'From Happy Homemaker to Desperate Housewives: Motherhood and Popular Television' is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to key debates concerning the representations of motherhood, motherwork and the maternal role in contemporary television programming. The volume looks at the construction of motherhood in the ostensibly female genre of soap opera; the mother as housewife in the domestic situation comedy; deviant, desiring and delinquent motherwork in the teen drama; the single working mother in the contemporary dramedy; the fragile and failing mother of reality parenting...

Unhomely Cinema explores how the unhomely nature of contemporary film narrative provides an insight into what it means to dwell in today s global societies. Drawing from Freud s concept of the uncanny that frightful and inexplicable experience of the home as foreign and strange the unhomely speaks to the spatial dislocation, transience, homelessness and disempowerment symptomatic of contemporary global societies.

While uncanny homes are traditionally associated with the science fiction and horror genres, Unhomely Cinema shows how an array of film genres from Michel Gondry s comedy...

Based on an extensive ethnographic study of television and audiences in class-divided Philippines, this is the first book to take a bottom-up approach in considering how people respond to images and narratives of suffering and poverty on television. Arguing for an anthropological ethics of media, this book challenges existing work in media studies and sociology that focuses solely on textual analysis and philosophical approaches to the question of representing vulnerable others. Current questions in media ethics, such as whether to portray sufferers as humane and empowered individuals or...