Kristyn Gorton
Biographic Data
| ID | 642962 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kristyn Gorton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kristyn |
| FAMILY NAME | Gorton |
| SIGNATURE | GORTON K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of York |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7741-360X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 123 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Anxiety in defining the older woman in contemporary British television drama
‘Storytelling is storytelling’
This article explores the resilience of soap screenwriters and the resilient characters they create in soap opera through interviews with screenwriters on the Dublin-based soap opera Fair City (1989–present). The article also draws on an interview with Brigie de Courcy, executive producer of Fair City , to highlight the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on soap operas. The interview reveals inherent characteristics of the soap genre, including …
Histories and new directions
This is an introduction to the Special Issue, inspired by the Histories and New Directions: Soap Opera and Serial Narrative Research conference at the University of York in July 2017. The event was conceptualized and organized by the editors of this Special Issue to gather media and cultural studies scholars, and generate a scholarly dialogue on the historical issues, current status and future directions of serial narratives and soap opera as a g…
It was Bauhaus without realising we were Bauhaus
This working paper focuses on women in leadership roles in the Entertainment Department of BBC North, based at New Broadcasting House on Oxford Road, Manchester and subsequently at Media City UK. In so doing, it considers the role of the department's founder, Janet Street-Porter, and her leadership of the then Youth Programmes department in the late 80s/early 90s. Drawing on interviews with six women professionals who worked either during or just…
Don't let the bastards grind you down
This article explores the tension that lies in the construction of resilience, which is at once, hopeful and inspiring and yet also in danger of positioning the individual as responsible for the lack of welfare and support that is available. In articulating these contradictory readings, I treat The Handmaid's Tale as a 'site where the meaning of feminism(s) is produced and contested' (Ferreday and Harris, 2017: 240) and as a television text whose…
Sally Wainwright
Remembering British Television
This original book asks how, in an age of convergence, when ‘television’ no longer means a box in the corner of the living room that we sit and watch together, do we remember television of the past? How do we gather and archive our memories? Kristyn Gordon and Joanne Garde-Hansen explore these questions through first person interviews with TV producers, curators and archivists, and case studies of popular television series and fan communities suc…
Enlightened melodrama
This essay explores Enlightened (HBO, 2011-2013) in relation to recent scholarly developments in our understanding of melodrama and television, particularly in work by Linda Williams and Jason Mittell. It argues that the series offers an example of the kind of 'politically efficiacous' drama that Williams finds in The Wire through attention to its use of excess. Dismissed in some part because of its association with soap operas, excess, as a feat…
Feeling Northern
This article analyses a recent television drama written by Sally Wainwright in order to explore notions of Northernness, gender and class. I consider to what extent Wainwright is expanding and revising current perceptions of the North, and more specifically of Northern women, through an analysis of her recent television programme, Happy Valley. Wainwright’s work shares characteristics of the British social realist television drama from the late 5…
Walking the line between saint and sinner
This article considers how the notion of care, whether as an act of kindness or as a moral ethics, is reflected and worked through in the contemporary American television series, Nurse Jackie (2009-2015). Nurse Jackie, a comedy drama set in a fictional Catholic New York City Hospital, explores the 'line between saint and sinner', in the life of an emergency room (ER) nurse. This article considers how Jackie's character negotiates moral boundaries…
Single Women in Popular Culture
In Sex and the City: The Movie (2008) Carrie tells Charlotte and Miranda the news of her engagement to “Big” over lunch at a crowded restaurant. Charlotte reacts with a loud scream and then stands
Paul Abbott
Social Media, Happiness, and Virtual Communities
We share therefore we are: likes, retweets, acceptance, followers, friends, connected, linked, networked, gifting, and everything is connected to everything . These are just some of the buzzwords and phrases of our socially mediated economy, which circulates around notions of ‘open happiness’ (Coca-Cola), your ‘happy place’ (Campbell’s Soup), or ‘make room for happiness’ and long-standing messages of ‘I’m lovin’ it’ and the Happy Meal (McDonald’s…
Screening Emotion
A common distinction made between televisions and computer screens is that for the television you lean back and for the computer you lean forward. Indeed msnbc’s tagline is: ‘It’s time to lean forward’: ‘to lean forward is to think bigger, listen closer, fight smarter and act faster’ ( www.msnbc.msn.com /id/39310817/ — United States). Leaning back implies a lack of interaction and participation, while leaning forward suggests engagement and agenc…
Emo-Techno-Ecology
In her book A Paradise Built on Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (2009), Rebecca Solnit does not hold back on her anger at what she describes as the fear-mongering US news reports of gangs, marauders, looters, and rapists (read ‘black’, she claims) that were seen to underwrite disaster reporting about Hurricane Katrina in 2005. According to Solnit, the rescue operation became a state and civilian armed kettling to save p…
Theorizing Emotion and Affect
Scholars attempting to cover the history of research on emotion often chart a course through work by Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, Sigmund Freud, and William James. These names become anchoring points in a chronological overview of emotion as a concept. Of course, like all broad-brush attempts to survey such a vast and complicated area, they leave out several other important scholars, such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Silvan S. Tomkins, and Raymond Wi…
Global Emotion
In ‘How the Internet Gets Inside Us’, New Yorker critic Adam Gopnik explored the tensions between the technophobes and technophiles, as both groups have something to say about the ‘cognitive entanglement’ of humans and technology. He commented that if television produced the global village, the Internet produces the global psyche, with ‘everyone keyed in like a neuron, so that to the eyes of a watching Martian we are really part of a single plane…
The Hate and Shame of Women’s Bodies Online
Beverley Skeggs (2001) has argued that women (and especially working-class women) use femininity and the female body as a form of cultural capital. Without the ability to gain capital in other arenas, their bodies and their appearance are their main resource. From a feminist perspective, this goes some way towards explaining the predominance of a culture of consumption around the aesthetics of female body parts, from body modifications and the co…
Conclusion
In the mid 1980s, the authors (at the time children) were playing PacMan and Asteroids on their first family computers. By 1990, we were sending our first e-mails as college students and worshipping the cut-and-paste function. In the mid-1990s we purchased our own PCs, Macs, and mobile phones. In late 2006, one of the authors opened a Facebook account and used screen shots in lectures to show undergraduates just what this new website could do. By…
Emotion Online
Travelling through theories of emotion and affect, this book addresses the key ways in which media studies can be brought to bear upon everyday encounters with online cultures and practices. The book
From Old Media Whore to New Media Troll
On the 18 January, 2009, an online pop music fan posted over fifty outtake images from Madonna's photographic shoot for her previously released Hard Candy album. These photos produced a backlash of abuse of the then fifty-year-old Madonna from music fans and can be situated in a wider online discursive sphere of brutal and offensive critique of Madonna's ageing body and femininity in social networking sites such as Facebook, for example. While lo…
Emotional Rescue
This chapter employs textual analysis in order to focus on three examples of television programmes often referred to as 'quality' television drama: ER, The Sopranos, and State of Play. Concentrating on specific scenes, this chapter considers what formal qualities make these programmes so emotionally engaging to their viewers. For example, this chapter argues that editing is crucial to establishing emotion in ER. Other formal qualities such as mus…
Personal Meanings, Fandom and Sitting Too Close to the Television
This chapter focuses on the meaning fans, readers and critics give to particular television texts, the affective dimensions of this 'meaning making,' and considers a way to rethink the 'dangers' of 'sitting too close to the tele'. It draws on work by David Bordwell, Michel de Certeau and Henry Jenkins in particular. It also considers new theories on fandom and the relationship between consumerism and television viewing practices.
Introduction
The introduction considers the importance of television studies as an academic discipline. It refers to the way in which the study of television has often been devalued and seeks to reiterate its importance within academic studies. The introduction also considers the guilt people often experience watching television and discusses new viewing practices, such as watching television series on DVD box sets.
Feminising Television
This chapter consider how the mother figure in two television programmes, Brothers and Sisters and Sex Feet Under, is used to draw out emotional and intimate details from the ensemble cast. The chapter argues that in centring on the mother figure and her relationship to her children, the series both foreground the affective attachments within families and the dramas that come from such close bonds. This chapter also considers the way in which fem…
Theorizing emotion and affect
There is a long history of theoretical work on emotion and affect. Indeed Ann Cvetkovich argues that ‘the representation of social problems as affective dilemmas can be traced to its origins in eighteenthand nineteenth-century culture’ (1992: 2). More recently, in the 1980s, feminist theorists such as Lila Abu-Lughod (1986), Arlie Russell Hochschild (1985), bell hooks (1989), Alison Jaggar (1989), Audre Lorde (1984), Elizabeth Spelman (1989) and …
Emotion Online
Travelling through theories of emotion and affect, this book addresses the key ways in which media studies can be brought to bear upon everyday encounters with online cultures and practices. The book
Media Audiences
Media Audiences
An engaging and original study of current research on television audiences and the concept of emotion, this book offers a unique approach to key issues within television studies. Topics discussed include: television branding; emotional qualities in television texts; audience reception models; fan cultures; 'quality' television; television aesthetics; reality television; individualism and its links to television consumption. The book is divided in…
Desire, Duras, and Melancholia
This article considers how the concept of desire can be theorized in light of recent work on emotion and affect. In so doing, it questions what desire does and how desire can be theorized, particularly within cinema. Instead of arguing that we must move away from a psychoanalytic interpretation of desire, I ask how this approach can be revitalized and reconsidered through work on affect. This article also highlights the way in which Lacanian and …
From Old Media Whore to New Media Troll
On the 18 January, 2009, an online pop music fan posted over fifty outtake images from Madonna's photographic shoot for her previously released Hard Candy album. These photos produced a backlash of abuse of the then fifty-year-old Madonna from music fans and can be situated in a wider online discursive sphere of brutal and offensive critique of Madonna's ageing body and femininity in social networking sites such as Facebook, for example. While lo…
Don't let the bastards grind you down
This article explores the tension that lies in the construction of resilience, which is at once, hopeful and inspiring and yet also in danger of positioning the individual as responsible for the lack of welfare and support that is available. In articulating these contradictory readings, I treat The Handmaid's Tale as a 'site where the meaning of feminism(s) is produced and contested' (Ferreday and Harris, 2017: 240) and as a television text whose…
Enlightened melodrama
This essay explores Enlightened (HBO, 2011-2013) in relation to recent scholarly developments in our understanding of melodrama and television, particularly in work by Linda Williams and Jason Mittell. It argues that the series offers an example of the kind of 'politically efficiacous' drama that Williams finds in The Wire through attention to its use of excess. Dismissed in some part because of its association with soap operas, excess, as a feat…
Walking the line between saint and sinner
This article considers how the notion of care, whether as an act of kindness or as a moral ethics, is reflected and worked through in the contemporary American television series, Nurse Jackie (2009-2015). Nurse Jackie, a comedy drama set in a fictional Catholic New York City Hospital, explores the 'line between saint and sinner', in the life of an emergency room (ER) nurse. This article considers how Jackie's character negotiates moral boundaries…
IV. `Why I Love Carmela Soprano
From the closet to the screen
The Point of View of Shame?
This article examines the question of woman in contemporary European cinema through an engagement with post-feminist theory and with French film director Catherine Breillat's Romance (1999) and Anatomy of Hell (2004). What comes through recent work within feminist film criticism is a desire to change the conceptual frameworks that have held ‘woman’ in place over the last thirty years. However, this article suggests that doing so needs to involve …
Theorizing emotion and affect
There is a long history of theoretical work on emotion and affect. Indeed Ann Cvetkovich argues that ‘the representation of social problems as affective dilemmas can be traced to its origins in eighteenthand nineteenth-century culture’ (1992: 2). More recently, in the 1980s, feminist theorists such as Lila Abu-Lughod (1986), Arlie Russell Hochschild (1985), bell hooks (1989), Alison Jaggar (1989), Audre Lorde (1984), Elizabeth Spelman (1989) and …
There's No Place like Home
Desire, Duras, and Melancholia
This article considers how the concept of desire can be theorized in light of recent work on emotion and affect. In so doing, it questions what desire does and how desire can be theorized, particularly within cinema. Instead of arguing that we must move away from a psychoanalytic interpretation of desire, I ask how this approach can be revitalized and reconsidered through work on affect. This article also highlights the way in which Lacanian and …
Emotional Rescue
This chapter employs textual analysis in order to focus on three examples of television programmes often referred to as 'quality' television drama: ER, The Sopranos, and State of Play. Concentrating on specific scenes, this chapter considers what formal qualities make these programmes so emotionally engaging to their viewers. For example, this chapter argues that editing is crucial to establishing emotion in ER. Other formal qualities such as mus…
Personal Meanings, Fandom and Sitting Too Close to the Television
This chapter focuses on the meaning fans, readers and critics give to particular television texts, the affective dimensions of this 'meaning making,' and considers a way to rethink the 'dangers' of 'sitting too close to the tele'. It draws on work by David Bordwell, Michel de Certeau and Henry Jenkins in particular. It also considers new theories on fandom and the relationship between consumerism and television viewing practices.
Introduction
The introduction considers the importance of television studies as an academic discipline. It refers to the way in which the study of television has often been devalued and seeks to reiterate its importance within academic studies. The introduction also considers the guilt people often experience watching television and discusses new viewing practices, such as watching television series on DVD box sets.
Feminising Television
This chapter consider how the mother figure in two television programmes, Brothers and Sisters and Sex Feet Under, is used to draw out emotional and intimate details from the ensemble cast. The chapter argues that in centring on the mother figure and her relationship to her children, the series both foreground the affective attachments within families and the dramas that come from such close bonds. This chapter also considers the way in which fem…
Researching Emotion in Television
The final chapter considers how the industry values the concept of emotion by drawing on interviews with those working within the UK/Irish television industry. It begins with a consideration of the role of ethnography within television studies and outlines the initial set-up of a small-scale case study. In asking questions about emotion and its value within television industry, this chapter reiterates many of the theoretical assertions made in th…
IV. `Why I Love Carmela Soprano
Media Audiences
Media Audiences
An engaging and original study of current research on television audiences and the concept of emotion, this book offers a unique approach to key issues within television studies. Topics discussed include: television branding; emotional qualities in television texts; audience reception models; fan cultures; 'quality' television; television aesthetics; reality television; individualism and its links to television consumption. The book is divided in…
From Old Media Whore to New Media Troll
On the 18 January, 2009, an online pop music fan posted over fifty outtake images from Madonna's photographic shoot for her previously released Hard Candy album. These photos produced a backlash of abuse of the then fifty-year-old Madonna from music fans and can be situated in a wider online discursive sphere of brutal and offensive critique of Madonna's ageing body and femininity in social networking sites such as Facebook, for example. While lo…
Social Media, Happiness, and Virtual Communities
We share therefore we are: likes, retweets, acceptance, followers, friends, connected, linked, networked, gifting, and everything is connected to everything . These are just some of the buzzwords and phrases of our socially mediated economy, which circulates around notions of ‘open happiness’ (Coca-Cola), your ‘happy place’ (Campbell’s Soup), or ‘make room for happiness’ and long-standing messages of ‘I’m lovin’ it’ and the Happy Meal (McDonald’s…
Screening Emotion
A common distinction made between televisions and computer screens is that for the television you lean back and for the computer you lean forward. Indeed msnbc’s tagline is: ‘It’s time to lean forward’: ‘to lean forward is to think bigger, listen closer, fight smarter and act faster’ ( www.msnbc.msn.com /id/39310817/ — United States). Leaning back implies a lack of interaction and participation, while leaning forward suggests engagement and agenc…
Emo-Techno-Ecology
In her book A Paradise Built on Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (2009), Rebecca Solnit does not hold back on her anger at what she describes as the fear-mongering US news reports of gangs, marauders, looters, and rapists (read ‘black’, she claims) that were seen to underwrite disaster reporting about Hurricane Katrina in 2005. According to Solnit, the rescue operation became a state and civilian armed kettling to save p…
Theorizing Emotion and Affect
Scholars attempting to cover the history of research on emotion often chart a course through work by Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, Sigmund Freud, and William James. These names become anchoring points in a chronological overview of emotion as a concept. Of course, like all broad-brush attempts to survey such a vast and complicated area, they leave out several other important scholars, such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Silvan S. Tomkins, and Raymond Wi…
Global Emotion
In ‘How the Internet Gets Inside Us’, New Yorker critic Adam Gopnik explored the tensions between the technophobes and technophiles, as both groups have something to say about the ‘cognitive entanglement’ of humans and technology. He commented that if television produced the global village, the Internet produces the global psyche, with ‘everyone keyed in like a neuron, so that to the eyes of a watching Martian we are really part of a single plane…
The Hate and Shame of Women’s Bodies Online
Beverley Skeggs (2001) has argued that women (and especially working-class women) use femininity and the female body as a form of cultural capital. Without the ability to gain capital in other arenas, their bodies and their appearance are their main resource. From a feminist perspective, this goes some way towards explaining the predominance of a culture of consumption around the aesthetics of female body parts, from body modifications and the co…
Conclusion
In the mid 1980s, the authors (at the time children) were playing PacMan and Asteroids on their first family computers. By 1990, we were sending our first e-mails as college students and worshipping the cut-and-paste function. In the mid-1990s we purchased our own PCs, Macs, and mobile phones. In late 2006, one of the authors opened a Facebook account and used screen shots in lectures to show undergraduates just what this new website could do. By…
Emotion Online
Travelling through theories of emotion and affect, this book addresses the key ways in which media studies can be brought to bear upon everyday encounters with online cultures and practices. The book
Single Women in Popular Culture
In Sex and the City: The Movie (2008) Carrie tells Charlotte and Miranda the news of her engagement to “Big” over lunch at a crowded restaurant. Charlotte reacts with a loud scream and then stands
Paul Abbott
Feeling Northern
This article analyses a recent television drama written by Sally Wainwright in order to explore notions of Northernness, gender and class. I consider to what extent Wainwright is expanding and revising current perceptions of the North, and more specifically of Northern women, through an analysis of her recent television programme, Happy Valley. Wainwright’s work shares characteristics of the British social realist television drama from the late 5…
Sociology (23 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Art (15 works) · Media studies (15 works) · Media Studies and Communication (12 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · History (10 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (9 works)