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Full-Text Articles in Women's Studies
“Putting Out Fires”: An Original Situational Comedy Pilot Episode Examining Modern Motherhood, Keely Gonyea
“Putting Out Fires”: An Original Situational Comedy Pilot Episode Examining Modern Motherhood, Keely Gonyea
Honors College
Even in an age of easily accessible and ever-changing digital content, television remains one of the most influential modes of media. Shows, on television and on streaming services, play key roles in informing their audiences of societal conventions. Situational comedies are an easily identifiable genre on television and their popularity has not wavered as seen by their steadfast presence during primetime viewing slots. This thesis explores and analyzes how situational comedies have created spaces for potentially harmful stereotypes for their female characters, specifically mothers. The creative work of this thesis offers an original situational comedy pilot episode that looks to …
The Fat Female Bodies Of Saturday Night Live: Uncovering The Normative Cultural Power Of A Countercultural Comedy Institution, Katharine Cacace
The Fat Female Bodies Of Saturday Night Live: Uncovering The Normative Cultural Power Of A Countercultural Comedy Institution, Katharine Cacace
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Despite its reputation as one of the most countercultural and anti-establishment voices in mainstream television comedy, Saturday Night Live helps produce and reproduces cultural norms. Using weight and gender as a lens, this paper investigates Saturday Night Live’s methods of creating, imitating, and evoking the fat female body in order to limit female agency and police unruly female power. It contends that even the inclusion of nonnormative female bodies—fat bodies, queer bodies, and bodies of color—is merely a reiteration of the techniques of neoliberal multiculturalism for the television audience.