| This dissertation examines how American film and television romance narratives produced since the early 1980s have become sites for reflection on and negotiation of post-feminist cultural and political discourses. Despite the fact that this period has seen the broader acceptance of second wave feminism and alternative views of gender and sexual preference, traditional romance narratives (i.e., those that present love, romance, and marriage as integral to a woman's sense of self worth) not only have resurfaced as the primary means of representing women and eliciting female spectatorship but they also have become the central cultural narrative form through which progressive and regressive trends in contemporary post-feminist identity politics are negotiated.; Taking into consideration the social, historical, and political milieu of the post-feminist era in conjunction with close analyses of characteristics and trends in film, television, and other media romance texts produced since 1980, this project has three main objectives: first, to identify the structure of contemporary romance narratives; second, to explore the tension between traditional and progressive notions of femininity and female subjectivity that play out in the external and internal discourses of contemporary romance narratives; and, third, to examine how trends and tendencies in contemporary romance narratives have been instrumental in creating and perpetuating post-feminist discourses (including the trans-media discourse of the post-feminist "chick" text; film and television romantic comedies and romantic thrillers that bifurcate romance and sexuality into mutually exclusive categories; and texts that are preoccupied with issues of temporality and its impact on female subjectivity). |
