Zoë Druick

Dialogic Absurdity TV News Parody as a Critique of Genre

This article examines the popular phenomenon of news parodies using the concept of genre. While genre is often used as a category of industrial production and marketing, the author argues that Mikhail Bakhtins notion of genre as a socially embedded aesthetic form allows us to understand the proliferation of news parodies as a commentary on the social authority of the news. Comparing examples from Canada, the UK, and the United States, the article argues that the political significance of intertextual social communication resides in the doubleness of texts that ask an audience to recognize the problems of official forms of culture while simultaneously possibly reinscribing their dominance. The article offers a comparison of shows that merely parody the news with those that actually satirize politics, and ends with a discussion of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and their particular significance as daily news parodies.

Haunted houses: Gender and property television after the financial crisis:

This special issue includes six essays that consider the gendered dimensions of property television in the UK, Canada and the US as they have emerged since the financial crises of 2008.

Property TV: Financialized femininity and new forms of domestic labour

This article argues that melodrama plays an important role in shaping the ambivalent narratives of property TV. Using the HGTV Canada show Buy Herself as a case study, the article considers the rise of what amounts to a new women’s genre as an attempt to frame and contain gendered experiences of the financialization of the domestic sphere. Positioning the show within neoliberalism’s faux feminism and superficial discourse of diversity, the article posits that the focus on the melodramatic struggles of real estate buyers in the reality genre of property TV brings to the fore anxieties and contradictions incited by the neoliberal imperatives to reframe the domestic sphere as real estate investment and normalize debt.