Roz Kaveney - Nip/Tuck: Television That Gets Under Your Skin

Series Editors: Kim Akass and Janet McCabe

janetandkim@hotmail.com

The Reading Contemporary Television series offers a varied, intellectually groundbreaking and often polemical response to what is happening in television today. This series is distinct in that it sets out to immediately comment upon the TV zeitgeist while providing an intellectual and creative platform for thinking differently and ingeniously writing about contemporary television culture. The books in the series seek to establish a critical space where new voices are heard and fresh perspectives offered. Innovation is encouraged and intellectual curiosity demanded.

Published and forthcoming:

Mad Men: Dream Come True TV , edited by Gary R. Edgerton

Makeover Television: Realities Remodelled , edited by Dana Heller

Quality TV: American Television and Beyond , edited by Janet McCabe and Kim Akass

The Queer Politics of Television , by Samuel A. Chambers

Reading CSI: Television Under the Microscope , edited by Michael Allen

Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By , edited by David Lavery

Reading Desperate Housewives: Beyond the White Picket Fence , edited by Janet McCabe and Kim Akass

Reading Little Britain: Comedy Masters on Contemporary Television , edited by Sharon Lockyer

Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show , edited by Roberta Pearson

Reading Sex and the City , edited by Kim Akass and Janet McCabe

Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For , edited by Kim Akass and Janet McCabe

Reading The L Word: Outing Contemporary Television , edited by Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, with an Introduction by Sarah Warne

Reading The Sopranos: Hit TV from HBO , edited by David Lavery

Reading 24: Television Against the Clock , edited by Steven Peacock

Reading Ugly Betty: TVs Betty Goes Global , edited by Janet McCabe and Kim Akass

Regenerating Doctor Who , edited by David Mellor

Third Wave Feminism and Television: Jane Puts It in a Box , edited by Merri Lisa Johnson

Published in 2011 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd

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Distributed in the United States and Canada

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Copyright editorial selection 2011, Roz Kaveney and Jennifer Stoy

Copyright introduction 2011, Roz Kaveney

Individual chapters copyright 2011, Jenn Brandt, Mark W. Bundy, Erica D. Galioto, Isabel Cla Gins, Roz Kaveney, Susan Santha Kerns, Alison Peirse, Jennifer Stoy, Concepcin Cascajosa Virino

The right of Roz Kaveney and Jennifer Stoy to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent 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.

ISBN: 978 1 84511 862 4

eISBN: 978 0 85773 544 7

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

Typeset by Free Range Book Design & Production Limited, UK

To Our Surgeons

ROZ KAVENEY

ROZ KAVENEY

JENN BRANDT

ERICA D. GALIOTO

ALISON PEIRSE

MARK W. BUNDY

ISABEL CLA GINS

CONCEPCIN CASCAJOSA VIRINO

SUSAN SANTHA KERNS

ROZ KAVENEY

JENNIFER STOY

appendices

My thanks are due to Rob Hansen and Avedon Carol for persuading me to persevere with watching the first season of Nip/Tuck . Craig McGill and Nick Proimakis made it possible for me to watch some episodes I might not otherwise have seen. As usual, I would like to thank Philippa Brewster and all at I.B.Tauris, and Kim Akass and Janet McCabe for useful advice and help with the call for papers.

Thanks are also due to our contributors for putting up with a change of plan that made this a book about the entire run rather than just the first four seasons.

As always, my thanks to Paule for putting up with sudden silences, bursts of wild enthusiasm and the other inconveniences of living with a writer.

RK

My thanks to Hollywood Videos ninety-nine cent rental deal, without which I would have never started watching Nip/Tuck ; also to Melissa Stevenson and Kate Bolin, whose appreciation of good television and FX, respectively, led me to start watching the series. Also gratefully thanked are the editors and publishers at I.B.Tauris.

JS

Jenn Brandt holds an MA in popular culture from Bowling Green State University and is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Rhode Island. At URI, Jenn teaches for the Womens Studies programme and is finishing a dissertation that looks at the role of the body in the literature of 9/11.

Mark W. Bundy is Lecturer in English and Composition at the University of California, Riverside. His emphases include LGBTQ studies, the Gothic genre, Twentieth Century and Contemporary American Poetry, Art History, and Visual Culture/Media Studies. His other contributions to I.B.Tauriss Reading Contemporary Television series are included in Reading The L Word: Outing Contemporary Television (I.B.Tauris, 2006), Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (I.B.Tauris, 2005) and Reading Sex and the City (I.B.Tauris, 2004); he has an essay in the book EntreMundos/Among Worlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldua (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and he also wrote the topic entry of American Gay and Lesbian Poetry, which appears in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry , 5 vols (Greenwood, 2005).

Dr Erica D. Galioto is Assistant Professor of English at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches classes in American literature and psychoanalysis, English education, and writing. Her research focuses on a concept she calls real-world therapy: everyday experiences in fiction and life that occasion therapeutic effects outside a clinical setting. Split Skin: Adolescent Cutters and the Other is forthcoming in an edited collection entitled Skin, Culture, and Psychoanalysis .

Isabel Cla Gins obtained her PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona. She belongs to the research group Body and Textuality (SGR2009/65). Her research focuses on the study of gender and identity construction in fin-de-sicle European culture, which she develops within the research project Corpografas de la identidad. Estudio cultural del cuerpo como lugar de representacin genrico-sexual y tnica del sujeto (FFI-200909026), coordinated by the Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona. Also she investigates contemporary popular culture from the perspective of feminist cultural studies; this line is developed within the research project Feminismo y gnero en la cultura popular actual. Escritura de las mujeres en la literatura, cine y soportes audiovisuales en Espaa (19952007), funded by the Spanish Womens Institute (exp. nm. 091/07) and linked to the centre Dona i Literatura (UB).