Synopses & Reviews
A reporter for the
Los Angeles Times once noted that “
I Love Lucy is said to be on the air somewhere in the world 24 hours a day.” That Lucys madcap antics can be watched anywhere at any time is thanks to television syndication, a booming global marketplace that imports and exports TV shows. Programs from different countries are packaged, bought, and sold all over the world, under the watch of an industry that is extraordinarily lucrative for major studios and production companies.
In Global TV, Denise D. Bielb and C. Lee Harrington seek to understand the machinery of this marketplace, its origins and history, its inner workings, and its product management. In so doing, they are led to explore the cultural significance of this global trade, and to ask how it is so remarkably successful despite the inherent cultural differences between shows and local audiences. How do culture-specific genres like American soap operas and Latin telenovelas so easily cross borders and adapt to new cultural surroundings? Why is The Nanny, whose gum-chewing star is from Queens, New York, a smash in Italy? Importantly, Bielby and Harrington also ask which kinds of shows fail. What is lost in translation? Considering such factors as censorship and other such state-specific policies, what are the inevitable constraints of crossing over?
Highly experienced in the field, Bielby and Harrington provide a unique and richly textured look at global television through a cultural lens, one that has an undeniable and complex effect on what shows succeed and which do not on an international scale.
Review
"In Rape and the Culture of the Courtroom, Taslitz (a former prosecutor) is concerned to show how and why police, prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys use their discretion to circumvent legal reforms in rape law." -Hypatia,
Review
"Global TV offers a richly textured account of the professional practices and protocols that govern the television marketplace. . . . A must read for those wishing to understand the complex cultural dynamics of globalization."-Michael Curtin,author of Playing to the World's Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV
Review
"Global TV is a major contribution to the important but neglected topic of globalization in cultural industries. Bielby and Harrington demonstrate the major role of distribution in shaping the characteristics and meanings of cultural exports. Through extensive field work they have obtained a rich body of insights into the perspectives of both television buyers and sellers in an industry that is changing rapidly over time and that varies greatly from one country to another."-Diana Crane,author of The Production of Culture: Media and the Urban Arts
Review
"Bielby and Harrington bring their sociological perspective and methodology to the study of internationalized television cultures, providing a fine grained net of evidence which test theories of globalization and cultural imperialism. This book should recast the landscape of global television studies."-Christina Slade,author of The Real Thing: Doing Philosophy with Media
Review
Through an ethnographic examination of the social organization of the global television marketplace, Bielby and Harrington make an important contribution that furthers understanding of the nature of global television business.-Choice,
Synopsis
Rape law reform has been a stunning failure. Defense lawyers persist in emphasizing victims' characters over defendants' behavior. Reform's goals of increasing rape report and conviction rates have generally not been achieved. In
Rape and the Culture of the Courtroom, Andrew Taslitz locates the cause of rape reform failure in the language lawyers use, and the cultural stories upon which they draw to dominate rape victims in the courtroom.
Cultural stories about rape, Taslitz argues, such as the provocatively dressed woman "asking for it," are at the root of many unconscious prejudices that determine jury views. He connects these stories with real-life examples, such as the Mike Tyson and Glen Ridge rape trials, to show how rape stereotypes are used by defense lawyers to gain acquittals for their clients.
Building on Deborah Tannen's pathbreaking research on the differences between male and female speech, Taslitz also demonstrates how word choice, tone, and other lawyers' linguistic tactics work to undermine the confidence and the credibility of the victim, weakening her voice during the trial. Taslitz provides politically realistic reform proposals, consistent with feminist theories of justice, which promise to improve both the adversary system in general and the way that the system handles rape cases.
About the Author
Denise D. Bielby is professor of Sociology and affiliated faculty in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the co-author (with
C. Lee Harrington) of
Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life and co-editor of Popular Culture: Production and Consumption.
C. Lee Harrington is professor of Sociology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In addition to her books with Denise Bielby, she is co-editor (with Jonathan Gray and Cornel Sandvoss) of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press, 2007).