Adorno, T. (1993) The culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception, in S. During (ed.) The Cultural Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Altman, R. (1999) Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute. Ang, I. (1991) Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge. Ang, I. (1996) Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World. London: Routledge. […]

1995 25%   Figure A1 Percentage of sex documentaries by year, 1995-2001 (Source: BUFVC television documentaries database)   Animal Planet 1 BBC 1 9 BBC 2 57 BBC Choice 9 BBC Knowledqe 3 Bravo 222 Channel 4 101 Channel 5 36 Discovery 6 History 1 ITV 27 ITV 2 4 Living 164 Geoqraphic 1 Sky […]

Aesthetics A set of principles of good taste and the appreciation of beauty (Oxford English Dictionary). It is used to describe and evaluate the form and style in which representations are embodied — in semiotic terms the ‘signifiers’ as opposed to the ‘signified’. In cultural studies the emphasis is on how these criteria of aesthetic […]

The transition to digital television is taking place across the globe, albeit in diverse local contexts. For those countries with a tradition in public service television fears of a rampant commercialism accompany these changes. The UK is developing its digital services ahead of many of its global competitors, making, perhaps, the British response to these […]

I have argued that television clearly has a significant role to play in the development of sexual citizenship and that there is a legitimate ‘public interest’ in the forms of representation made available that shouldn’t simply be left to market relations. The historical formation of taste means that generic conventions constrain the pro­duction and consumption […]

Drawing conclusions when writing about television is a seemingly impossible task. It eludes any comprehensive overview. Its ubiquity can only be viewed from a very limited perspective and its open-ended flow makes conclusions inevitably provisional. This book is best understood in the same way as the programmes it has been discussing; that is, in relation […]

Feminist evaluations of Sex and the City have conflated it with other examples of postfeminist culture in which comedy and satire has replaced any serious, ethical commitment to challenging the power relations of patriarchy, a challenge that they argue is undermined by complicit critique. The postfeminist irony in texts such as Bridget Jones or Ally […]

The almost exclusive focus on sexual relationships and consumption in Sex and the City speaks to the cultural influence in the 1990s of the ‘bourgeois bohemians’. This class fraction has, David Brooks (2000) argues, replaced the yuppies as the new culturally dominant class in the USA (and other developed economies). The key feature of this […]

The ‘new’ media depend for their success on their ability to ‘remediate’ — that is, ‘adapt to a new medium’ — the forms that are already established in the ‘old’ media. The relationship also works in the opposite direction, with earlier technologies ‘struggling to maintain their legitimacy by remediating newer ones’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: […]

Postfeminism is an ambiguous term in that it can imply both a continuity and a break with the second wave feminism that preceded it. ‘Post’ means ‘after’, and we can therefore simply understand the term as the multiple responses to the political challenges posed by the feminist movement of the 1970s. Generation is one of […]