Bargains! PROMOTIONS
Anna Marie Bautista is lecturer in american studies, gender studies, and comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong.
""""Five years after the #MeToo movement roiled the world of entertainment, Anna Marie Bautista makes a crucia, l critical intervention by highlighting the role '""conspicuous feminism""' plays in female-centered television series such as The Handmaid's Tale, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Big Little Lies, and Insecure. Drawing on a wide range of feminist media scholarship, the book focuses on the most salient issues currently circulating throughout American popular culture involving femininity, domesticity, consumerism, racial differences, and class mobility. This is cutting-edge feminist scholarship that places #MeToo and contemporary American popular culture in a dramatic new light."""" --Gina Marchetti, Pratt Institute ""This timely treatment of prestige TV series from the past decade brings the concerns of the #MeToo movement into conversation with contemporary patterns of conspicuous consumption in the digital age. Using the term ""conspicuous feminism,"" Bautista merges Veblen's concept of ""conspicuous consumption"" with Banet-Weiser's designation of ""popular feminism,"" which emphasizes highly visible political support in the mass media and commodity spheres that ultimately falls short of meaningful challenges to the deeper structures maintaining a status quo of gendered power relations. After a chapter on the televisual history of feminist issues on TV beginning in the 1960s, the book studies the prestige streaming series Big Little Lies, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Insecure, and The Handmaid's Tale. Bautista meticulously examines the plot and characterization of each show to demonstrate its intervention in feminist politics. Bautista lauds these shows for their commentary on the persistence of gender oppression. However, she worries that the commodification surrounding the shows and their need to appeal to straight, white, middle-class viewers results in a toothless critique that fails to meaningfully challenge the dominant power structures perpetuating all women's oppression. Recommended. Undergraduates through faculty and general readers."" --Choice Reviews
