Serialised Gender: A Linguistic Analysis of Femininities in Contemporary TV Series and Media (“Lagado Studi”, volume no. 7, General Editors G. Sertoli and F. Cleto), awarded the AIA (Italian Association of English Studies) Book Prize 2013 for a monograph in the field of English Language and Linguistics

VIRDIS, DANIELA FRANCESCA

2012-01-01

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Abstract

Addressing the interdisciplinary area of language and gender as applied to television and media studies, this book analyses a number of extremely popular contemporary TV series — Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, The Simpsons, Nip/Tuck — and two equally significant cultural products, namely, the film When Harry Met Sally…and the novel Bridget Jones’s Diary. With all their specificities, these TV series, film and novel share a reinvention of the codes of romance, by representing an up-to-date, somehow fashionable version of the traditional, and traditionally female, genre of romance geared to postfeminist consumer culture. While the femininities and sexualities enacted in these cultural narratives may appear to be unsparingly and humorously critical of conventionally female linguistic and cultural stereotypes, and could therefore be regarded as radical feminist embodiments, despite all their ironic and hyperbolic approach they are in fact not only romantic and mainstream, but also ideologically biased, preserving a normative white middle-class status quo, and restoring a challenged/contested patriarchal value system. A close linguistic and critical scrutiny thus lays bare the textual and discursive strategies by which feminism has switched to postfeminist romance, and in so doing has yielded to postfeminist backlash.