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Research Centre for Gender Studies

Fathers of the Nation: White Masculinities and Fatherhood in Contemporary U.S.-American Television Series (2001-2015)

Name of the project

Fathers of the Nation: White Masculinities and Fatherhood in Contemporary U.S.-American Television Series (2001-2015)

Collaborators/Participants

Sandra Becker ( s.becker rug.nl ), PhD candidate in American Studies

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Michael Stewart Foley (Université Grenoble Alpes), Dr. Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University), and Dr. Tim Jelfs (University of Groningen)

What are you currently working on? And how is a gender and diversity perspective important to your research?

My PhD project focuses on analyzing the portrayals of white, heterosexual, father-figure protagonists in recent U.S.-American cable TV series, such as Breaking Bad, Dexter, The Walking Dead, Masters of Sex, and Hung. I argue that these series’ depictions of fatherhood reflect both a peculiar cultural zeitgeist in the early twenty-first century United States, troubled by the gendered twin crises of 9/11 and the Great Recession, and a deeper-rooted, cyclical nostalgia that has repeatedly resurfaced in times of change and uncertainty in the U.S.Approaching the corpus of series often labeled as “Quality TV” or “Complex TV” and their male lead protagonists from an American Studies perspective, and thus reading them against the backdrop of longer cultural historic developments in the United States (and the Western world), helps me to reflect upon and dismantle the well-established discourses that surround both the medium television in the digital age and the prominent narrative of the “crisis of masculinity,” which permeates 20th- and 21st-century U.S. cultural history.

The project idea stems from my MA thesis research, which investigated the depiction of Latino characters in U.S.-American crime TV series and its reception by Mexican students via focus group interviews. These were conducted during a four-month research stay at the Centro de Investigación en Comunicación e Información (CINCO), at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Nuevo León, Mexico in 2012. Upon graduation, I decided to shift my focus onto the portrayal of the often overlooked white, male majority and the central aspect of fatherhood in contemporary U.S.-American drama TV series (2001-2015).

Although my current research engages with white, heterosexual, cisgender, male fathers, their depiction within the respective fictional series always has to be analyzed with respect to their interactions with other characters: people of color, women, and LGBTQ characters. It is moreover essential to read these depictions against the broader field of recent TV series beyond Quality TV drama series. My project therefore also tackles questions, as for instance: Do these allegedly more “transgressive” Quality TV series allow for a wider character spectrum and complex female roles, such as female “anti-heroes”? Or in how far do the portrayals of LGBTQ characters in comedy-drama series, such as HBO’s Hung, or the ABC sitcom Modern Family, meet the criteria of The Vito Russo Test, as demanded by the U.S.-American media monitoring NGO GLAAD?

Last modified:14 February 2019 06.05 a.m.