Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity

This timely, necessary collection of essays provides feminist analyses of a recession-era media culture characterized by the reemergence and refashioning of familiar gender tropes, including crisis masculinity, coping women, and postfeminist self-renewal. Interpreting media forms as diverse as reality television, financial journalism, novels, lifestyle blogs, popular cinema, and advertising, the contributors reveal gendered narratives that recur across media forms too often considered in isolation from one another. They also show how, with a few notable exceptions, recession-era popular culture promotes affective normalcy and transformative individual enterprise under duress while avoiding meaningful critique of the privileged white male or the destructive aspects of Western capitalism. By acknowledging the contradictions between political rhetoric and popular culture, and between diverse screen fantasies and lived realities, Gendering the Recession helps to make sense of our postboom cultural moment.

Contributors. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Hamilton Carroll, Hannah Hamad, Anik Imre, Suzanne Leonard, Isabel Molina-Guzm n, Sin ad Molony, Elizabeth Nathanson, Diane Negra, Tim Snelson, Yvonne Tasker, Pamela Thoma


Author: Diane Negra
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 03/28/2014
Pages: 307
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 9.14h x 5.99w x 0.77d
ISBN: 9780822356967

Review Citation(s):
Choice 09/01/2014 pg. 124

About the Author
Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture and Head of Film Studies at University College Dublin.

Yvonne Tasker is Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of East Anglia.

Negra and Tasker are the coeditors of Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, also published by Duke University Press.