"Levy's study is nuanced and fascinating, providing insights of interest to those who examine American popular culture and women's roles in media."—Journal of Popular Culture
"Chick TV reveals the relationship between narrative structure and gender representation in exciting new ways, making an important contribution to feminist TV studies."—Elana Levine, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
"Exciting, detailed, and far-reaching, Chick TV is sure to provide scholars and students much to discuss for years to come."—Paul Booth, DePaul University
"A very timely, original and important piece of work. . . . Levy’s focus on heroines and antiheroines represents an important feminist intervention into debates around ‘quality’ and ‘complex’ TV."—JP Kelly, University of London
Description
Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White ushered in the era of the television antihero, with compelling narratives and complex characters. While critics and academics celebrated these characters, the antiheroines who populated television screens in the twenty-first century were pushed to the margins and dismissed as “chick TV.”
In this volume, Yael Levy advances antiheroines to the forefront of television criticism, revealing the varied and subtle ways in which they perform feminist resistance. Offering a retooling of gendered media analyses, Levy finds antiheroism not only in the morally questionable cop and tormented lawyer, but also in the housewife and nurse who inhabit more stereotypical feminine roles. By analyzing Girls, Desperate Housewives, Nurse Jackie, Being Mary Jane, Grey’s Anatomy, Six Feet Under, Sister Wives, and the Real Housewives franchise, Levy explores the narrative complexities of “chick TV” and the radical feminist potential of these shows.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Complexities of Chick TV
1. Resistance
2. Deviation
3. Serialization
4. Rewriting
Conclusion: Reclaiming “Chick” for TV
Appendix: Antiheroines Positioned along the Continua
About the Author
Yael Levy is a teaching fellow at the Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, where she teaches courses in television studies, race, and feminist theories. Her works have appeared in Feminist Media Studies and Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, among others.
March 2022