Mediating the Family: Gender, Culture and Representation

Taking as its starting point the ‘problem’ of how the family has been
mediated in popular film, television, literature and social policy over
the last 50 years, Mediating the Family: Gender, Culture and
Representation explores the ways in which struggles over sexuality,
identity, gender and power have informed the conceptualisation and
representation of the family as an institution and as a site of
discursive complexity.

Mediating the Family: Gender,
Culture and Representation ‘unpacks the family’, looking in detail at
the different generational and identificatory components: motherhood,
fatherhood, adolescence and childhood. Using theoretical and critical
frameworks from cultural studies, sociology, textual analysis and
cultural history, and drawing on original research, case studies and
critical analysis from a range of sources from around the world, the
book examines the relationship between the intersecting discourses of
youth; childhood innocence; post-war companionate marriage; ‘bad’
families; and entrepreneurial femininity in the 1980s in order to
interrogate the representation - and - reinvention of the family.

Mediating
the Family: Gender, Culture and Representation is an important
intervention in debates about family relationships and will be essential
reading for scholars and students of cultural, film and media studies,
sociology and cultural history.