This article analyses, through a feminist media studies lens, the representations of corporate cultures portrayed within the Marvel series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022) produced for Disney+. The protagonist, Jennifer Walters, in both “normal Jen” and “She-Hulk” forms, is forced to navigate numerous gendered environments and expectations as part of working within the legal profession as a defence lawyer. The show, in line with popular forms of western fourth wave feminism engages with numerous contemporary gender issues, including women’s safety, expectations of normative femininity, workplace identity, and diversity work. This article explores how the character of Jen/She-Hulk, within the parameters of the superhero comedy form, provides a site for pop culture critique of the gendered aesthetic and emotional labour women undertake within corporate workplaces, as well as the diversity work expected of women and racially minoritised people. In a post #MeToo context the series makes sophisticated use of its comedic elements to humorously examine the pressures women experience when working in male-dominated corporate environments.
The conceptual fluidity of narrative in the children’s contemporary fantasy television series Trollhunters , from the Tales of Arcadia universe, emerges from techno-magic and non-human modes of being. Uncontainability and monstrous and object-mediated transformation define both aesthetic and subject matter. Creaturely humans, humane trolls, porous worlds and malleable realities, as well as magical objects transform that with which they come into contact. Contemporary iterations of established fantasy tropes, particularly the catalytic ‘thing’—offer useful insights into key aspects of posthuman childhood. Objects represent our affective orientation towards the world, and their talismanic quality foregrounds relational potential rather than depositing fixed meaning.
First broadcast on BBC One in 2013, Shetland has become the most high-profile and successful networked Scottish TV drama of recent years. In this article I examine the ways in which the show uses the conventions of crime drama to explore the specificity of Shetland as a place and a location, how it informs the plot lines and its relation to the main protagonist, DCI Jimmy Perez’s, sense of identity and belonging. This in turn indicates the importance of Shetland to both the vitality of this perennially popular genre and to questions of national representation and identity in post-devolutionary Scotland.
This article demonstrates how the seemingly mundane Swedish forest functions as a key spatial frame driving the narrative in a Swedish youth drama. Even though the forest is an uncommented part of the characters’ lifeworlds, it still affects the storyline by enabling key developments that would be improbable in other spatial frames. We demonstrate how the forest can be understood as a subtle border, a safe space, a place for unexpected meetings, and a venue for well-being. By tracing these themes, we argue that the forest is an uncommented spatial frame that advances plot and exposes tensions about class and identity in contemporary teen TV.
While Flemish travel programmes enjoy widespread popularity, the ways in which they negotiate representations of destinations, cultures, and populations remain largely underexplored. This paper examines representational strategies employed in four factual-entertaining Flemish travel programmes (2018-2022) using textual analysis. In addition, expert interviews (n = 4) were employed to examine how producers themselves frame and negotiate these representations. Our textual findings reveal how Flemish travel shows frequently reproduce stereotypical and reductive portrayals of other cultures. Insights from interviews suggest that these outcomes stem from the difficulty of balancing institutional constraints and genre constraints.
This article explores the UK significance of Netflix’s Adolescence in three areas. First is why Adolescence was commissioned for Netflix, a multinational subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) service, rather than for one of the UK’s PSBs and what this conveys about the current position of UK-produced high-end dramas and Netflix’s involvement in them. Second is the creative genesis of Adolescence and what narrative and aesthetic strategies were important to the story it tells. Third are the public outcomes of Adolescence , its connections with the UK’s PSB drama traditions, and the significance of its near-global release.
The popular Romanian sitcom Las Fierbinti serves as a cultural-ideological pedagogical instrument propagating urban middle-class and neoliberal values. The show ridicules semi-rural inhabitants, portraying them negatively and implying their inability to adapt to modern society. Multimodal critical discourse analysis reveals the sitcom's national-pedagogical objectives, which it pursues through promoting several key themes. The show explicitly supports national public policies, positioning them as triumphs over rural ignorance and scepticism. It also espouses cultural progressivism, while reinforcing neoliberal individualism by attributing economic stagnation to individual moral failure and a supposedly weak work ethic, imposing its ideas towards a form of cultural hegemony.
