Television for Women brings together emerging and established scholars to reconsider the question of ‘television for women’. In the context of the 2000s, when the potential meanings of both terms have expanded and changed so significantly, in what ways might the concept of programming, addressed explicitly to a group identified by gender still matter? The essays in this collection take the existing scholarship in this field in significant new directions. They expand its reach in terms of territory (looking beyond, for example, the paradigmatic Anglo-American axis) and also historical span. Additionally, whilst the influential methodological formation of production, text and audience is still visible here, the new research in Television for Women frequently reconfigures that relationship. The topics included here are far-reaching; from television as material culture at the British exhibition in the first half of the twentieth century, women’s roles in television production past and present, to popular 1960s television such as The Liver Birds and, in the twenty-first century, highly successful programmes including Orange is the New Black, Call the Midwife, One Born Every Minute and Wanted Down Under. This book presents ground-breaking research on historical and contemporary relationships between women and television around the world and is an ideal resource for students of television, media and gender studies.

Women's inclinations to identify with television characters varies with their assessment of the realism of these characters and their social world.

In this book an international team of contributors examines critically the relationship between television and women's culture. Although they recognize that television frequently distorts and oppresses women's experience, the authors avoid a simplistic manipulative view of the media. Instead they show how and why such different genres as game shows, police fiction and soap opera offer women opportunities for negotiation of their own meanings and their own aesthetic appreciation. Not for sale in Australia or New Zealand.

Study conducted at the Patna Municipal Corporation area of Patna town in Bihar State, India.

"The focus of Women Television Producers is upon a new cadre of women producers, who, as a result of rulings by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission in the early seventies, found employment in the three major networks beginning in 1971-72. In the following decade many of them emerged as television producers and writers."--BOOK JACKET.

Fusing audience research and ethnography, the book presents a compelling account of women’s changing lives and identities in relation to the impact of the most popular media culture in everyday life: television. Within the historically-specific social conditions of Korean modernity, Youna Kim analyzes how Korean women of varying age and class group cope with the new environment of changing economical structure and social relations. The book argues that television is an important resource for women, stimulating them to research their own lives and identities. Youna Kim reveals Korean women as creative, energetic and critical audiences in their responses to evolving modernity and the impact of the West. Based on original empirical research, the book explores the hopes, aspirations, frustrations and dilemmas of Korean women as they try to cope with life beyond traditional grounds. Going beyond the traditional Anglo-American view of media and culture, this text will appeal to students and scholars of both Korean area studies and media and communications studies.

Contemporary cultural theory, feminist criticism, and ethnography converge in this provocative study of the construction of meaning in mass culture. Television Culture and Women's Lives explores the complex relationship between the gender conflicts played out in the scripts of the popular television show thirtysomething and the real-life conflicts experienced by "baby-boomer" women viewers. Women viewers often reinterpreted the program's conservative view on gender roles, seeing it instead as a protest against real dilemmas women face as they try to integrate career and family priorities. Heide's study confirms women viewers' close identifications with thirtysomething characters and positions audience responses against the backdrop of changes in the lives of women in the 1980s and 1990s. Television Culture and Women's Lives accessibly treats fascinating issues related to cultural criticism, the relationship between mass media, and audiences, and the struggles faced by women in late twentieth-century America.

This book critically analyzes the portrayals of Black women in current reality television. Audiences are presented with a multitude of images of Black women fighting, arguing, and cursing at one another in this manufactured world of reality television. This perpetuation of negative, insidious racial and gender stereotypes influences how the U.S. views Black women. This stereotyping disrupts the process in which people are able to appreciate cultural and gender difference. Instead of celebrating the diverse symbols and meaning making that accompanies Black women's discourse and identities, reality television scripts an artificial or plastic image of Black women that reinforces extant stereotypes. This collection's contributors seek to uncover examples in reality television shows where instantiations of Black women's gendered, racial, and cultural difference is signified and made sinister.

Profiles such notable women as Lucille Ball, Faye Emerson, Betty Furness, Lucy Jarvis, Ida Lupino, and Betty White

Branded Women in U.S. Television examines how The Real Housewives of New York City, Martha Stewart, and other female entrepreneurs create branded televised versions of the iconic U.S. housewife. Using their television presence to establish and promote their own product lines, including jewelry, cookware, clothing, and skincare, they become the primary physical representations of these brands. While their businesses are serious and seriously lucrative, especially reality television enables a certain representational flexibility that allows participants to create campy and sometimes tongue-in-cheek personas. Peter Bjelskou explores their innovative branding strategies, specifically the complex relationships between their entrepreneurial endeavors and their physical bodies, attires, tastes, and personal histories. Generally these branded women speak volumes about their contemporaneous political environments, and this book illustrates how they, and many other women in U.S. television history, are indicative of larger societal trends and structures.