the need for scholars to fully explore the internally contradictory narratives that are characteristic of the increasing complexity of some television storytelling and defies norms of critical media analysis that argue particular media texts either reinforce or resist dominant ideology. Cogent examination of other instances of working through could reinvigorate stymied intellectual spaces by insisting that scholars consider characters’ process of struggle with ideological perspectives throughout the unfolding of a series.

Working Through as Ideological Intervention: The Case of Homophobia in Rescue me

As critical thinkers, it is our nature to take stock of our surroundings. For academics, this often means assessing the state of one’s field, and in communication and media research, this typically requires an assessment of whether a field yet exists. Corner’s query reanimates a discussion that dates back at least as far as the 1983 special issue of Journal of Communication that has become canonical as a milestone in the field despite the massive changes taking place since. Here we respond with a rejoinder meant to echo the playful yet provocative tone Corner sets forth. After all, it is not the question of whether there is a field or the answer that is nearly as interesting as the evidence put forth to persuade. Thus, if we are to meaningfully engage Corner’s query of “whether there is a ‘field’ of media research,” we might first consider what is at stake in posing this question, and then consider the alternative: what it would mean not to be a field. To begin with, any discussion of media studies should acknowledge that we arrived late (and continue to arrive late) in academia, and that tardiness regularly requires us to remind people we’re here and why we and our object of study matters. Departments and degrees in media studies didn’t exist 40 years ago, and still don’t exist in many universities. Consequently, we haven’t had the time to sink our roots deep into institutional structures to the same extent as have “older” departments such as English, Sociology, and History. We are still not part of the hegemonic common sense of a university, in other words, and, more disturbingly, the study of media and their roles in society is not yet seen as something in which every university worth its salt should be engaging. Many university administrations, funding bodies, and helicopter parents are not inclined to support us – indeed, we have had bad press, and to some we represent a surrender of the humanities to populism, trash, and the cult of now. And so a great deal is at stake in insisting that the study of media matters, not as a side note, a singular specialization of a solitary department member and her lone course on