"Why do I like soap operas?" Laura Stempel Mumford asks, and her answer emerges in a feminist analysis of soap opera that participates in current debates about popular culture, television, and ideology. She argues that the conventional daytime soap has an implicit and at times explicit political agenda that cooperates in the "teaching" of male dominance and the related oppressions of racism, classism, and heterosexism--so that they seem inevitable. All My Children, General Hospital, Another World, One Life to Live, Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless: a close reading of their texts will also answer some larger questions about television and its place in the broad landscape of popular culture.

"Why do I like soap operas?" Laura Stempel Mumford asks, and her answer emerges in a feminist analysis of soap opera that participates in current debates about popular culture, television, and ideology. She argues that the conventional daytime soap has an implicit and at times explicit political agenda that cooperates in the "teaching" of male dominance and the related oppressions of racism, classism, and heterosexism -- so that they seem inevitable. All My Children, General Hospital, Another World, One Life to Live, Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless: a close reading of their texts will also answer some larger questions about television and its place in the broad landscape of popular culture.

""Genre and Television" is an insightful, original, and well researched book and makes a significant and timely contribution to television studies." --Annette Hill, University of Westminster, UK)

We yearn to experience the idealized love in so many novels, movies, poems, and popular songs. Ironically, it is the idealization of love that arms it with its destructive power. Popular media consistently remind us that love is all we need, but statistics concerning the rate of depression and suicides after divorce or romantic break up remind us what might happen if "all that we need" is taken away. This book is about our ideals of love, our experiences of love, the actual disparity between the two, and the manners of coping with this disparity.L A major study case of the book concerns men who have murdered their wives or partners allegedly "out of love." It is estimated that over 30% of all female murder victims in the United States die at the hands of former or present spouses or boyfriends. How can murdering a loved one be associated with the assumed moral and altruistic love? Not only is love intrinsically ambivalent, but it can also give rise to dangerous consequences. Some of the worst evils have been committed in the name of love.L A unique collaboration between a leading philosopher in the field of emotions and a social scientist, In the Name of Love presents fascinating insights into romantic love and it's future in modern society.

Passengers disco dancing in The Love Boat’s Acapulco Lounge. A young girl walking by a marquee advertising Deep Throat in the made-for-TV movie Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway. A frustrated housewife borrowing Orgasm and You from her local library in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Commercial television of the 1970s was awash with references to sex. In the wake of the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation and gay rights movements, significant changes were rippling through American culture. In representing—or not representing—those changes, broadcast television provided a crucial forum through which Americans alternately accepted and contested momentous shifts in sexual mores, identities, and practices. Wallowing in Sex is a lively analysis of the key role of commercial television in the new sexual culture of the 1970s. Elana Levine explores sex-themed made-for-TV movies; female sex symbols such as the stars of Charlie’s Angels and Wonder Woman; the innuendo-driven humor of variety shows (The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, Laugh-In), sitcoms (M*A*S*H, Three’s Company), and game shows (Match Game); and the proliferation of rape plots in daytime soap operas. She also uncovers those sexual topics that were barred from the airwaves. Along with program content, Levine examines the economic motivations of the television industry, the television production process, regulation by the government and the tv industry, and audience responses. She demonstrates that the new sexual culture of 1970s television was a product of negotiation between producers, executives, advertisers, censors, audiences, performers, activists, and many others. Ultimately, 1970s television legitimized some of the sexual revolution’s most significant gains while minimizing its more radical impulses.

A Companion to Television is a magisterial collection of 31 original essays that charter the field of television studies over the past century Explores a diverse range of topics and theories that have led to television’s current incarnation, and predict its likely future Covers technology and aesthetics, television’s relationship to the state, televisual commerce; texts, representation, genre, internationalism, and audience reception and effects Essays are by an international group of first-rate scholars For information, news, and content from Blackwell's reference publishing program please visit www.blackwellpublishing.com/reference/

Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television, the first anthology dedicated to analyses of Canadian television content, is a collection of original, interdisciplinary articles, combining textual analysis and political economy of communications. It explores the television that has thrived in the Canadian regulatory and cultural context: namely, programs that straddle the border between reality and fiction or even blur it. The conceptual basis of this collection is the hybrid nature of television fare: the widely theorized notion that all mediations of reality involve fiction in the form of narrative or symbolic shaping. Each of the contributions here is a reminder, too, of the significant relationship of television to nation building in Canada—to the imaginative work involved in thinking through the relations that constitute nations, citizens, and communities. The collection focuses on English-language Canadian television because the imperatives guiding its texts are markedly different from those pertaining to their French-lanugage counterparts. The collection, therefore, develops a nuance of perspective on the cultural and political economic specificities that inform the imaginative work of television production for English Canada.