Arcy Dissertation
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Feminized Convergence: Bravo TV and Interactivity for Women A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Jacquelyn Arcy IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Laurie Ouellette July 2015 © Jacquelyn Arcy 2015 Acknowledgements Throughout this project, I have been supported from an amazing network of mentors, colleagues, friends, and family. This dissertation is a testament to their generosity and guidance. I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Laurie Ouellette for her invaluable insights on this project. The media studies courses I took with Laurie were instrumental in shaping my thinking about convergence culture, the television industry, and digital media. As I worked on the dissertation, Laurie encouraged me to bring together my interests in gender and new media and helped me to shape the theoretical foundation of this project. Laurie is a generous mentor with unparalleled expertise in media studies. I am also grateful to my dissertation committee for their enthusiasm for this project and constructive feedback. Dr. Annie Hill’s comments on drafts and keen editing helped make this project more complete. Dr. Shayla Theil-Stern’s insights into the media industry helped guide my thinking about the role of digital technologies in the convergent television industry. I am thankful to Dr. Mary Vavrus whose research on gender and political economy shaped some of the key questions that emerge in this project. Throughout my graduate studies, Annie, Shayla, and Mary have challenged me to become a better scholar. The graduate student community at the University of Minnesota provided me with an incomparable community of scholars whose support has made this dissertation possible. I am especially thankful to my cohort, David Tucker, Mia Fischer, Allison Page, and Diane Cormany and my writing group, Liora Elias, Rebecca Jurisz, and Heidi i Zimmerman for their friendship and helpful insights on drafts. I am particularly grateful to Kate Ranachan for her friendship and willingness to give advice and feedback every step of the way, and Melody Hoffman for her encouragement and support. I also want to thank Kate Livingston and Wonda Baugh who are the funniest and most caring colleagues. Most of all, I want to thank my family for their unwavering love and support. I am especially grateful to my mom for teaching me to love learning and for encouraging me stand up for what I believe in. Thank you to my dad for always engaging me in intellectual conversations and teaching me to be a critical thinker. I also want to thank my grandparents Pop and Mimi, George Brown, Karla Arcy, my brothers Eddie and Travis, for nurturing my intellectual curiosity and supporting me throughout my graduate education. Finally, I am grateful to my partner Cohen for the long conversations we had about this project and for his never-ending encouragement. ii Dedication To my family, for their unwavering support. iii Abstract This dissertation analyzes the convergence of television and digital technologies in the context of media that is designed for and marketed specifically to women. Taking the female-targeted Bravo TV network and its interactive platforms as a case study, I show how Bravo organizes its participatory, new media initiates around its brand of stylized, melodramatic docu-soap series. My dissertation argues that Bravo draws women into interactivity through the gendered conventions of mass women’s culture, setting a template for addressing women as digital media users through the socially-constructed skills of femininity. I refer to the gendered strategies, practices, and content used to integrate women into convergence culture as “feminized convergence.” My analysis of feminized convergence suggests a reversion to traditional approaches for attracting female audiences popularized in the twentieth century formats like the soap opera and melodramatic woman’s film. Despite the hope that media convergence will “democratize the media” (Jenkins, 2006), feminized convergence reveals a turning back to the stereotypical conventions of mass women’s culture and the intensification of gender stereotypes in the digital realm. iv Table of Contents Introduction Feminized Media in the Age of Convergence……………………………………...….….1 Chapter 1 Meet the Affluencers: Constructing the Tech-Savvy Female Audience……………..….38 Chapter 2 Intimate Digital Public: Gendering Interactivity on Watch What Happens Live………...93 Chapter 3 Affective Enterprising: Transmedia Branding and Emotional Labor…………………..145 Conclusion The Gender Politics of Convergence…………………………………………………...189 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………203 v Introduction Feminized Media in the Age of Convergence Over the past decade, digital technologies have transformed the way we watch television. Today, multi-screen platforms allow viewers to follow content across old and new media sites and participate in real-time conversations about television on web forums, social media, and mobile applications. The convergence of television and digital technologies has opened the lines of communication between media producers and consumers and substantially restructured relations between the media industry and their audiences. At the same time, advancements in digital media, including the vast expansion of media outlets, digital recording devices, and ad-skipping technologies, have given viewers more control over how and when they watch television. As a result, television networks are revolutionizing their marketing, programming, and distribution models in efforts to maintain dominance in the multimedia environment. With this new institutional context comes a need to better understand new ways of targeting and engaging consumers in a mediascape where television and new media converge. This dissertation examines how interactive television platforms are being designed for and marketed specifically to women. In the field of media studies, Henry Jenkins (2006) term “convergence culture” has been widely adopted to describe the technological and industry shifts that coincide with the increased “flow of content across media platforms, cooperation between media industries, and migratory behavior of media audiences” (p. 2). While Jenkins (2006) argues that media convergence empowers viewers to influence and create media, other 1 scholars like Mark Andrejevic (2007), point out that media corporations profit from media convergence by utilizing the free promotion, demographic data, and consumer feedback users wittingly and unwittingly provide through digital interactions. Yet, scholars on both sides of the debate have overlooked how gender structures convergence culture. This dissertation addresses this gap by examining how gender assumptions impact marketing strategies, programming, and interactive platforms used to pursue a tech-savvy female audience. My project intervenes in the growing body of research on media convergence by considering how the Bravo TV network tailors its interactive platforms to reach female viewers. I argue that Bravo draws women into interactivity through the gendered conventions of mass women’s culture, setting a template for addressing women as digital media users. I refer to the gendered strategies, practices, and content used to integrate women into convergence culture as “feminized convergence.” My analysis of feminized convergence suggests a reversion to traditional approaches for attracting female audiences established in the twentieth century through popular formats like the soap opera and melodramatic woman’s film. Despite the explosion of female-centered programming in the late twentieth century that seemed to signal a shift toward a more diverse media environment for women (Lotz, 2006), my research shows the convergence of television and digital technologies has changed the competitive dynamics of the industry and spurred a turning back to the stereotypical conventions of mass women’s culture. 2 My dissertation advances the argument that media institutions are developing converging media platforms for women around gender stereotypes that have long circulated around mass cultural texts for women. The cluster of assumptions I identify and explore are encapsulated by the “good mother” stereotype (Modleski, 1997), a trope that positions women as motivated by their emotions, experts in the intimate realm of domesticity and care work, eager to give advice and intervene in interpersonal disputes. As Berlant (2008) explains, women’s mass cultural texts promote “a core form of gendered personhood for women” that links women through the common experience of “the pleasures and burdens of reproducing everyday life in the family, which…has meant, among other things, being charged with managing dynamics of affective and emotional intimacy” (p. 170). Even with the diversification of women’s media (Lotz, 2006) and the decline of the women-centered formats like the soap opera in the twenty-first century (Levine, 2011), the media industry’s quest to attract female audiences through the socially-constructed skills of femininity has not dissipated. Rather, it is my contention that the media industries’ dependence on gender assumptions has intensified in the era of media convergence. This project explores feminized convergence through an in-depth examination of the Bravo cable TV network and its interactive television platforms. The case of Bravo, as one of NBC’s female-targeted subsidiaries, illustrates how the media industry is tailoring new media technologies