Abstract
From its early years until the mid-1990s, primetime television offered its mainstream family viewers a memorable array of sitcoms that privileged hilarious women, including I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyck Show, That Girl, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Phyllis, Maude, The Golden Girls, and Roseanne, among many others. While television in the postfeminist 1990s offered up conflicted women in Sex and the City and produced comic book-type heroines in campy shows such as Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it sold sexuality as agency and commodified women’s bodies in ways that the earlier shows never did. By the 2000s, the inheritors of these trailblazing women included anonymous dead women on crime shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The repetitive visualizations of murders and corpses of women in numerous television shows (and movies) throughout the 2000s visually “put women in their place” and naturalize their powerlessness in representation.
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Notes
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© 2014 Joanne Clarke Dillman
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Dillman, J.C. (2014). Television Narratives and Dead Women. In: Women and Death in Film, Television, and News. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137452283_4
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