Description
This book examines the multiple ways that popular media mainstream and reinforce neoliberal ideology, exposing how they promote neoliberalism窶冱 underlying ideas, values and beliefs so as to naturalize inequality, undercut democracy and contribute to the collapse of social notions of community and the common good.
Covering a wide range of media and genres, and adopting a variety of qualitative textual methodologies and theoretical frameworks, the chapters examine diverse topics, from news coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the NBC show Superstore (an atypical instance in which a TV show, for one brief season, challenged the central tenets of neoliberalism) to "kitchen porn." The book also takes an intersectional approach, as contributors explore how gender, race, class and other aspects of social identity are inextricably tied to each other within media representation. At once innovative and distinctive in its illustration of how the media is complicit in perpetuating neoliberal ideology, Neoliberalism and the Media offers students and scholars alike an incisive portrait of the intersection between media and ideology today.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Notes on Contributors
PART I: Where We Are and How We Got Here
1 Neoliberalism and the Media: History and Context
Marian Meyers
PART II: Corporations and Markets
2 Reality TV 窶廨ets Real窶�: Hypercommercialism and Post-Truth in CNN窶冱 Coverage of the 2016 Election Campaign
Liane Tanguay
3 The Girl Effect: Philanthrocapitalism and the Branded Marketplace of Philanthropic Governance
Dana Schowalter
4 Neoliberalism and Women窶冱 Right to Communicate: The Politics of Ownership and Voice in Media
Carolyn M. Byerly
PART III: Responsibility and Choice
5 Numinous Fortune and Holy Money: Dave Ramsey窶冱 Cruel Optimism
John Ike Sewell
6 From Homo Economicus to Homo Sacer: Neoliberalism and the Thanatopolitics of The Meth Project
Michael F. Walker
7 As American as Capitalist Exploitation: Neoliberalism in The Men Who Built America
Christopher M. Duerringer
PART IV: Consumers and Advertising
8 Affirmative Advertising and the Mediated Feeling Rules of Neoliberalism
Rosalind Gill and Akane Kanai
9 Kitchen Porn: Of Consumerist Fantasies and Desires
C. Wesley Buerkle
PART V: Identity and Representation
10 窶廬 Deserved to Get Knocked Up窶�: Sex, Class and Latinidad in Jane the Virgin
John S. Quinn-Puerta
11 An Intersectional Analysis of Controlling Images and Neoliberal Meritocracy on Scandal and Empire
Cheryl Thompson
12 Doing Whiteness 窶彝ight窶�: Playing by the Rules of Neoliberalism for Television窶冱 Working Class
Holly Willson Holladay
13 Negotiating Identity and Working Class Struggles in NBC窶冱 Superstore
Lauren Bratslavsky
Index