Sujata Moorti is Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont. She is currently completing a manuscript, iFeminism: Social Media and Activist Re-Imaginings, analyzing the transnational socialities enabled by digital media. Her publications include Color of Rape: Gender and Race in Televisions Public Spheres (2003) and two co-edited volumes. She has also written extensively on the South Asian diaspora and critical race theories.
Lisa Cuklanz is Professor and Chair of the Communication Department at Boston College. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, Director of Womens Studies at Boston College, and co-chaired the Graduate Consortium in Womens Studies. She has published extensively on representations of rape in American television and news media, including Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence (2000).
Moorti and Cuklanzs book illustrates the necessity and value of analyzing those kinds of long-running, well-watched TV series often disqualified from academic canons. Their study of Law & Order SVU brilliantly illuminates its hybridization of melodrama and police procedural, the ways it indexes shifts in US rape culture and its production of what the authors call a misogynist feminism.
Diane Negra, Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture, University College Dublin
Setting a US drama in relation to global issues, Moorti and Cuklanz provide yet another deep and insightful analysis of contemporary mainstream popular culture. Through Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Cuklanz and Moorti conduct the utterly necessary task of bringing together an optivc of race, gender, and the global to bear on this massively popular television show with a global audience. This book will immediately become a major resource for those researching and teaching in issues of television studies once more underscoring that television is by no means dead. As well as this book, previous work by Moorti and Cuklanz makes an absolutely essential contribution to studies of gender, race, media, and violence.
Angharad N. Valdivia, Professor of Media and Cinema Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Library of Gender and Popular Culture
From Mad Men to gaming culture, performance art to steam-punk fashion, the presentation and representation of gender continues to saturate popular media. This new series seeks to explore the intersection of gender and popular culture, engaging with a variety of texts drawn primarily from Art, Fashion, TV, Cinema, Cultural Studies and Media Studies as a way of considering various models for understanding the complementary relationship between gender identities and popular culture. By considering race, ethnicity, class, and sexual identities across a range of cultural forms, each book in the series will adopt a critical stance towards issues surrounding the development of gender identities and popular and mass cultural products.
For further information or enquiries, please contact the library series editors:
Claire Nally: claire.nally@northumbria.ac.uk
Angela Smith: angela.smith@sunderland.ac.uk
Advisory Board:
Dr Kate Ames, Central Queensland University, Australia
Prof Leslie Heywood, Binghampton University, USA
Dr Michael Higgins, Strathclyde University, UK
Prof sa Kroon, rebro University, Sweden
Dr Niall Richardson, Sussex University, UK
Dr Jacki Willson, Central St Martins, University of Arts London, UK
Published and forthcoming titles:
Ageing Femininity on Film: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema
Niall Richardson
All-American TV Crime Drama: Feminism and Identity Politics in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
Sujata Moorti and Lisa Cuklanz
Beyonc, Feminism and Popular Culture
Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs
Female Bodies and Performance in Film: Queer Encounters with Embodiment and Affect
Katharina Lindner
Framing the Single Mother: Gender, Politics and Family Values in Contemporary Popular Cinema
Louise Fitzgerald
Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity
John Mercer
Gender and Economics in Popular Culture: Femininity, Masculinity and Austerity in Film and TV
Helen Davies and Claire OCallaghan (eds)
Gendering History on Screen: Women Filmmakers and Historical Films
Julia Erhart
Girls Like This, Boys Like That: The Reproduction of Gender in Contemporary Youth Cultures
Victoria Cann
Love Wars: Television Romantic Comedy
Mary Irwin
Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future
Marianne Kac-Vergne
Paradoxical Pleasures: Female Submission in Popular and Erotic Fiction
Anna Watz
Positive Images: Gay Men and HIV/AIDS in the Popular Culture of Post-Crisis
Dion Kagan
Queer Horror Film and Television: Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins
Darren Elliott-Smith
Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy
Shane Brown
Steampunk: Gender and the Neo-Victorian
Claire Nally
Television Comedy and Femininity: Queering Gender
Rosie White
Television, Technology and Gender: New Platforms and New Audiences
Sarah Arnold
Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture
Melanie Kennedy
Published in 2017 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London New York
www.ibtauris.com
Copyright 2017 Sujata Moorti and Lisa Cuklanz
The right of Sujata Moorti and Lisa Cuklanz to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by the them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.
References to websites were correct at the time of writing.
Library of Gender and Popular Culture 7
ISBN: 978 1 78453 429 5
eISBN: 9 78 1 78672 161 7
ePDF: 978 1 78673 161 6
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
