Boy Melodrama: Genre Negotiations and Gender-Bending in the Supernatural Series
Journal Title: Text Matters. A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture - Year 2016, Vol 6, Issue 6
Abstract
For years Supernatural (CW, 2005–) has gained the status of a cult series as well as one of the most passionate and devoted fandoms that has ever emerged. Even though the main concept of the series indicates that Supernatural should appeal predominantly to young male viewers, in fact, the fandom is dominated by young women who are the target audience of the CW network. My research is couched in fan studies and audience studies methodological perspectives as it is impossible to understand the phenomenon of Supernatural without referring to its fandom and fan practices. However, it focuses on the series’ structure in order to explain how this structure enables Supernatural’s viewers to challenge and revise prevailing gender roles. Supernatural combines elements of divergent TV genres, traditionally associated with either male or female audiences. It opens up to gender hybridity through genre hybridity: by interweaving melodrama with horror and other “masculine” genres the show provides a fascinating example of Gothic television which questions any simplistic gender identifications.
Authors and Affiliations
Agata Łuksza
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP328239
- DOI 10.1515/texmat-2016-0011
- Views 103
- Downloads 0
Gothic Matters of De-Composition: The Pastoral Dead in Contemporary American Fiction
In Alice Walker’s vignette “The Flowers,” a young black girl’s walk in the woods is interrupted when she treads “smack” into the skull of a lynched man. As her name predicates, Myop’s age and innocence obstruct her from...
Outside the Magic Circle of White Male Supremacy in the Jim Crow South: Virginia Foster Durr’s Memoirs
Virginia Foster Durr was born in 1903 in Birmingham, Alabama in a former planter class family, and in spite of the gradual decline in the family fortune, she was brought up as a traditional southern belle, utterly subjec...
Imagining Hedda Gabler: Munch and Ibsen on Art and Modern Life
Among Edvard Munch’s many portraits of Henrik Ibsen, the famous Norwegian dramatist and Munch’s senior by a generation, one stands out. Large in scope and with a characteristic pallet of roughly hewed gray blue, green an...
Cabeza de Vaca, Estebanico, and the Language of Diversity in Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account
Published in 1542, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s La relación is a chronicle of the Pánfilo de Narváez’s 1527 expedition to the New World in which Cabeza de Vaca was one of the four survivors. His account has received cons...
The Paramount Role of Translation in Modern Opera Productions
Opera is undoubtedly a particularly high and traditional genre of art, but recently there have been numerous attempts at breaking this stereotype and presenting opera in a contemporary light. The most popular way of achi...