Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary Us Television

The notion of seriality and serial identity performance runs as a strong undercurrent through much of the fields of gender studies, feminist theory and queer studies, although the explicit analysis of a serial enactment of gender is surprisingly rare. Whereas media studies and cultural studies-based seriality scholarship can often overlook gender as an ongoing process, this book defines gender as a serial and discursively produced, intersectional entanglement of different practices and agencies. It argues that serial storytelling offers such complex negotiations of identity that it is never adequate to consider the ’results’ of televisual gender performances as separate from the processes that produce them. As such, gender performances are not restricted to individual television programmes themselves, but are also located in official paratexts, such as making-of documentaries, interviews with writers and actors, as well as in cultural sites like online viewer discussions, recaps and fan fiction. With case studies of series such as Girls, How to Get Away With Murder and The Walking Dead, this book seeks to understand how gender as a practice is generated by television narratives in the overlapping of text, reception and production, and explores which viewer practices these narratives seek to trigger and draw on in the process.

Maria Sulimma is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Anglophone Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen.