Witches and bitches: Reality television, housewifization and the new hidden abode of production

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Hearn
Keyword(s):  
Business Models ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Television Industry ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Public ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Economic Formation

The governance of affect by capital has seen its ideological legitimation and emblematic site of production in the mainstream television industry, specifically reality television programs, as they provide templates for affective self-presentation to the public at large. As even a cursory glance at most reality television production demonstrates, it is most often women’s bodies and self-concepts that bear the burden of signifying and legitimating the message of this new economic formation: ‘conform to our template, be seen, and build a reputation!’ This article will focus on the Real Housewives franchise, which along with its network Bravo is credited with saving the fortunes of NBC, as the paradigmatic example of these new narrative trends and business models. It will interrogate the historical resonances and discontinuities between the economy of affective visibility now apparent on reality television and its modes of production and the origins of the ‘real’ housewife in early capitalism. At this time, women’s skills, bodies and reproductive capacities were violently restructured; forbidden from earning a wage or having money, women’s work inside and outside the home was simultaneously appropriated and concealed. As reality television inaugurates new kinds of labor and value creation in the 21st century, it does so in ways that are deeply gendered or ‘housewifized’; reality television’s forms of hidden, precarious, and unregulated labour recall the appropriation and denigration of the value of women’s work by systems of capitalist expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries.

scholarly journals Doing women’s film & television history

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Sarah Arnold ◽  
Anne O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
Women's Work ◽  
Women's Images ◽  
Television History ◽  
The Public ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Sex And Sexuality ◽  
Women's Film ◽  
Irish Film ◽  
The Many

The scholarship collected in this issue of Alphaville represents a selection of the research that was to be presented at the 2020 Doing Women’s Film & Television History conference, which was one of the many events cancelled as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic itself greatly impeded academic life and our capacity to carry out and share research among colleagues, students and the public. Covid-19 was even more problematic for women, who shouldered a disproportionate care burden throughout the pandemic. Therefore, we are particularly delighted to be able to present an issue that addresses a number of topics and themes related to the study of women in film and television, including, but not limited to, the production and use of archival collections for the study of women’s film and television histories; the foregrounding of women in Irish film and television histories; women’s productions and representation in films of the Middle East; representations of sex and sexuality in television drama; and women’s work and labour in film and television. The breadth of the themes covered here is indicative of the many ways in which scholars seek to produce, describe and uncover the histories and practices of women in these media. They suggest opportunities for drawing attention to women’s work, whether that is labouring in the film and television industries or the work that women’s images are put to do on screen. Collectively, the articles contained in this issue point to a multitude of opportunities for doing and producing women’s film and television histories, either as they occurred in the past or as they materialise in the present. They offer correctives to absences and marginalisation in production histories, in archiving or preservation, and in representation.

scholarly journals Making do on not much: High Energy Striving, Femininity and Friendship in Broad City

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 517-533
Author(s):  
Akane Kanai ◽  
Amy Dobson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
High Energy ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Normative Relation ◽  
Women's Friendship ◽  
Women’S Friendship

In the years following the 2008 global financial crisis (“GFC”), feminist media scholarship has drawn attention to the gendered calls in Western media culture to remake subjectivity in line with imperatives of thrift required in conditions of austerity. In the shared symbolic environments that “gender the recession” (Negra & Tasker, 2014), media ranging from news, reality television, and film have placed further, intensified demands on women’s domestic, affective, paid and unpaid labour, requiring attitudinal orientations combining future-oriented enthusiasm, positivity, entrepreneurialism, a continued faith in (budget-conscious) consumption and investment in the home and the family. This article considers the US comedy Broad City as an articulation of how young women are critically grappling with such shifts in gendered social relations and labour markets in the cosmopolitan setting of New York City. We suggest, in the depiction of the central female friendship between Abbi Abrams (Abbi Jacobson) and Ilana Wexler (Ilana Glazer) in Broad City, the show foregrounds the necessity of young women’s “high energy striving” but produces an alternative configuration of the normative relation between femininity and labour. In the show, contra the “retreatism” Negra and Tasker document idealising women’s work in the home as a means of combatting an austere future, the thrifty fun, care, support, and love Abbi and Ilana strive to create together spills across public spaces, spanning the streets of the city, outdoors in parks and on stoops. Abbi and Ilana are continually depicted labouring in some way, though such labour does not generally result in financial or career-based reward, but rather, produces psychic and emotional sustenance for the women’s friendship and a means of affectively investing in each other. Thus, in Broad City’s acknowledgement of the high energy striving required to survive, the show critically questions the relation of such feminine striving to the promise of career, financial success, and the idealised direction of such striving towards the domestic and hetero-patriarchal family. Instead, the show emphasises the material importance of such striving in relation to the bonds of women’s friendship in conditions of material and social hardship, suggesting a different orientation to women’s work and its place in recessional culture.

تشخيص الثقافة التنظيمية في مؤسسات القطاعين العام والخاص حول عمل المرأة الإماراتية وتوليها مناصب إدارية وقيادية عليا

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdulfattah Yaghi
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Culture ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Convenience Sample ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
National Values ◽  
Private Sector Organizations ◽  
Public And Private Sector

<p dir="RTL">هدفت هذه الدراسة إلى تشخيص الثقافة التنظيمية في مؤسسات القطاعين العام والخاص من خلال استطلاع آراء الموظفين الإماراتيين حول عمل المرأة الإماراتية وتوليها مناصب إدارية وقيادية عليا. وتم استخدام أسلوب المسح الميداني بتوزيع 1500 استبياناً خاصا بالدراسة على عينة عشوائية متيسرة من الموظفين الإماراتيين العاملين في مختلف الإمارات السبع في الدولة وتم استرجاع 1026 استبيانا مكتملا منها. وقد أظهرت نتائج تحليل التباين الأحادي وتحليل الانحدار المتعدد أنّ الموظفين يؤيدون عمل المرأة المواطنة خارج بيتها لكن مع وجود تخوف من أن يكون هذا العمل على حساب بيتها وأسرتها. كما أنّ الموظفين يؤيدون تولي المرأة الإماراتية مناصب إدارية وقيادية عليا في مؤسساتهم ويثقون بقدرتها على القيام بمهام هذه الوظائف. كما أظهر التحليل أن النساء الإماراتيات يفضلن العمل في وظائف تختلف عن تلك التي يفضلها لهن الرجال مع تشابه الطرفين في تفضيل عمل المرأة المواطنة في الوظائف الحكومية عموما. وقد تأثرت آراء الموظفين بعوامل رئيسية هي الجنس ومستوى التعليم ودرجة التمدن والتمسك بالقيم والعادات والتقاليد الإماراتية ودرجة المحافظه أو التحرر. وقد تمت مناقشة هذه النتائج وارتباطها بالثقافة التنظيمية وثقافة المجتمع في الإمارات العربية المتحدة.</p><p dir="RTL"> <strong><em>كلمات محورية</em></strong>: ثقافة تنظيمية، عمل المرأة، الإمارات، وظائف قيادية</p><p dir="RTL" align="right"><strong>Examining the Organizational Culture of Public and Private Sector Organizations about the Work of Emirati Women and their Appointment in Administrative and Top Leadership Positions</strong></p><p>The purpose of the present study was to examine organizational culture in the public and private sectors by exploring Emirati employees’ opinion about local women’s work and leadership capabilities. Survey was used to collect responses from a convenience sample of 1500 employees of which 1026 were completed and analyzed using SPSS. Univariate and multivariate analyses showed that employees supported women’s work outside home but with concern that such work might come on the expense of their families. Employees also supported women’s appointment in administrative and leadership top positions with confidence in their leadership capabilities. Although expressed similar opinions, men were less supportive of women and have preferred different jobs for local women with governmental jobs being marked as the most suitable for Emirati women by both genders. Those opinions were influenced by employee’s gender, education, urbanization, commitment to national values, and liberalism. These findings have been discussed in relationship with organizational culture and culture of the society. <strong><em></em></strong></p><p><strong><em>Keywords</em></strong>: Women Work, Emirates, Leadership, Public Sector, Private Sector, Organizational Culture</p><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]-->

Home is where the heart is? Organizing women’s work and domesticity at Christmas

Organization ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
pp. 807-821 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheena J Vachhani ◽  
Alison Pullen
Keyword(s):  
Women's Work ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Feminine Subjectivity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Contested Space ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Home Work ◽  
Commercial Work ◽  
Commercial Organizations

This article critically discusses domestication and women’s work in household organization at Christmas, a case of meta-organizing which fuels commercialization. Located in the growing body of work on contesting femininity that challenges traditional notions of femininity, we problematize the binary divide between women’s work at home and commercial organizations. By considering Christmas as a set of ritualistic activities replete with myths of femininity, we explore how the home—a major site of festival activity—constructs gender through the public/private divide. This division has been central to critical interpretations of women’s subordination in work and leisure spaces where the concept of home has attracted feminist attention through its association with exile or retreat into domesticity. Home is, however, a culturally and politically contested space, and this article argues that home-work is a productive retreat from commercial-work. Home relates to domesticity and rituals in paradoxical ways and attesting to the ambivalence of Christmas provides opportunities for the subversion of traditional discourses of women in the household, especially those associated with older ideas of femininity understood through ritualistic practice. We demonstrate this by analysing cultural representations of rituals located and practised in and around the home that are central to the enactment of Christmas and discern how these both subjugate and offer subversive possibilities for feminine subjectivity. Using contemporary representations of Christmas and home from media culture, we conclude that home is a feminist space with Christmas acting as a gift for women’s return to that space.

Gendered Discourses and the Making of Protective Labor Legislation in England, 1830–1914

1998 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Malone
Keyword(s):  
State Intervention ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Physical Point ◽  
Education Society ◽  
The Public ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Labor Legislation ◽  
Single Idea ◽  
Prolonged Absence

The crowding together of numbers of the young in both sexes in factories, is a prolific source of moral delinquency. The stimulus of the heated atmosphere, the contact of the opposite sexes, the example of the lasciviousness upon the animal passion—all have conspired to produce a very early development of sexual appetencies. (Peter Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England, 1833)The prolonged absence from home of the wife and mother caused an enormous amount of infant mortality and it must cause the elder children to be more or less neglected. It deadened the sense of parental responsibility. (Thomas Maudsley, secretary of the Committee Promoting the Nine Hours Movement, 1872)From a purely physical point of view the nation's strength is measured by its reproductive power and the high percentage of the fitness of its children …. Women's work becomes the cause of physical degeneracy and of inability on the part of women to rise to the dignity of the completed act of motherhood. (Dr. Thomas Oliver, lecture before the Eugenics Education Society, 1911)Each of these statements was made as part of the public debate about enacting protective labor legislation in England. They were diverse manifestations of a single idea—the idea that women's work outside the home was dangerous to society and required state intervention. Between 1830 and 1914, a discourse of danger dominated the public discussion of female labor. Yet, as the opening quotations suggest, different types of danger were emphasized at various times.

scholarly journals Covid-19 and Inequality: A Gender Perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Elisabetta Frontoni
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
Gender Perspective ◽  
The Public ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Work From Home ◽  
Third Phase ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Way

My paper examines some aspects of the Covid19 pandemic in Italy from a gender perspective. I intend to highlight some important inequalities in the management and cohabitation during the pandemic that risk being otherwise hidden in the public discourse. I will focus in particular on two circumstances: public decisions about the pandemic and work-care balancing. As regards the first profile, I will focus on the composition of the committees appointed by the government for the management of the crisis and the effects that this composition had on the way to deal with the pandemic in our country. With regard to the second profile, working environment is certainly where inequalities have emerged most clearly, albeit in a different way. First of all, there were women who had to work during the emergency and had problems reconciling work and care role. Secondly, women who could / had to work from home had to deal with the lack of a distinction between workspace and care duties. On this point, the Italian State has taken very different measures from those of other countries, for example the decision not to reopen schools, which has penalised and will continue to penalise women's work. In this perspective, the work will investigate what other measures have been or will be adopted since the so-called third phase.

Reality TV Crime Programs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette Hill
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Video On Demand ◽  
Reality Tv ◽  
Central Component ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Public ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
True Crime

Crime reality television is a significant origin story in understanding reality entertainment. In the 1980s, crime reality television captured the public’s imagination with cold cases, ongoing criminal investigations, surveillance feeds, and live appeals to the public for information to catch criminals. Early crime reality television borrowed from other factual genres, including news reportage, crime and observational documentary, and crime drama; this mixing of different generic elements helped to create representations of crime that were a combination of dramatized spectacles, surveillance footage, and public appeals. What united this mix of factual and dramatic styles was the sense of liveness; the live address to the public and the caught-in-the-act camerawork contributed to an experience of watching as immediate and real. This feeling of liveness, a central component of television itself, meant that crime reality television was popular entertainment that also connected to the real world, inviting audiences and publics to engage with crime in their local neighborhood, in society, and in public debates about law and order. This was citizen crime television that had commercial and public appeal. At some point in the origin story of reality television, crime was overshadowed by the global development of this entertainment genre. In early studies, books such as Entertaining Crime (Fishman & Cavender, 1998) or Tabloid Television (Langer, 1998) examined the influx of infotainment and sensational news reportage primarily on television in Europe, Australia, and America. These books were about reality television and addressed the first crime wave in the genre. Studies of the 2000s books, such as Reality TV (Hill, 2005) or Staging the Real (Kilborn, 2003), examined docusoaps and competitive reality and talent shows, addressing the second and third waves in the genre. More recently, companions to reality television (Ouellette, 2014) contain research on global reality television formats, as well as scripted reality or business reality, and analyze issues concerning politics, race, class, production, celebrities, branding, and lifestyles. Crime is conspicuous by its relative absence from these discussions: what happened to crime reality television? Today, true crime is flourishing in commercial zones, for example, on branded digital television channels like CBS Reality or the international surveillance format Hunted, and subscription video on demand true crime Making a Murderer. Many of these popular series tap into that feeling of liveness that was so crucial to early crime reality television, particularly the connection between representing crime, law and order, and the real world. This makes crime reality television a rich site of analysis as an intergeneric space where there are tensions surrounding the staging of real crime for entertainment, and its connection to traditional values of authority and duty, representations of ethnicity, gender and social class, and broader moral, legal and political issues.

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