Books Aren’t Dead (BAD) interview for October 2014 is now uploaded on the Fembot website. In this month’s interview Lauren DeCarvalho (assistant professor, University of Arkansas) talks with Diane Negra (professor, University College Dublin) and Yvonne Tasker (professor, University of East Anglia), coeditors of Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in the Age of Austerity (Duke University Press, 2014). You can listen to this interview here <http://fembotcollective.org/blog/2014/10/15/books-arent-dead-gendering-the-recession-media-and-culture-in-the-age-of-austerity/>.
The podcast and the transcript for this interview (as well as BAD’s past interviews) will be available for download in the near future. BAD is Fembot’s series of monthly interviews with feminist authors of recent books on media, science, and technology. For those who are interested in participating in the ongoing BAD project please contact the BAD editor, Hye Jin Lee (hj.hyejin.lee@gmail.com), or Carol Stabile (carol.stabile@gmail.com).
About Gendering the Recession (from the Duke University Press Website):
This timely, necessary collection of essays provides feminist analyses of a recession-era media culture characterized by the reemergence and refashioning of familiar gender tropes, including crisis masculinity, coping women, and postfeminist self-renewal. Interpreting media forms as diverse as reality television, financial journalism, novels, lifestyle blogs, popular cinema, and advertising, the contributors reveal gendered narratives that recur across media forms too often considered in isolation from one another. They also show how, with a few notable exceptions, recession-era popular culture promotes affective normalcy and transformative individual enterprise under duress while avoiding meaningful critique of the privileged white male or the destructive aspects of Western capitalism. By acknowledging the contradictions between political rhetoric and popular culture, and between diverse screen fantasies and lived realities, Gendering the Recession helps to make sense of our postboom cultural moment.
About the Editors:
Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture and Head of Film Studies at University College Dublin. She is the author, editor or co-editor of nine books including the forthcoming Extreme Weather and Global Media (with Julia Leyda, Routledge, 2015). In 2015 she will take up co-editorship of Television and New Media.
Yvonne Tasker is Professor of Film and Television Studies and Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of East Anglia. She is author, editor or coeditor of a number of books including the focus of this podcast (with Diane Negra) Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity (Duke University Press, 2014). Her Hollywood Action and Adventure Cinema will be published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2015. Yvonne is currently working on projects across three areas: crime television, the culture visibility of women filmmakers, and questions of culture and inequality.
About the Interviewer:
Lauren J. DeCarvalho is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Arkansas, where she teaches film and media studies. Her research interests focus on gender constructions and other representational issues in television, especially the intersection of gender and economics against the backdrop of the most recent recession. Currently, she is examining Orange is the New Black, but she has written previously on Sons of Anarchy, Girls, and Enlightened, among others.
