On Living with Television

Description

In On Living with Television, Amy Holdsworth examines the characteristics of intimacy, familiarity, repetition, and duration that have come to exemplify the medium of television. Drawing on feminist television studies, queer theory, and disability studies as well as autobiographical life-writing practices, Holdsworth shows how television shapes everyday activities, from eating and sleeping to driving and homemaking. Recounting her own life with television, she offers a sense of the joys and pleasures Disney videos brought to her disabled sister, traces how bedtime television becomes part of a daily routine between child and caregiver, explores her own relationship to binge-eating and binge-viewing, and considers the idea of home through the BBC family drama Last Tango in Halifax. By foregrounding the ways in which television structures our relationships, daily routines, and sense of time, Holdsworth demonstrates how television emerges as a potent vehicle for writing about life. Amy Holdsworth recounts her life with television to trace how the medium shapes everyday activities, our relationships with others, and our sense of time. Amy Holdsworth is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, author of Television, Memory, and Nostalgia, and coeditor of Discourses of Care: Media Practices and Cultures. Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. To (Not) Grow Up with Television 31
2. Bedtime Stories  49
3. TV Dinners  77
4. Homecomings and Goings  107
5. Epilogue: (Un)pause  139
Notes147
Bibliography  163
Index  175