Mad Women

White, Mimi

doi:10.5040/9780755698066.ch-0010

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…On the one hand, Mad Men ’s smoky, alcoholic atmosphere has encouraged claims that its pleasures are primarily escapist and potentially retrograde. It is a ‘regressive yet attractive U.S.A.’ (French, 2011), evoking ‘nostalgia for a world where men chain-smoked, wore suits and drank Martinis for lunch’ (p. 550) with ‘fetishistic fidelity to period detail’ (Taveira, 2012: 293) while creating ‘retro-lushness’ (White, 2011: 150). It transforms today’s medical and moral vices into yesterday’s shimmering luxuries, inviting viewers to identify with the patriarchal social norms and gendered aesthetic codes of the period (Kraus, 2011), attracting and seducing viewers with its glossy nostalgic exterior (Kraus, 2011).…”

Section: Mad Men and Nostalgiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Television audiences and transnational nostalgia:Mad Menin Israel

Tsapovsky¹,

Frosh

2015

Media, Culture & Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Nostalgia is a transnational condition. It not only describes temporal displacement from a vanished past but also spatial dislocation from a lost dwelling place: home. What happens, then, when the spatio-temporal dimensions of nostalgia are realigned by media globalization? Can the transnational consumption of media texts create memory-structures that allow viewers to feel ‘at home’ in a past that is not ‘theirs’? What might such a reconstitution of nostalgia tell us about practices of interpretation, recollection, and identification among media audiences? Addressing these questions, this article investigates the responses of Israeli television viewers to a purportedly nostalgic US drama series, Mad Men. In the process, it reemphasizes nostalgia’s spatial axis, while reframing nostalgia as a construct of viewer engagement rather than as a feature of media texts. Ultimately, it proposes that contemporary transnational nostalgia possesses a double structure: it is selective, acting as an emotional and cognitive resource consciously used by audiences to examine their present personal and socio-political realities; that very use, however, depends on a ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ in which the mediated pasts of distant societies are seamlessly experienced as a part of viewers’ proximate lifeworlds.

show abstract

Section: Mad Men and Nostalgiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Television audiences and transnational nostalgia:Mad Menin Israel

Tsapovsky¹,

Frosh

2015

Media, Culture & Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The explicit historical context is in fact a substantial part of the narrative strategy of Mad Men . The show counts on ‘historical markers to generate anticipation via retrospection, and interpretation, of narrative events’ (White, 2011: 153). Period objects and meticulously designed clothing work as historical markers as well.…”

Section: Travelling To the Past And Backmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Am I supposed to say how shocked I was?’ Audience responses to Mad Men

Agirre

2014

European Journal of Cultural Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This essay is the result of an audience research study of the US television series Mad Men. Based on the assumption that there is a postfeminist sensibility embedded within the show, the study uses data drawn from focus groups and email questionnaires with US, UK and Spanish viewers of Mad Men, to determine to what extent this sensibility is felt and shared -if at all -by different viewers. The essay concludes that the postfeminist sensibility might be an entrance gate to the show, but later engagement with the series differs, especially with regard to gender. Although the postfeminist spirit might have feminist consequences in female viewers' interpretations, male viewers tend to read the show in more unproblematic ways. On the other hand, national distinctions have turned out to be very slight.

show abstract

“…Of the three essays in the section on sexual politics and gender, Kim Akass and Janet McCabe ( 2011) come closest to the issues of performance and theatricality that are inseparable from Mad Men's interests in the conditions and possibilities for women in its world. In this respect, their essay is distinct from the two other contributions (White 2011;Haralovish 2011) through the dislocation between representation and critique, between silence and language," they write, "these women make visible the halting logic of our age of troubled emancipation with its diverse culture wars, uneasy legacy of second-wave feminism and the lingering trauma of 9/11" (2011,181). This sentence contains the unbalanced tension that characterises the essay as a whole.…”

Section: Overlooking Performance In Serial Dramamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The distinction of both series lies in 13 Both Mad Men and Homeland have been subject to considerable attention in both journalistic commentary and scholarship, where each -and especially Mad Men -is seen as a marker of the artistic ambition, cultural significance, and industrial value of signature serial drama during the mid-2000s. For examples of such discussion regarding Mad Men, see White (2011) Mendelsohn (2011, Stoddart (2011), Steinberg (2012), Goodlad, Kaganovsky, and Rushing (2013), Bartley (2014), Beail and Goren (2015), Sepinwall (2015), and Seitz (2017). On the cultural significance of Homeland in relation to its historical context of terrorism and national security, see Aleaziz (2011), Edgerton and Edgerton (2012), Steiner (2012), Bevan (2015), Castonguay (2015), Negra and Lagerwey (2015), Shapiro (2015), Steenberg and Tasker (2015), Zanger (2015), Echart and Castrillo (2016), and Letort (2017).…”

Section: Introduction: Claims Of Companionshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

The presence of performance and the stakes of serial drama: accrual, transience, companionship

Logan¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This thesis shows how performance is a critically neglected but crucial aspect of serial television drama as an art form. One of serial drama's obvious storytelling attractions is its ability to involve viewers in relationships between characters over long periods of time. Such involvement takes place through a recurring structure of episodes and seasons, whose unfolding reflects the extensive, ongoing history through which interpersonal bonds form and develop, deepen and decay. The characters we watch onscreen are embodied and performed by actors. Television studies, however, has persistently overlooked screen performance, hampering appreciation of serial drama's affinity with long-term relationships as a resource for aesthetic significance. Redressing such neglect, this thesis directs new critical attention to expressive stylistic relationships between serial form, screen performance, and the subject of companionship in some recent US serial dramas.The focus of that attention is a particular aesthetic quality: the provisional, which emerges through serial drama's distinctive tension between permanence and transience. In the first chapter, I argue that the provisional is central to an affinity between screen performance, seriality in television drama, and companionship as an aspect of human life. Chapters Two and Three then show how the art of the provisional in particular series has been underappreciated due to television studies' neglect of performance and expressiveness as dimensions of serial form in television fiction. The final two chapters of the thesis highlight contrasting treatments of provisionality, performance, and the survival of social bonds in two critically celebrated US dramas of the mid-2000s: Mad Men (AMC, 2007-15) and Homeland (Showtime, 2011-19). In doing so, this thesis illuminates the significance and value to be found in an under-explored dimension of experience made available by performance in particular serial dramas. Its original contribution is to highlight overlooked features of this medium whose potential aesthetic significance should be a priority for the criticism of serial drama in television studies.

show abstract

Mad Women

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Television audiences and transnational nostalgia:Mad Menin Israel

Television audiences and transnational nostalgia:Mad Menin Israel

‘Am I supposed to say how shocked I was?’ Audience responses to Mad Men

The presence of performance and the stakes of serial drama: accrual, transience, companionship

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About