Gender and the Media

Publisher
Polity
Location
Cambridge
Publication year
2007
Comment

Arguably, this isn't about romance despite what it says here in part of the abstract:

The book looks in depth at five areas of media - talk shows, magazines, news, advertising, and contemporary screen and paperback romances - to examine how representations of women and men are changing in the twenty-first century, partly in response to feminist, queer and anti-racist critique.

because as described in the introduction, the chapter on romance in fact focuses on one chick lit novel and two TV shows:

The last of the substantive chapters considers the genre of romance, which has shown remarkable resilience and staying power in the face of significant social structural shifts and ongoing transformations of intimacy. Focusing on Bridget Jones's Diary and the rise of 'chick lit' the chapter examines constructions of gender, 'race' and sexuality and asks in what ways contemporary popular depictions of heterosexual love are different from earlier romances. These texts are interesting because they are structured both by conventional formulas and by an engagement with feminism. Do they offer new versions of heterosexual partnerships? How different are their constructions of femininity and masculinity compared with Harlequin or Mills & Boon novels? Why and in what way have singleness and the body become such preoccupations? The chapter concludes with a discussion of two popular TV shows - Ally McBeal and Sex and the City - to put forward an argument about a new postfeminist sensibility. (5)

However, there is a discussion of romance scholarship, primarily Tania Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance and Janice Radway's Reading the Romance, from page 219 to page 226, and Bridget Jones and chick lit more generally are compared to "traditional romance" (see pages 234-240).

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