Anuja Pradhan and Alev Kuruoglu talk about gender and representation issues in TV production - and in the writer's rooms. Shows like The Queen’s Gambit and Indian Matchmaking are put under the microscope. Consumer sociologist Carly Drake joins along the way.

Notes and reading tips:

“The Male Gaze”
It was Laura Mulvey who came up with this term, in in the essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Published in 1975, in the journal Screen - reprinted in the collection “Visual and Other Pleasures” in 1989)

The following are some sources if you would like to better understand engagement with and academic trajectories of this term:

Sassatelli, R. (2011). Interview with Laura Mulvey: Gender, gaze and technology in film culture. Theory, Culture & Society, 28(5), 123-143.

Cooper, B. (2000). “Chick flicks” as feminist texts: The appropriation of the male gaze in Thelma & Louise. Women's Studies in Communication, 23(3), 277-306.

Oliver, K. (2017). The male gaze is more relevant, and more dangerous, than ever. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 15(4), 451-455.

Benson-Allott, C. (2017). On Platforms: No Such Thing Not Yet: Questioning Television's Female Gaze. Film Quarterly, 71(2), 65-71.

Jones, A. (Ed.). (2003). The feminism and visual culture reader. Psychology Press.


Indian Feminist Scholars:

Mohanty, C.T. (1988) Under Western Eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Feminist Review. 30. 61-88.

Mohanty, C.T. (2003) “Under Western Eyes” revisited: Feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles. Signs. 28 (2). 499-535.

John, M. (2014) Feminist vocabularies in time and space: Perspectives from India. Economic and Political Weekly. 49(22). 121-130.


Gender and TV:

hooks, b. (2003). The oppositional gaze: Black female spectators. The feminism and visual culture reader, 94-105.

Nygaard, T., Lagerwey, J. (2020) Horrible White People: Gender, genre, and television's precarious whiteness. United States: NYU Press.

Tuncay Zayer, L., Sredl , K., Parmentier,M. & Coleman, C. (2012) Consumption and gender identity in popular media: Discourses of domesticity, authenticity, and sexuality. Consumption Markets & Culture, 15:4, 333-357.

Kandelwal, M. (2009) Arranging Love: Interrogating the vantage point in cross‐border feminism. Signs. 34(3). 583-609.

Cavender, G., Bond-Maupin, L. And Jurik, N. C. (1999) ‘The construction of gender in reality crime TV’, Gender & Society, 13(5), pp. 643–663. doi: 10.1177/089124399013005005.

D'Acci, Julie. 1994. Defining women: Television and the case of “Cagney and Lacey.” Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Green, S. (2019) Fantasy, gender and power in Jessica Jones, Continuum, 33:2, 173-184, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2019.1569383


General TV:

Fiske, John. 1987. Television culture. New York: Routledge Kegan Paul.