Full Description
This timely, necessary collection of essays provides feminist analyses of a recession-era media culture characterized by the reemergence and refashioning of familiar gender tropes, including crisis masculinity, coping women, and postfeminist self-renewal. Interpreting media forms as diverse as reality television, financial journalism, novels, lifestyle blogs, popular cinema, and advertising, the contributors reveal gendered narratives that recur across media forms too often considered in isolation from one another. They also show how, with a few notable exceptions, recession-era popular culture promotes affective normalcy and transformative individual enterprise under duress while avoiding meaningful critique of the privileged white male or the destructive aspects of Western capitalism. By acknowledging the contradictions between political rhetoric and popular culture, and between diverse screen fantasies and lived realities, Gendering the Recession helps to make sense of our postboom cultural moment.
Contributors. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Hamilton Carroll, Hannah Hamad, AnikÓ Imre, Suzanne Leonard, Isabel Molina-GuzmÁn, SinÉad Molony, Elizabeth Nathanson, Diane Negra, Tim Snelson, Yvonne Tasker, Pamela Thoma
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Gender and Recessionary Culture / Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker 1
1. Escaping the Recession? The New Vitality of the Woman Worker / Suzanne Leonard 31
2. "Latina Wisdom" in "Postrace" Recession Media / Isabel Molina-Guzmán 59
3. "We Are All Workers": Economic Crisis, Masculinity, and the American Working Class / Sarah Banet-Weiser 81
4. What Julia Knew: Domestic Labor in the Recession-Era Chick Flick / Pamela Thoma 107
5. Dressed for Economic Distress: Blogging and the "New" Pleasure of Fashion / Elizabeth Nathanson 136
6. The (Re)possession of the American Home: Negative Equity, Gender Inequality, and the Housing Crisis Horror Story / Tim Snelson 161
7. House and Home: Structuring Absences in Post-Celtic Tiger Documentary / Sinéad Molony 181
8. "Stuck between Meanings": Recession-Era Print Fictions of Crisis Masculinity / Hamilton Carroll 203
9. Fairy Jobmother to the Rescue: Postfeminism and the Recessionary Cultures of Reality TV / Hannah Hamad 223
10. How Long Can the Party Last? Gendering the European Crisis on Reality TV / Anikó Imre 246
Bibliography 273
Contributors 299
Index 303
