Author: Former Student

Theory to Praxis Assignment

Posted on by Former Student

In today’s society kids are growing up with factors that are very different from what parents grew up with. Starting with technology. Kids’ actions and beliefs are influenced by what they see and hear, and less by what they are told. TV especially is a major influence on kids’ behavior and views on society. These factors include body image, diversity, and influence on societal beliefs. This last one is less obvious, for example in elementary school and high school I watched Jessie, Liv and Madi, and Wizards of Waverly Place. All of these shows have main characters in high school, these shows are what I based high school off on and how I expected high school to be like. TV can influence people’s expectations of real-life situations. Tv, especially Disney, (at least when I was a child) had very little diversity, and many of the main characters were skinny, pretty, straight, white women. This shows both a lack of diversity in race and sexuality. It can also create body image issues when little kids grow up with role models that look like actual models. Creating a stereotypical belief that all women are supposed to look that way when they are older. 

Although many tv programs including Disney are starting to work on becoming more diverse, there is still a long way to go to create shows that support and show all bodies and sexualities. Since our generation is the first to be influenced by tv and some of us will raise children in the next 15 ish years, I believe that we are the solution to help future generations understand and analyze what they see on technology. Learning how to analyze shows and media will not only help our generation understand factors that have influenced us without our knowledge but it will also help the next generations. This is a goal of many feminists, as seen in many of our texts including “You Say Nature, I Say Nurture… Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off” by Suzanna Danuta Walters. Whether it is a younger sibling, a kid being babysat, or our own children. If our generation gets educated on how we were and kids are being influenced by television then we can be more attentive to what we are watching and what the kids around us are watching. We have the ability to prevent kids from watching certain shows, although that method may not work because kids have access to their own phones and computers earlier. Rather than attempting to control our kids’ freedom, we need to equip them with the ability to understand and see what is wrong with shows. This limits parents from being super controlling while giving kids the tools they need to analyze what they see on television. 

Once you start to analyze television shows you begin to realize the number of issues that are ignored or looked past. These issues need to be understood and recognized. It will take time to completely fix this issue, although many television programs have already begun to recognize and fix this issue and expand their diversity. And even though there is change, our generation, including the students at Davidson, needs to recognize these issues so they can prevent future generations from perceiving these shows as reality. A class that analyzes televisions and technological physiological effects on kids and teens would benefit our generation and future generations.

Feminist mixtape: The Man by Taylor Swift

Posted on by Former Student

Taylor Swift is notorious for her love and breakup songs, but in her song The Man, she identifies some key struggles that women deal with on a daily basis. Many of these struggles include not being respected or held to the same standards as men in workplaces. As her lyrics claim that if she was a man then, “they’d say I hustled/ Put in the work/ They wouldn’t shake their heads and question how much of this I deserve/ What I was wearing/ If I was rude/ Could all be separated from my good ideas and power moves?” Swift’s main point she is making is that women’s work and personalities/looks are not separated. They’re often criticized for their ideas based on their outward appearances and their ‘moods’. This reminds me of Peggy Mclntosh’s work “White Privilege and Male Privilege” because men have an advantage over women in the workforce whether they are aware of it or not. Similar to Jean Kilbourne’s Ted Talk on Killing us Softly where she goes into the sexualization of women and stereotypical thin women. Women are judged and criticized from a very young age and are treated differently if they don’t fit that stereotypical body. 

Although she does claim, “if I was a man/I’d be the man”(4), which is slightly construed since the idea is not to compare or wish women were men it’s to fix the gap and inequalities that stand between us. These lyrics can be viewed a few ways though because she is trying to show how if she was a man she would be treated differently than she is as a woman. This song perfectly explains how women have to work harder to be in the same place as a man.

In Taylors music video for The Man, she literally plays the man.

Book Review: *Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History*

Posted on by Former Student

Soap operas have been a major part of television history, anyone who owns a TV has at some point in their lives watched a soap opera show. These programs have highly influenced popular culture. The monograph Her Stories by Elana Levine highlights the impacts soap operas have had on the US broadcasting industry as well as on “cultural constructions of gender and social identity”. Similar to the popular girls in high school, soap operas can be the trendsetters for what is and is not acceptable in our society. Soap operas often set the standard and definitions for gender and sexuality, many teens grow up watching these shows that can ultimately determine and impact each generation’s cultural beliefs. 

In Levine’s own words, Her Stories “is American television history, a lens through which to see the economic, creative, technological, social, and experiential path of television across seventy years that exposes its gendered structure” (6). This age was the start of the “cultural construction of femininity” as well. In the 1940s these serials were mainly viewed by American housewives and highlighted the differences between men’s and women’s lives that could push some to envision cultural changes. This book tells the history of soap operas and more specifically the shifts in culture and identities. Levine lays out this history, from the 1940s to 2010s, to support her claim that soap operas have shaped US culture on gender and identities. 

Elana Levine is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she teaches Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies. Not only was she an avid soap opera watcher but it was her main focus in graduate school. She dedicated many of her papers and academic research to soap operas. This book was written over a span of twelve years, focusing on how the past, present, and future have been shaped by soaps. Levine got her undergraduate degree in English and Telecommunications from Indiana University and graduate degrees in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she currently teaches. Just from her degrees, it is obvious that soap operas and television’s effects on culture are the main focus of her studies. This topic could be researched for years, each generation tends to be impacted slightly differently. It could also go into depth on how this has affected teens mentally as they figure out who they are and how they fit into society. 

Levine’s research is mainly from archives, she combines her own personal experiences and research analysis with books, manuscripts from soap creators/networks, episodes, blogs, and websites. She is able to take into consideration the facts and opinions of that current time period and connect it to what occurs in the soap opera. She watches the soap opera shows or reads the scripts and she then analyzes them and makes connections on how they differ depending on the era.  

As stated above Levine goes through the history of soap operas and the cultural impacts they had on each decade. Focusing on two main changes, the first being “Change in US broadcast network television as an economic and social institution” (page 5). The second is “change in cultural and constructions of gender and intersecting aspects of social identity including race, class, and sexuality”(page 5). The first change is more on how TV changes and gets influenced/ influences society, whereas the second is how these changes affect cultural ideas and beliefs on intersectionality. These changes are constantly occurring in society but TV and soap operas specifically had and have a major impact on culture. 

This book is split into three parts each focusing on a different time period. “Part 1: The New TV Soap” is from the late 1940s to early 1960s focusing on the transition from radios to television and post-war soap operas. “Part 2: The Classic Network Era” is from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s and discusses the evolution of television businesses and content. “Part 3: A Post Network Age” from the late 1980s to 2010s is on issues of the post-network era.

The first chapter is called “Serials in Transition (From Radio to Television)”, as the name implies this chapter is describing the transition from radio to TV. Early television was trying to find ways to get people to watch more television, by appealing to current social expectations they can convince viewers to watch more television. Chapter Two: “Daytime Therapy (Help and Healing in the Postwar Soap)” discusses the postwar mentality on gender identities and family roles. Dissecting the soap opera, As the World Turns, helps show how this “eras investment in emotional realism” created characters that questioned traditional roles. This was the first era in television where characters started questioning and expressing current traditions and identities. 

In part two, Chapter three: “Building Network Power (The Broadcasting Business and the Craft of Soap Opera),” Levine examines the economic growth and development of television-influenced soaps. These “developments in the ownership and control of soaps were crucial shifts in the business, enabling network dominance”(83). Soaps were one of the most profitable forms of entertainment so they became very popular on many networks. At this time soap operas were still created with young housewives as the main audience. Chapter four: “Turning to Relevance (Social Issue Storytelling)” explains the new social issues emerging in soap operas in the 60s. General Hospital, a popular soap opera, was created in the early 19060s during a transitional period for soaps. The social issues being questioned changed, this show particularly “combined a focus on gender-specific ‘disorders’ of the psyche with a sense that gendered roles and the problems associated with them were changing, no longer confined to the sphere of home and family” (107). This chapter focuses on normalizing and expressing family and marital issues. This leads into Chapter five: “Love in the Afternoon (The Fracturing Fantasies of the Soap Boom)” introduces the soap romances that grew in popularity throughout the 1980s.  These fantasies often lacked an “explicit connection to the issues of the day” (154), which created a reprieve from societal issues. Though 1980s soaps were popular they were short-lived. 

The last section focuses on the late 1980s to 2010s starting with Chapter six: “Struggles for Survival (Stagnation and Innovation)”. This section focuses on the convergence era when networks began struggling to make a profit. The decline was due to many reasons but mainly structural instabilities in the dramas and the network, although despite many challenges the companies adapted to current audiences and technologies. Chapter seven: “Reckoning with the Past (Reimagining Characters and Stories)” focuses on the “Stories and Characters of the soaps”(12) across this same period of time. Many shows brought back soaps challenging family and couple dynamics but in this new era they then had to decide on how to incorporate race, sexuality and gender. Chapter eight: “Can Her Stories Go On? (Soap Opera in Digital Age)” discusses this era from the 2000s to 2010s. This chapter “details the major business, production, and storytelling changes that the soaps have experienced in the 2010s” (281), these changes ultimately led to a decline of daytime soap operas. Although it has declined, soap operas are still a major and important part of American media culture and influence current social standards and traditions. 

In Her Stories, Levine does a great job of connecting the economic/technological side of broadcasting with the decade and current social standards. This is clear in part three, Chapter six analyzes the economic decline of daytime soap operas and the reasons behind that decline. Chapter seven explains how the industry tried to save these shows by bringing back and incorporating social issues, thus adapting to the current societal wants and needs. And finally, chapter eight how despite these changes current modernizations in technology have hindered and continued the decline in soap operas. These three chapters, in the same time period, help to build on each other while giving different perspectives for the current state of the broadcasting networks. Levine’s main strength in her work is her organization, her entire book is structured to give the reader the best possible understanding of the history of daytime soap operas. She is able to take a complicated history and describe all the different factors that affected and determined the current shows being broadcast. 

Although her organization is strong her topic is so broad and her summary is misleading, in the introduction she summarizes each chapter and at the beginning of each chapter, she summarizes what is about to be said. This can be helpful so the reader can follow along easier, but it also makes it difficult to connect back to the main focus in her work. The author’s introduction gave the impression that most of this monograph would explain how soap operas have impacted social and cultural standards but a lot of the book seemed to be focused on the economic growth of broadcasting networks. Yes, the author still analyzed how many of the show’s characters and plots were based on social norms in that time period, but the overall book was the entire history of Broadcasting. 

Overall I enjoyed this book, the topic and history were interesting. It makes you consider how not only are we impacted by social constructs that we watch but what and how soaps create is also dependent on how we respond and what we enjoy in that time period. Although there was less focus on social and cultural impact than I was expecting I would still recommend reading this book especially if you enjoy the economic and historical perspectives of broadcasting. 

Levine, Elana. Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History. Duke University Press Books, (2020). Print.

Un-Defining Parenting

Posted on by Former Student
What are we taught to believe about motherhood? The stereotypical idealist view tends to be the birth of a child after marriage. Yes this view is one road to becoming a mother but there are so many others. Even today there is some stigma around certain types of births, many of these are addressed in the tv show Friends. Although this show does have some of its own issues, including its lack of diversity, it portrayed multiple ways of becoming a mother that may go against the norm. 

The first baby born in Friends was Ben, Ross and Carol’s son. Ben was an unexpected pregnancy; Ross found out his ex wife, Carol, was pregnant shortly after she left him for another woman. This birth was controversial in the 90s, not only were the parents not married (yet, Carol and Susan get married later in the show) but the baby had 3 parents. Although this sitcom was not perfect and incorporated many homophobic jokes, it was also one of the only shows at this time to feature a lesbian wedding. The show also did a decent job with their family relationship. Each and every family is unique, and we got to watch as Ross, Carol, and Susan figured out a new dynamic as they raised Ben. 

Phoebe Buffay, A badass hippie, was a surrogate to her brother’s children. Frank Buffay and his wife, Alice, had a very large age gap. Alice was Frank’s Professor in college and was over twice his age. Although their marriage was mostly used as a joke in the show, it did highlight and bring attention to age differences. When Phoebe first found out about their relationship, she was shocked but by the end of the episode came to the belief that love is love. Later in the show, Frank and Alice want to have a child but are unable to due to Alice’s age, so they ask Phoebe to be their surrogate. In the show they express the pregnancy and surrogacy well, but do make jokes such as when Phoebe tells the nurse at the hospital, “the father is my brother”. Many of these quotes are lighthearted. They bring up some of the harder parts of surrogacy such as carrying and birthing a child that is not theirs and having to give the babies to their parents. Ultimately the directors and writers wrote this story well and for the most part accurately portrayed the ups and downs of Phoebe’s decision. 

Rachel Green is from a very posh family in which she was raised to believe that her goals in life should be to marry a wealthy man and be a stay at home mother. This ideology was quickly challenged for her when she ran from her fiancé on her wedding day and then decided to get a job and become an independent woman. Later she also had an unconventional pregnancy for this era because she got pregnant and did not get married. Despite how she was raised and societal pressure from her family, she decided to have the baby on her own; Ross was still there to raise the child, but they were not together. At one point during a family convention, Ross’s mother even tells them to pretend they got married because they had been telling that to friends. Despite the pressure to get married by both their families, she still decided it was not the right time. And even though Rachel was not in a relationship to help raise Emma, she still had a ton of support from Ross, her family, and friends. She proved to many that you can be a single mother, work, date, and succeed, breaking many conventionalized beliefs. 

Monica Geller was one of the more heartbreaking stories. When her dream of having kids was put on hold because she had a hostile uterus and was unable to bear a child, she and Chandler started looking into other options and got into adoption. After being put on a list, they met a mother that agreed to let them adopt the baby when it was born. Although this process went by a lot faster than it normally would in real life, it still very accurately described this unconventional way of becoming a mother. 

All 7 babies born into this show either had unconventional births or family dynamics, but no matter the story they all had friends and family that supported their decisions. Recognizing that this sitcom did make many jokes that are viewed as offensive today, they were not seen as offensive in the 90s. The show incorporates these stories into their plot well, some may not even realize that all 4 main characters had unconventional stories. Even though this show was not perfect, it enforced the fact that there is no right or wrong to being a mother.