Synopses & Reviews
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, Anikandoacute; Imre, Suzanne Leonard, Isabel Molina-Guzmandaacute;n, Sinandeacute;ad Molony, Elizabeth Nathanson, Diane Negra, Tim Snelson, Yvonne Tasker, Pamela Thoma
and#160;
Review
andquot;Gendering the Recession is a must-read. Essays referencing topics such as fashion blogs and thrift practices, housing and home ownership, domestic labor, unemployment, family breakdown, and so on keep the material conditions and lived experience of the recession at the fore.andquot;
Review
andldquo;The new anthology
Gendering the Recession offers a look at the marked resurgence of gender roles, assumptions, and imperatives that characterized this time, with smart analyses of how gender impacted branding and marketingandhellip;. The essays are united in their well-stated indictment of journalistic rhetoric that infantilizes the underemployed, particularly those who are male. While the timespan and subject matter covered by
Gendering the Recession is severe and bleak, the writing here is far from it.andrdquo;
Review
andquot;As the global economic crisis takes new shape, there could be no more timely and telling a contribution to understanding it than this powerful volume. Drawing on some of the best analysts in cultural studies, it emphasizes the necessity of a gendered lens if we are to make sense of the times we live in.andquot;andmdash;Toby Miller
Review
andquot; . . . the book, with its feminist analyses of a recession-era media culture, will be particularly useful to students and faculty interested in the sociology of media, gender studies, womenand#39;s studies, and communication . . . Highly recommended.andquot;
Review
andquot;On the whole, Gendering the Recession is a well-researched, well-edited and well-timed book that invites the reader to consider why women are still struggling economically compared to men....Diverse topic areas, focusing not only on different classes, but on different nations and ethnicities, give the study depth and relevance. This is particularly welcome as too often, questions of gender concern the socio-economic elite. The book is surprisingly readable and contains entertaining analyses of television shows.andquot;
Review
andldquo;If it is not yet clear what a more economically minded, andlsquo;anti-capitalistandrsquo; approach to the feminist analysis of popular media culture might look like, Gendering the Recession is of value both for the quality of the readings it collects and for the extent to which it crystallises the challenges that persist.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;The significant contribution of this volume is that the authors are able to connect the various themes of gender and the recession across a variety of media sites. . . . It is a challenge in any edited volume to ensure that the chapters connect with each other to build and support a coherent argument, and this challenge was successfully met in this book. This volume will appeal to scholars and students alikeandmdash;particularly advanced undergraduate and graduate classes across the social sciences and humanities.andrdquo;
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.