"Where We Are On TV" has some promising and not-so-promising numbers for queer women on the teevee, and also raises some questions about how we quantify "representation" in the first place for all groups.
Contemporary television fictions allow the audience to experience the reality of everyday life in audio-visual spaces. Thus, controversial issues discussed in German society such as homosexuality, racism or 'clashes of cultures' are revisited in the social drama films produced for German television through a mixture of generic conventions such as tragedy, thriller and melodrama. Consequently, the audio-visual representations of the people, who are the focus of these discussions, represent an interesting area of research. The book deals with the audio-visual spatiality of the Turkish diaspora in Berlin in three contemporary TV films in this format; namely Wut (Range, dir. Zuli Aladağ, 2006), Die Neue (The Newcomer, dir. Buket Alakuş, 2015) and Nachspielzeit (Extra-Time, dir. Andreas Pieper, 2015). Therewith, it brings a spatial approach to the issue of 'polemical belonging of the Turkish Diaspora to the German national space' within the audio-visual context. The proposed spatial approach presents an alternative argument to the assumptions of German politicians, who celebrate 'a common German history that bases on Christian-Jewish identity, democracy and enlightenment'.
Why are same-sex TV couples more likely to be interracial than straight TV couples?
This book is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the key debates concerning the representation of masculinities in a wide range of popular television genres. The volume looks at the depiction of public masculinity in the soap opera, homosexuality in the situation comedy, the portrayal of fatherhood in prime-time animation, emerging manhood in the supernatural teen text, alternative gender roles in science fiction, male authority in the police series, masculine anxieties in the hospital drama, violence and aggression in sports coverage, ordinariness and emotional connectedness in the reality game show, and domesticity in lifestyle television. Masculinity and Popular Television examines the ways in which masculinities are being constructed, circulated and interrogated in contemporary British and American programming, and considers the ways in which such images can be understood in relation to the 'common sense' model of the hegemonic male that is said to dominate the cultural landscape.Key Features*Offers a clear and comprehensive overview of existing theoretical debates concerning the representation of masculinities on the small screen.*Explores various representations of masculinities across a wide range of popular television genres. *Draws on a broad range of today's most critically and commercially successful television programmes in order to make the volume both accessible and enjoyable for the reader.