Women watching television : gender, class, and generation in the American television experience
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Women watching television : gender, class, and generation in the American television experience
University of Pennsylvania Press, c1991
- : pbk
- : hard
Available at 21 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [213]-232) and index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
-
: pbk ISBN 9780812212860
Description
Women's inclinations to identify with television characters varies with their assessment of the realism of these characters and their social world.
- Volume
-
: hard ISBN 9780812281699
Description
Few issues are more important to feminist scholars than that of gender identity, especially women's gender identity. Of particular concern are the ways in which culture shapes this identity. The author of this study focuses on one of the most powerful image-shaping forces within American culture - television - and examines the relationship between the representations television presents to women of themselves and their own self-images. She asks how women's self-conceptions correspond to television images, whether women identify with the female characters they see on television, and whether women use television images in forming their own self-images. The answers to these questions depend on several factors, the most important being the social class of the women studied. The author contends that women's inclinations to identify with television characters varies with their assessment of the realism of these characters and their social world.
She finds that working-class women are much more likely to find television characters and situations "real" than are middle-class women, but that their evaluations of realism reflect their wishes about reality - especially material reality - rather than any objective assessment of the accuracy of television's depiction of their own experience. In her exploration of this and other complexities, Andrea Press draws on feminist analyses of traditional theories of identification, Marxist and socialist analyses of class, and mainstream social scientific studies of the mass media audience.
by "Nielsen BookData"