INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILY LIFE: MEDIA AND CULTURAL STUDIES

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INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILY LIFE
MEDIA AND CULTURAL STUDIES

• KEY FOCUS PERSPECTIVES
• Critique of the nuclear ideal
• Ideologies and popular cultural representations
  of romance, domesticity, childhood, parenting,
  sexuality, identity belonging. about kinship,
  sexuality, parenting
• Representations of family domestic units in
  popular film, TV, literature, social policy
• How sexuality, identity, gender, power have
  informed the conceptualisation and representation
  of the family as an institution

• THEORETICAL APPROACHES
• Psychoanalysis, critical psychology
• Queer theory (Butler, Weeks, Plummer
• Feminist cultural analysis (McRobbie, van
  Zoonen,)
• Social theory (Giddens Beck, Foucault).
• TOPICS
• Discourses of family crisis (teenage sex,
  rising divorce rates, civil partnerships)
• Sexual politics
• Changing masculinities and femininities
• Changes in household types Post divorce
  families, families of choice, co-habitation
• Representations of fatherhood and motherhood in
  films/TV
• Teenage sexual morality.

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CASE STUDIES METHODOLOGIES FOR STUDYING
FAMILY IN MEDIA CULTURAL STUDIES

• Cultural texts womens magazines, TV soaps,
  films, popular fiction,
• Lived Cultures youth culture, family life,
  parenting, lesbian gay cultures.
• Social and cultural institutions (eg. that tend
  to uphold the nuclear ideal) education, medical
  science, the church, the media.
• Global/transnational scope eg. population
  studies, the politics of fertility

• Textual analysis discourse analysis, semiotics,
  content analysis (literary, linguistic bases
• Textual and ethnographic (derived from
  anthropology, literary studies, film studies,
  sociology)
• Ethnography/interviews, political economy,
  textual eg. policy documents (sociology,
  literary)
• Cultural geography
• feminist development studies,
• post-colonialist theory