Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary US Television (Screen Serialities)

The notion of seriality and serial identity performance runs as a strong undercurrent through much of the fields of gender studies, feminist theory and queer studies, although the explicit analysis of a serial enactment of gender is surprisingly rare. Whereas media studies and cultural studies-based seriality scholarship can often overlook gender as an ongoing process, this book defines gender as a serial and discursively produced, intersectional entanglement of different practices and agencies. It argues that serial storytelling offers such complex negotiations of identity that it is never adequate to consider the 'results' of televisual gender performances as separate from the processes that produce them. As such, gender performances are not restricted to individual television programmes themselves, but are also located in official paratexts, such as making-of documentaries, interviews with writers and actors, as well as in cultural sites like online viewer discussions, recaps and fan fiction. With case studies of series such as __Girls, How to Get Away With Murder__ and __The Walking Dead__, this book seeks to understand how gender as a practice is generated by television narratives in the overlapping of text, reception and production, and explores which viewer practices these narratives seek to trigger and draw on in the process. List of Figures 7 Acknowledgements 10 Introduction: Serial Genders, Gendered Serialities 14 Part I Serial TV Criticism and Girls 36 1 The Thinkpiece Seriality of Girls 38 2 Carousel: Gendering through Controversy 60 3 Navigating Discourses of Universality and Specificity: The (Feminist) Voice of a Generation? 81 Part II Television Audience Engagement and How to Get Away with Murder 102 4 The Looped Seriality of How to Get Away with Murder 104 5 Outward Spiral: Gendering through Recognisability 126 6 Evoking Discourses of Progressivism, Social Activism, and Identity Politics: Such an Important Episode! 147 Part III Television Authorship and The Walking Dead 164 7 The Paratext Seriality of The Walking Dead 166 8 Palimpsest: Gendering through Accountability 188 9 Neoliberalising Discourses of Serialised Survivalism: You Make It . . . Until You Don’t 208 Conclusion: Archiving Snapshots 228 Bibliography 238 Index 257 This book seeks to understand how gender as a practice is generated by television narratives in the overlapping of text, reception and production, and explores the viewer practices that these narratives seek to trigger and draw on in the process.