Julia Leyda und Maria Sulimma haben für die diesjährige European Association for American Studies Conference in Constanta, Rumänien, ein Panel zu “Gender and “Quality” in American Television” organisiert. Des Weiteren halten Jennifer S. Clark von der Fordham University und Hannah Mueller von der Cornell University im Panel Vorträge.

Aus der Panelbeschreibung:

Responding to the immense popularity of certain US American television series within the categories of “quality” TV (QTV), the discipline of American Studies has increasingly turned to television as an object of research, thereby practicing the field’s characteristic interdisciplinarity as well as exploring implications of what it means to approach American Studies as Media Studies. In our panel we enter these discussions from the perspective of Gender Studies and Feminist Media Studies, to consider which conceptions of quality are ascribed to a variety of female-centered US television series (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Masters of Sex, Girls, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt).

From a feminist standpoint, we see that QTV series first earned prestige on the backs of male heroes and only then broadened to include women-centered shows such as those mentioned above. This panel’s goal is to elucidate notable features of female-centered QTV and to examine the difficulties inherent in this seemingly simple task; we will discuss the ways in which woman-centered programming often reveals the instabilities inherent in the term and to examine reasons for this breakdown of coherence around this contested concept.

Session 72: Gender and “Quality” in American Television

Chair: Maria Sulimma, Free University of Berlin, Germany

Maria Sulimma, Free University of Berlin, Germany: “Not That Kind of Girl: Television’s Troubled Relationship with Academia and TV Criticism”

Jennifer S. Clark, Fordham University, USA: “‘Mary Tyler Moore Can Sell Pantyhose, but How Can Mary Hartman Sell Anything?’: Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman as a Quality Soap Opera”

Hannah Mueller, Cornell University, USA: “The Inside of a Vagina: The Exploration of Female Sexuality in Masters of Sex”

Julia Leyda, Free University of Berlin, Germany: “Quality Cuteness: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”

Das Program und weitere Information finden sich unter: http://eaas2016.org/