A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
Elana Levine traces the slow pace of social change on 1970s sitcoms, exploring the connections between MTM, Maude, One Day at a Time, Alice, Charlie’s Angels, and Wonder Woman.
Read moreJane Feuer looks back on what The Mary Tyler Moore Show meant to her as a college student and then as a television scholar.
Read moreEmily Hoffman discusses the ways in which The Mary Tyler Moore Show demonstrates the possible messiness of motherhood and daughterhood without relying on sitcom conventions.
Read moreRemembering Mary Tyler Moore, Gerald Walton addresses the personal possibilities and pitfalls of identifying with the character of Mary Richards from a queer perspective.
Read moreJennifer Fogel explores an often overlooked aspect of Mary Richards’ personality: her vulnerability. Mary waffled, wobbled, and “made it on her own”–a lesson still valuable to contemporary viewers.
Read moreAlexis Carreiro explores Ghostbusters‘s (2016) deployment of a queef joke in relation to the gendered history of fart jokes and the feminist implications of and social strictures against women making noise, both bodily and politically.
Read moreIn her contribution to the Flow Special Issue on Loop Media, S. Topiary Landberg argues for the benefits and potentials of loop narratives and circular forms as a productive alternative to dominant linear logics; where she sees such linear narratives and modes as patriarchal, controlling, and predetermined, loops provide for the expression of “experiences of change and growth to be inclusive and fundamentally non-combative and non-competitive.”
Read moreWhitten Overby continues his explorations of the intersections of architecture, technology, and gender in AMC’s Mad Men, this time through the lenses of Futurism, car travel, and the sprawling Los Angeles cityscape.
Read moreWhitten Overby argues that the modern architectural spaces and sets in AMC’s Mad Men assert white, patriarchal ideologies that challenge feminist readings of the show and illustrate the show’s shortcomings in exploring issues of racial discrimination.
Read moreBigoted Brother 1, Forgotten Sisters
by: Kim Akass and Janet McCabe
Sanctifying sexism as long as your target is a racist – this article explores the sexist discourse surrounding media coverage of the recent “race row” on the UK show Celebrity Big Brother and the controversial figure of Jade Goody.
“Big Man on Campus Ladies”
by: Walter Metz / Montana State University
Metz discusses the Oxygen TV show Campus Ladies and the so-called outrageous collegiate lives, the politicization of academia and the “vitriol reserved at this moment of American culture for professors.”
Playboy Feminism? Hugh Hefner and The Girls Next Door
by: Moya Luckett / New York University
The Girls Next Door plays with significant ideological contradictions as it tries to address the prevailing popularity of the Playboy bunny image with a new generation of women while trying to remove any taint of sexual exploitation from its girls.