Archive - Topic - Gender and Media

[1] Lily Tomlin was perhaps at the peak of her mainstream fame and popularity in the 1970s and 80s. Her body of work at that time includes live performance, television, sound recording, and film. Prominent in all of these, her public persona was shaped mostly in the latter three arenas,...

[1] The discourse of feminism since at least the last two decades of the twentieth century has had to combat repeatedly questions of “conformity” and “happiness”: if feminism must work against patriarchy, must women reject, in full, every aspect of traditional femininity and domesticity, even heterosexual intimacy? if the feminist...

(part of a series in Special Issue #48: GOING CHEAP? Female Celebrity in Reality, Tabloid and Scandal Genres – Edited by DIANE NEGRA and SU HOLMES ) [1] What is it with female celebrities lately? While the good girl/bad girl categories of a ludicrously dichotomized cultural script of femininity have...

(part of a series in Special Issue #48: GOING CHEAP? Female Celebrity in Reality, Tabloid and Scandal Genres – Edited by DIANE NEGRA and SU HOLMES ) Introduction [1] From “outing” well known actors to breaking news of celebrity pregnancies or mental breakdowns, the gossip blog has become a key...

(part of a series in Special Issue #48: GOING CHEAP? Female Celebrity in Reality, Tabloid and Scandal Genres – Edited by DIANE NEGRA and SU HOLMES ) [1] 2007 was the year of the vagina. This word, which formerly maintained semi-taboo status—as either coldly clinical or uncomfortably explicit—circulated like never...

(part of a series in Special Issue #48: GOING CHEAP? Female Celebrity in Reality, Tabloid and Scandal Genres – Edited by DIANE NEGRA and SU HOLMES ) “Hi everyone, I’m Kerry. You probably think you know everything about me already, but don’t believe all that crap you read in the...

(part of a series in Special Issue #48: GOING CHEAP? Female Celebrity in Reality, Tabloid and Scandal Genres – Edited by DIANE NEGRA and SU HOLMES ) [1] Multiple accounts of reality television discuss its ability to make a celebrity out of anybody, to pluck an ordinary person out of...

“Redneck Aliens Take Over Trailer Park.” —Weekly World News (2006) [1] The gothic, a pan-media mode that migrated from novels to drama and poetry and then to film and television, has a long history of engaging the binary construction of gender and race as well as class (see, for instance,...

[1] A 1987 profile in Newsweek meditated on the unlikely early success of Danny DeVito in Hollywood: “DeVito has…becom[e] one of Hollywood’s hottest—and most unlikely—success stories. In a town of pretty-boy leading men, he has triumphed despite being typecast as five-foot and fiendish” (Reese, 72). An interviewer for Peopleregistered similar...

Bodies, stardom, narratives [1] The questions that compel this essay concern the relationship between bodies and narratives: the narratives available to certain bodies and the disruptive impact of those bodies on narratives. My focus is the embodiment of the spunky heroine of the romantic comedy film–the feisty screwball leading lady...