Screening Gender

Screening Gender on Children’s Television offers readers insights into the transformations taking place in the presentation of gender portrayals in television productions aimed at younger audiences. It goes far beyond a critical analysis of the existing portrayals of gender and culture by sharing media professionals’ action-oriented recommendations for change that would promote gender equity, social diversity and the wellbeing of children. Incorporating the author’s interviews with 135 producers of children’s television from 65 countries, this book discusses the role television plays in the lives of young people and, more specifically, in developing gender identity. It examines how gender images presented to children on television are intertwined with important existential and cultural concerns that occupy the social agenda worldwide, including the promotion of education for girls, prevention of HIV/AIDS and domestic violence and caring for ‘neglected’ boys who lack healthy masculine role models, as well as confronting the pressures of the beauty myth. Screening Gender on Children’s Television also explores how children’s television producers struggle to portray issues such as sex/sexuality and the preservation of local cultures in a profit-driven market which continually strives to reinforce gender segregation. The author documents pro-active attempts by producers to advance social change, illustrating how television can serve to provide positive, empowering images for children around the world. Screening Gender on Children’s Television is an accessible text which will appeal to a wide audience of media practitioners as well as students and scholars. It will be useful on a range of courses, including popular culture, gender, television and media studies. Researchers will also be interested in the breadth of this cross-cultural study and its interviewing methodology.

Screening Gender on Children’s Television offers readers insights into the transformations taking place in the presentation of gender portrayals in television productions aimed at younger audiences. It goes far beyond a critical analysis of the existing portrayals of gender and culture by sharing media professionals’ action-oriented recommendations for change that would promote gender equity, social diversity and the wellbeing of children. Incorporating the author’s interviews with 135 producers of children’s television from 65 countries, this book discusses the role television plays in the lives of young people and, more specifically, in developing gender identity. It examines how gender images presented to children on television are intertwined with important existential and cultural concerns that occupy the social agenda worldwide, including the promotion of education for girls, prevention of HIV/AIDS and domestic violence and caring for ‘neglected’ boys who lack healthy masculine role models, as well as confronting the pressures of the beauty myth. Screening Gender on Children’s Television also explores how children’s television producers struggle to portray issues such as sex/sexuality and the preservation of local cultures in a profit-driven market which continually strives to reinforce gender segregation. The author documents pro-active attempts by producers to advance social change, illustrating how television can serve to provide positive, empowering images for children around the world. Screening Gender on Children’s Television is an accessible text which will appeal to a wide audience of media practitioners as well as students and scholars. It will be useful on a range of courses, including popular culture, gender, television and media studies. Researchers will also be interested in the breadth of this cross-cultural study and its interviewing methodology.

Examines the history and theory of films adapted from Canadian literature through the lens of gender studies. This study offers readings of works by well-known Canadian authors such as Margaret Atwood, Marie-Claire Blais, and Michael Ondaatje, and by important Canadian filmmakers such as Mireille Dansereau, Claude Jutra, and Bruce McDonald.

When adapting Shakespeare's comedies, cinema and television have to address the differences and incompatibilities between early modern gender constructs and contemporary cultural, social, and political contexts. Screening Gender in Shakespeare’s Comedies: Film and Television Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century analyzes methods employed by cinema and television in approaching those aspects of Shakespeare's comedies, indicating a range of ways in which adaptations made in the twenty-first century approach the problems of cultural and social normativity, gender politics, stereotypes of femininity and masculinity, the dynamic of power relations between men and women, and social roles of men and women. This book discusses both mainstream cinematic productions, such as Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice or Julie Taymor's The Tempest, and more low-key adaptations, such as Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It and Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, as well as the three comedies of BBC ShakespeaRe-Told miniseries: Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. This book examines how the analyzed films deal with elements of Shakespeare's comedies that appear subversive, challenging, or offensive to today's culture, and how they interpret or update gender issues to reconcile Shakespeare with contemporary cultural norms. By exploring tensions and negotiations between early modern and present-day gender politics, the book defines the prevailing attitudes of recent adaptations in relation to those issues, and identifies the most popular strategies of accommodating early modern constructs for contemporary audiences.

Screening Scarlett Johansson: Gender, Genre, Stardom provides an account of Johansson’s persona, work and stardom, extending from her breakout roles in independent cinema, to contemporary blockbusters, to her self-parodying work in science-fiction. Screening Scarlett Johansson is more than an account of Johansson’s career; it positions Johansson as a point of reference for interrogating how femininity, sexuality, identity and genre play out through a contemporary woman star and the textual manipulations of her image. The chapters in this collection cast a critical eye over the characters Johansson has portrayed, the personas she has inhabited, and how the two intersect and influence one another. They draw out the multitude of meanings generated through and inherent to her performances, specifically looking at processes of transformation, metamorphosis and self-deconstruction depicted in her work.

This book analyzes how twenty-first century film adaptations of Shakespeare's comedies interpret gender-related concepts of their source texts. Examining the negotiations between early modern and contemporary gender politics, Cieślak identifies the main strategies of accommodating early modern gender constructs for today's audiences.

Health is a gendered concept in Western cultures. Customarily it is associated with strength in men and beauty in women. This gendered concept was transmitted through visual representations of the ideal female and male bodies, and ubiquitous media images resulted in the absorption of universal standards of beauty and health and generalized desires to achieve them. Today, genuine or self-styled experts—from physicians to newspaper columnists to advertisers—offer advice on achieving optimal health. Topics in this collection are wide ranging and include childbirth advice in Victorian Australia and Cold War America, menstruation films, Canadian abortion tourism, the Pap smear, the Body Worlds exhibition, and fat liberation. Masculinity is explored among drunkards in antebellum Philadelphia and family memoirs during the 1980s AIDS epidemic. Seemingly objective public health advisories are shown to be as influenced by commercial interests, class, gender, and other social differentiations as marketing approaches are, and the message presented is mediated to varying degrees by those receiving it. This book will be of interest to scholars in women’s studies, health studies, marketing, media studies, social history and anthropology, and popular culture.