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Budapest W8: Feminist Research - Class Notes

Daily daytime talk shows - succeeding soap operas

When you want to degrade and discredit your political opponent, you liken what they are doing to the feminised soap opera, unlike prime time television.
Post-structuralist/modernist/feminist moment brings along with it the talk shows that are often named after the host.

What is at work with the categorisation with the differences across the talk-shows?

Categorisation is based on:

Audience Participation: Public/political issues
Therapeutic: Feminine individual issues (repackage political issues into a psychological discourse, bringing them into the public sphere)
Confrontational: Private/personal issues

How is something imagined to be set up in a studio? And how is something looked at that is aired on a TV channel? - Once you bring something onto the set, it is no longer private, is inherently public.

Discourse of therapeutic - psychology
Discourse of confrontational - uncritical masses, marketisation, spectacle

Spectacle society - consumerism is about making everything attractive
How does a problem come to be presented and what kind of meaning are explicitly shown as problems?

What is moralising - you are invited as an audience, how is that an act of moralising?

Oprah - morality is drawn by the anchor which the guests and audience agree on - guests come on and redeem themselves the level of morality
Springer - there is no line, you are allowed to act immoral - guests are immoral and are not brought up to morality. The viewer at home feels moral by distancing themselves from the guests.

Moralising and indoctrination - when you take up the position of the viewer, you are not allowed to reflect on what is happening, you are given a position on the 'right' moral side.

Problems - social/individual frame - are solved through the talk show
What is never asked? The underlying issues that cause these problems, reflection of shared narrative, real solution to create change, the problem itself is never problematised

de Beauvoir - women are kept in isolation as the property of men, and that is how they will not politically organise
Oprah - the saviour figure who you watch on television and makes you believe that as an individual you can solve your problems

How does the differentiation of art vs mass culture work? What is happening in popular culture (talk shows, soap opera, reality show)?
What is wrong with calling it a "trash" talk show?
Classism
Identity category - who is viewed as trashy? Implicated in class, race, gender
Viewer is able to distance themselves whilst the audience/guest cannot
White trash vs unmarked trash referring to POC
Once you are perceived as class - you are disadvantaged - not being raced entails privilege

Feminism on television

THE ESSAY

Pick an event
Analyse it
Use texts to relate to it
Reflect on how feminist media research is done
Research paper
Systematic format

Negra - she is discussing the ideological responses to 9/11 in the US space through arguing that pop-culture that is banal/trivial is in fact used for important political purposes. What kind of discourses emerge at that particular moment?

Post-feminist - the terrorist attack as being a point of departure for the nationalist project



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