‘Women, be Good!’ – Music in the Production of ‘Femininities’: Case Studies of Grey’s Anatomy and The Good Wife
‘Women, be Good!’ – Music in the Production of ‘Femininities’: Case Studies of Grey’s Anatomy and The Good Wife

Summary/Abstract: As Keith Negus and John Street wrote in their Introduction to the “Music and Television” Special Issue of the journal Popular Music (No. 3, 2002), television is an important mediator of the knowledge, understanding and experience of music. Inverting their formulation to “music is an important mediator of knowledge, understanding, and experience of television” (as James Deaville writes), we can further our understanding of different, more or less obvious meanings transferred by a television program. Bearing these two complementary ideas in mind, we aim to map the kinds of knowledge that are being produced and mediated through music in two extremely popular TV shows, which are also famous for their (innovative) use of music: Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005) and The Good Wife (CBS, 2009–16). These two series – a medical drama and a series about lawyers and politics – have (at least) two things in common: 1) the already-mentioned role that music plays in their narratives, and 2) the fact that both focus on female characters and ‘feminine’ stories, employing numerous, liberal and/or postfeminist discourses. Our goal will thus be, to investigate what ‘kind’ of a female subject is being produced through interactions of music and image and by the music itself, as well as what kind of (post)feminist discourse is deemed ‘acceptable’ in a mainstream television discourse.

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