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Action TV Reboots and Visibility Politics
Recycling Middlebrow Culture
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Book Presentation:
Examines the cultural politics of the contemporary American action TV re-boot
• A theorisation of middlebrow television
• A conceptualisation of visibility politics as a visual signifier of social change rather than it narrativization
• A focus on contemporary middlebrow reboots
• A theorization of the ‘gender and race swap
Action TV Reboots and Visibility Politics: Rebooting Middlebrow Culture deals with the network TV reboots of Hawaii Five-0, MacGyver, Magnum, P.I., Lethal Weapon and The Equalizer to explore the cultural politics at work in contemporary middlebrow culture. The book focuses specifically on the representational politics of contemporary middlebrow TV.
The book analyses action TV reboots via the framework of middlebrow television, and the political meanings of the category. It explores the category of middlebrow TV, the role of nostalgia of middlebrow reboots. This leads into a critique of the representational norms of middlebrow TV, which includes a variety of visual representations of ‘otherness’ but fails to narrativize marginalisation. Instead, visual ‘difference’ is reduced to visual signifier of an inclusive society. What emerges is the idea of visibility politics and its dominance in American network TV.
About the Author:
Mareike Jenner is a researcher at Anglia Ruskin University. Her research focusses on Streaming, American Television, and Middlebrow Television. Her edited collection Binge-Watching and Contemporary Television Studies was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021. Her previous work includes the monographs Netflix and the Re-Invention of Television and American TV Detective Dramas.
Press Reviews:
This is an important intervention in our understanding of TV drama of the 2000s. By looking at the ‘middle-brow’ action reboots of the 2000s, Mareike Jenner shows us that these dramas provide middle America with a sense of progress while also continuing to serve up quite regressive politics: women remain sexualised, homosocial bonds between (mostly) white men are undermined by casting a more gender-diverse team in which heterosexual romantic liaisons can be more explicitly developed. By analysing these programmes in detail, Jenner shows that the concessions of ‘visibility politics’ – of providing visual diversity – are actually undermining the progressive politics behind the demands for greater equality.– Elke Weissmann, Reader in Film and Television, Edge Hill University
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
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