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

Vesna Mikić,Adriana Sabo

doi:10.25038/am.v0i17.272

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.  Article received: March 31, 2018; Article accepted: May 10, 2018; Published online: October 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Mikić, Vesna, Adriana Sabo. "‘Women, be Good!’ – Music in the Production of ‘Femininities’: Case Studies of Grey’s Anatomy and The Good Wife." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 17 (2018): 79−88. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i17.272

Highlights

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
It may be that the shift that Caldwell describes as the need for studying television’s “culture of production” along with the usual research in its “production of culture”, both understood as the production of knowledge, could open up a space for re-introduction of theorizing music as one of the actors in this production which supposedly is in the multimedia/multi-image context that pushes us to learn new ‘viewing protocols’
The highly popular medical drama, and political/legal show, both address important social issues in their narratives, though in quite different ways: the former introduces the viewer to the world that is much better than the real one, a world centered around a state-of-the-art hospital with dedicated doctors, brilliant scientists and sincere human beings; the latter shows us a more ‘realistic’ vision of the world of politics and business that is very often painted as corrupt

Summary

Introduction

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.

Objectives

Results

Conclusion