Lisa Parks

Elana Levine

DIVCritical studies of the popular television show, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER./div

Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Undead TV

Media expansion into the digital realm and the continuing segregation of users into niches has led to a proliferation of cultural products targeted to and consumed by women. Though often dismissed as frivolous or excessively emotional, feminized culture in reality offers compelling insights into the American experience of the early twenty-first century. Elana Levine brings together writings from feminist critics that chart the current terrain of feminized pop cultural production. Analyzing everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to Pinterest to pregnancy apps, contributors examine the economic, technological, representational, and experiential dimensions of products and phenomena that speak to, and about, the feminine. As these essays show, the imperative of productivity currently permeating feminized pop culture has created a generation of texts that speak as much to women's roles as public and private workers as to an impulse for fantasy or escape. Incisive and compelling, Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn sheds new light on contemporary women's engagement with an array of media forms in the context of postfeminist culture and neoliberalism.

Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century

Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn

DIVA cultural history of sexual content in television shows and TV advertising during the 1970s./div

The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television

Wallowing in Sex

Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History

Her Stories

Since the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic, creative, technological, social, and cultural institution. In Her Stories, Elana Levine draws on archival research and her experience as a longtime soap fan to provide an in-depth history of the daytime television soap opera as a uniquely gendered cultural form and a central force in the economic and social influence of network television. Closely observing the production, promotion, reception, and narrative strategies of the soaps, Levine examines two intersecting developments: the role soap operas have played in shaping cultural understandings of gender and the rise and fall of broadcast network television as a culture industry. In so doing, she foregrounds how soap operas have revealed changing conceptions of gender and femininity as imagined by and reflected on the television screen.

Passengers disco dancing in The Love Boat’s Acapulco Lounge. A young girl walking by a marquee advertising Deep Throat in the made-for-TV movie Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway. A frustrated housewife borrowing Orgasm and You from her local library in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Commercial television of the 1970s was awash with references to sex. In the wake of the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation and gay rights movements, significant changes were rippling through American culture. In representing—or not representing—those changes, broadcast television provided a crucial forum through which Americans alternately accepted and contested momentous shifts in sexual mores, identities, and practices. Wallowing in Sex is a lively analysis of the key role of commercial television in the new sexual culture of the 1970s. Elana Levine explores sex-themed made-for-TV movies; female sex symbols such as the stars of Charlie’s Angels and Wonder Woman; the innuendo-driven humor of variety shows (The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, Laugh-In), sitcoms (M*A*S*H, Three’s Company), and game shows (Match Game); and the proliferation of rape plots in daytime soap operas. She also uncovers those sexual topics that were barred from the airwaves. Along with program content, Levine examines the economic motivations of the television industry, the television production process, regulation by the government and the tv industry, and audience responses. She demonstrates that the new sexual culture of 1970s television was a product of negotiation between producers, executives, advertisers, censors, audiences, performers, activists, and many others. Ultimately, 1970s television legitimized some of the sexual revolution’s most significant gains while minimizing its more radical impulses.

"HER STORIES provides an in-depth history of the production and reception of the daytime soap opera in the U.S. It offers a detailed view of the genre's life span-from its move from radio to television in the middle of the 20th century to its supposed demise (but continued afterlife) in the beginning of the 21st century. Soap operas have traditionally been considered a women's genre and thus marginal to the formation of television industry. Elana Levine reclaims the foundational role of soap operas in US television history. Levine begins by tracing how soap opera transitioned from a radio to a TV genre from the 1940s through the 1960s, focusing on how the American TV industry used the genre to hone TV production and storytelling techniques, as well as to develop the medium's commercial viability. With viewers imagined as white middle-class housewives, soaps interrogated stories of family life and marriage, purporting to serve as therapy for women struggling to cope with their home lives. Levine shows how early soaps offered real recognition of the challenges and dissatisfactions of the heterosexual nuclear family ideal, but failed to connect that unhappiness to structural forces. Next, the book turns to the boom years of daytime soaps on US broadcast network television, from the 1960s through the 1980s. Early soaps had been funded by a single sponsor-owner-for example, Procter & Gamble-but the rising popularity of daytime soaps allowed for experimentation with other funding models: ABC's first soap, General Hospital, was funded by participation advertising, which left more editorial power in the hands of the network. This then altered the relationship between soap writers and broadcast networks, allowing for technological shifts, evolving visual and audial norms, new narrative strategies-including comedy and recapping-and greater representation and engagement with social issues. Finally, Levine examines the slow decline of soaps from the 1980s to today. Shifting notions of the imagined audience for soaps, as well as changing technologies for recording and watching TV, have led the industry to cast soap audiences in derogatory gendered, raced, and classed terms-old, low-income, and non-white, and therefore undesirable for advertisers. Levine argues that, desperate for viewers, soaps in the 2000s turned to exploitative treatment of social difference in a way that, for her, undermines the genre's history. HER STORIES is accessibly written and will appeal to scholars and students in TV and media studies, women's studies, American studies, and cultural studies"--

Michael Z Newman

Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status explores how and why television is gaining a new level of cultural respectability in the 21st century. Once looked down upon as a "plug-in drug" offering little redeeming social or artistic value, television is now said to be in a creative renaissance, with critics hailing the rise of Quality series such as Mad Men and 30 Rock. Likewise, DVDs and DVRs, web video, HDTV, and mobile devices have shifted the longstanding conception of television as a household appliance toward a new understanding of TV as a sophisticated, high-tech gadget. Newman and Levine argue that television’s growing prestige emerges alongside the convergence of media at technological, industrial, and experiential levels. Television is permitted to rise in respectability once it is connected to more highly valued media and audiences. Legitimation works by denigrating "ordinary" television associated with the past, distancing the television of the present from the feminized and mass audiences assumed to be inherent to the "old" TV. It is no coincidence that the most validated programming and technologies of the convergence era are associated with a more privileged viewership. The legitimation of television articulates the medium with the masculine over the feminine, the elite over the mass, reinforcing cultural hierarchies that have long perpetuated inequalities of gender and class. Legitimating Television urges readers to move beyond the question of taste—whether TV is "good" or "bad"—and to focus instead on the cultural, political, and economic issues at stake in television’s transformation in the digital age.

Media Convergence and Cultural Status

Legitimating Television

When the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired in 2003, fans mourned the death of the hit television series. Yet the show has lived on through syndication, global distribution, DVD release, and merchandising, as well as in the memories of its devoted viewers. Buffy stands out from much entertainment television by offering sharp, provocative commentaries on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and youth. Yet it has also been central to changing trends in television production and reception. As a flagship show for two U.S. “netlets”—the WB and UPN—Buffy helped usher in the “post-network” era, and as the inspiration for an active fan base, it helped drive the proliferation of Web-based fan engagement. In Undead TV, media studies scholars tackle the Buffy phenomenon and its many afterlives in popular culture, the television industry, the Internet, and academic criticism. Contributors engage with critical issues such as stardom, gender identity, spectatorship, fandom, and intertextuality. Collectively, they reveal how a vampire television series set in a sunny California suburb managed to provide some of the most biting social commentaries on the air while exposing the darker side of American life. By offering detailed engagements with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s celebrity image, science-fiction fanzines, international and “youth” audiences, Buffy tie-in books, and Angel’s body, Undead TV shows how this prime-time drama became a prominent marker of industrial, social, and cultural change. Contributors. Ian Calcutt, Cynthia Fuchs, Amelie Hastie, Annette Hill, Mary Celeste Kearney, Elana Levine, Allison McCracken, Jason Middleton, Susan Murray, Lisa Parks

Elana Levine

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