Overview

"Contemporary popular culture has created a slew of stereotypical roles for girls and women to (willingly or not) play throughout their lives: The Princess, the Nymphette, the Diva, the Single Girl, the Bridezilla, the Tiger Mother, the M.I.L.F, the Cougar, and more. In this book Ames and Burcon investigate the role of cultural texts in gender socialization at specific pre-scripted stages of a woman's life (from girls to the ""golden girls"") and how that instruction compounds over time. By studying various texts (toys, magazines, blogs, tweets, television shows, Hollywood films, novels, and self-help books) they argue that popular culture exists as a type of funhouse mirror constantly distorting the real world conditions that exist for women, magnifying the gendered expectations they face. Despite the many problematic, conflicting messages women receive throughout their lives, this book also showcases the ways such messages are resisted, allowing women to move past the blurry realitythey broadcast and toward, hopefully, gender equality."

Full Product Details

Author:   Melissa Ames ,  Sarah Burcon
Publisher:   Palgrave Macmillan
Imprint:   Palgrave Macmillan
Edition:   1st ed. 2016
Dimensions:   Width: 14.00cm , Height: 1.80cm , Length: 21.60cm
Weight:   4.827kg
ISBN:  

9781137566171

ISBN 10:   1137566175
Pages:   291
Publication Date:   08 March 2016
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction. Funhouse Mirrors: Popular Culture's Distorted View of Girl/Womanhood 1. Becoming a Girl: Pop Culture's First Stage of Gender Training 2. Reading between the Lines: The Lessons Adolescent Girls Learn through Popular Young Adult Literature 3. The Gendered Self-Help Reel: How Romantic Comedies Instruct Women on Dating Dos and Don'ts 4. Selling Weddings and Producing Brides: Mediated Portrayals of that 'Perfect Day' 5. Love, American Style: Gendered Representations of Marriage in the Media 6. Nine Months of Fear & A Lifetime of Paranoia: The Hidden Effects of Pregnancy Manuals, Child Rearing Products & More 7. Changing the Playing (or Reading) Field: Reconceptualizing Motherhood through Humorous Parenting Texts 8. Pumas, and Cougars, and M.I.L.F.S., Oh My!: Popular Portrayals of Romance & Sexual Encounters Between 'The Older Woman' & Younger Man 9. Beyond the Hot Flashes: New Portrayals of Mature Women Conclusion. Exiting the Funhouse: Challenging Society's Lessons One Stage at a Time Bibliography 

Reviews

In this timely and accessible book, Ames (Eastern Illinois Univ.) and Burcon (Univ. of Michigan) use meta-analyses of audience studies, textual analyses of blogs, user comments and reviews of media texts and products, and one survey to analyze regressive popular cultural texts (e.g., films, toys, self-help books) and stereotypical representations of cisgender girls and women. ... Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. (T. E. Adams, Choice, Vol. 54 (3), November, 2016)

Melissa Ames and Sarah Burcon offer intelligent and incisive commentary on how the entirety of a woman's life is shaped by the pop culture we consume in their groundbreaking book, How Pop Culture Shapes the Stages of a Woman's Life. From examining how young girls are taught what a girl should look and act like in movies and television to the unnecessarily imposed rigors of self-help culture to the ways pop culture distort love and marriage, Ames and Burcon reveal the uncomfortable truth that women are never really free from harshly prescriptive messages. They reveal the importance of media literacy so that women can shape their identities in productive ways despite the overwhelming influence of pop culture. - Roxanne Gay In this timely and provocative book, Sarah Ames and Sarah Burcon illustrate the ways in which sexism, ageism, and restrictive gender roles continue to be sold to women of all ages via the media and popular culture. With chapters covering various phases of women's lives, from toddlers to mature women, addressing life events such as dating, weddings, and pregnancies, the authors provide a smart and sophisticated critique which challenges readers to re-think common tropes that equality has been achieved, and instead highlights the ways in which feminism is still necessary in this supposedly post-feminist age. - Kaitlyn Mendes

Author Information

Melissa Ames is an Associate Professor at Eastern Illinois University specializing in media studies, television scholarship, popular culture, feminist theory, and pedagogy. Her most recent and forthcoming publications include her books, Women and Language (2011) and Time in Television Narrative (2012); chapters in Grace Under Pressure: Grey's Anatomy Uncovered (2008), Writing the Digital Generation (2010), Bitten by Twilight (2010), and Manufacturing Phobias (2015); and articles in The Journal of Dracula Studies (2011), The Women and Popular Culture Encyclopedia (2012), The High School Journal (2013), The Journal of Popular Culture (2014), and Pedagogy (2017). Sarah Burcon is a Lecturer in the Program for Technical Communication at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She specializes in technical communication, feminist theory, popular culture, and linguistics. She has published in anthologies and encyclopedias, and her most recent publications include her books, Women and Language: Essays on Gendered Communication Across Media (2011), Fabricating the Body (2014); chapters in Time in Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality in 21st Century Programming (2012) and Revisiting the Past through Rhetorics of Memory and Amnesia (2011); and articles for Women and Popular Culture Encyclopedia (2014).

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