Gender and Austerity in Popular Culture: Femininity, Masculinity and Recession in Film and Television

Description

From the gritty landscapes of The Hunger Games and The Walking Dead, to the portrayal of the twenty-first-century precariat in Girls, this book explores how transatlantic visual culture has represented and reconstructed ideas of gender in times of financial crisis. Drawing on social, cultural and feminist theory, these writers explore how men and women experience austerity differently and illuminate the problematic ways in which economic policy can shape how gender is presented in popular culture. Written from the perspective that the popular is indeed political, this book considers film, literature and television's ideological attitudes towards race, sex and disability. It also takes into account how mass culture has responded to austerity in the past and the present, whilst examining the impact that feminism will have in the future.

Helen Davies is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University. She is on the advisory board of Durham University's Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, and is on the editorial board for Journal of Gender Studies. Claire O'Callaghan is an Associate Lecturer in English at Brunel University. She is the Honorary Treasurer of the Feminist and Women's Studies Association (FWSA) and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Gender Studies.

'Gender and Austerity in Popular Culture is an important development in our understanding of the ways in which the 'austerity' politics of both the UK and the USA are deeply gendered. But what is also recognised here are the historical parallels in which policies demanding restraint in both personal and state spending had different forms for men and women. Thus in this highly original collection of essays the various authors consider distinct locations of the traditions through which women and men are asked to live out, and through, economic inequality. In all, a highly readable and valuable collection'. - Mary Evans, Centennial Professor at the Gender Institute, London School of Economics