Full Description
Sitting prominently at the hearth of our homes, television serves as a voice of our modern time. Given our media-saturated society and television's prominent voice and place in the home, it is likely we learn about our society and selves through these stories. These narratives are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that shape and reflect the world and our role in it. Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation brings together a diverse group of scholars to investigate the role television plays in shaping our understanding of self and family. This edited collection's rich and diverse research demonstrates how television plays an important role in negotiating self, and goes far beyond the treacly "very special" episodes found in family sit-coms in the 1980s. Instead, the authors show how television reflects our reality and helps us to sort out what it means to be a twenty-first-century man or woman.
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
Kathleen M. Ryan & Deborah A. Macey
Part 1: The Electronic Hearth, or the (un)Real World
Chapter 2: The Way We Were: Ritual, Memory and Televsion
Leah A. Rosenberg
Chapter 3: Becoming-Spectator: Tracing Global Becoming Through Polish Television in a Canadian Family Room
Marcelina Piotrowski
Part 2: Father (and Mother) Knows Best
Chapter 4: As Seen On TV: Media Influences of Pregnancy and Birth Narratives
Jennifer G. Hall
Chapter 5: All About My HBO Mothers: Talking Back to Carmela Soprano and Ruth Fisher
Andrée E. C. Betancourt
Chapter 6: Mad Hatters: The Bad Dads of AMC
David Staton
Part 3: Family Ties
Chapter 7: Family Communication and Television: Viewing, Identification, and Evaluation of Televised Family Communication Models
Ellen E. Stiffler, Lynne M. Webb, and Amy C. Duvall
Chapter 8: Reality Check: Real Housewives and Fan Discourses on Parenting and Family
Jingsi Christina Wu and Brian McKernan
Chapter 9: Keeping Up with Contradictory Family Values: The Voice of the Kardashians
Amanda S. McClain
Part 4: The Facts of Life
Chapter 10: The Selling of Gender-Role Stereotyping: A Content Analysis of Toy Commercials Airing on Nickelodeon
Susan G. Kahlenberg
Chapter 11: "Stand by, Space Rangers": Interstellar Lessons in Early Cold-War Masculinity
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Chapter 12: The Avengers and Feminist Identity Development: Learning the Example of Critical Resistance from Cathy Gale
Robin Redmond Wright
Chapter 13: Juno for Real: Negotiating Teenage Sexuality, Pregnancy, and Love in MTV's 16 and Pregnant/Teen Mom
Tanja N. Aho.
Part 5: As Not Seen on TV
Chapter 14: Race, Aging and Gay In/visibility on U.S. Televsion
Michael Johnson, Jr.
Chapter 15: Eighty is Still Eighty, but Everyone Else Needs to Look Twenty-Five: The Fascination with Betty White Despite our Obsession with Youth
Deborah A. Macey
