Mediating the family : gender, culture and representation / Estella Tincknell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tincknell, Estella.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Families.

Families in mass media.

Physical Description:

vi, 186 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

London : Hodder Arnold ; New York : Distributed in the U.S.A. by Oxford University Press, 2005.

Summary:

This new book takes as its starting point the long cultural shadow that the nuclear ideal has cast over how the family has been mediated in popular film, television, literature and social policy over the last 50 years. The book explores the ways in which struggles over sexuality, identity, gender and power have informed the conceptualization and representation of the family as an institution and as a site of discursive complexity.

Mediating the Family: Gender, Culture and Representation 'unpacks the family', looking in detail at the different generational and identificatory components: motherhood, fatherhood, adolescence and childhood. It uses theoretical and critical frameworks from cultural studies, sociology, textual analysis and cultural history, and draws on original research and case studies to examine the relationship between the intersecting discourses of: youth, childhood innocence, post-war companionate marriage, 'bad' families, entrepreneurial femininity in the 1980s, 'new fathering' in the 1990s, inorder to interrogate the representation - and reinvention - of the family.

Mediating the Family: Gender, Culture and Representation is an important intervention in debates about family relationships and will be essential reading for scholars and students of cultural, film and media studies, sociology and cultural history.

Contents:

Introduction: The family, politics and identity 1

1 Nuclear family values? Meanings and mediations from the 1940s to the 1960s 5

2 The impossibility of maternity: the family saga and entrepreneurial femininity in the 1980s 35

3 Paternity suits: reclaiming fatherhood 55

4 Lost innocents: childhood in contemporary media 77

5 Teenage kicks: constructing adolescence 105

6 Family pathologies and pluralities: reinventing the family from the 1970s to the 1990s 133.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 161-173) and index.

ISBN:

0340740809

OCLC:

57006220

Publisher Number:

9780340740804