Television talk shows have fueled debates about television's faltering role as a medium for social interaction, but this book points out that many viewers don't just absorb the shows; they react to them and even talk back to their televisions. By observing and analyzing the daily viewing habits of a dozen women viewers, Helen Wood interprets these experiences as daily rituals of self-reflexivity, focusing on the performance of gender as a doubling of place in contemporary conditions of modernity. Directly challenging the fundamental assumption that new media forms are uniquely interactive,...

The unremitting explosion of reality television across the schedules has become a sustainable global phenomenon generating considerable popular and political fervour. The zeal with which television executives seize on the easily replicated formats is matched equally by the eagerness of audiences to offer themselves up as television participants for others to watch and criticise. But how do we react to so many people breaking down, fronting up, tearing apart, dominating, empathising, humiliating, and seemingly laying bare their raw emotion for our entertainment? Do we feel sad when others are...

Liz has a quiet determination to overcome the obstacles that have beset her with the collapse of her husband's property business when the economic climate drastically struck. She has many new hurdles to surmount before she finds happiness, but through it all is still the lovely warm hearted girl.

Liz has a quiet determination to overcome the obstacles that have beset her with the collapse of her husband's property business when the economic climate drastically struck. She has many new hurdles to surmount before she finds happiness, but through it all is still the lovely warm hearted girl.

How does class get 'cast' and made performative? What modes are there for people to wrestle-back their forms of representation? And how should we understand this intense manipulation of feeling? This bookexamines why class politics matter against much political and academic rhetoric which refract inequality through other means.

Television for Women brings together emerging and established scholars to reconsider the question of television for women . In the context of the 2000s, when the potential meanings of both terms have expanded and changed so significantly, in what ways might the concept of programming, addressed explicitly to a group identified by gender, still matter?

The essays in this collection take the existing scholarship in this field in significant new directions. They expand its reach in terms of territory (looking beyond, for example, the paradigmatic Anglo-American axis) and also...

Television for Women brings together emerging and established scholars to reconsider the question of television for women . In the context of the 2000s, when the potential meanings of both terms have expanded and changed so significantly, in what ways might the concept of programming, addressed explicitly to a group identified by gender, still matter?

The essays in this collection take the existing scholarship in this field in significant new directions. They expand its reach in terms of territory (looking beyond, for example, the paradigmatic Anglo-American axis) and also...