Gender and Seriality

The notion of seriality and serial identity performance runs as a strong undercurrent through much of the fields of feminist theory, gender studies and queer studies. Defining gender as a serial and discursively produced entanglement of different practices and agencies, this book argues that serial storytelling can offer such complex negotiations of identity that the ‘results‘ of televisual gender performances are rarely separate from the processes that produce them. As such, gender performances are not restricted to individual television programmes themselves, but are also located in official paratexts, such as making-of documentaries, interviews with writers and actors, and in cultural sites like online viewer discussions, recaps and fan fiction. With case studies of series such as Girls, How to Get Away With Murder and The Walking Dead, this book seeks to understand how gender as a practice is generated by television narratives in the overlapping of text, reception and production, and explores the viewer practices that these narratives seek to trigger and draw on in the process. Maria Sulimma is an American Studies scholar working in the intersecting areas of cultural studies, urban studies, feminist media studies, and gender studies. Based at the University Duisburg-Essen, she is the Postdoctoral Researcher in the Research Group City Scripts.