‘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

Authors

Vesna Mikić
Adriana Sabo

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i17.272

Keywords:

music, television, The Good Wife, Grey’s Anatomy, postfeminism, knowledge

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

Author Biographies

Vesna Mikić

Faculty of Music, University of Arts, Belgrade
Serbia

Vesna Mikić, PhD., full professor, head of the Department of Musicology of the Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade. She teaches contemporary music history, as well as introduction studies of popular music courses. She is the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the International Magazine for Music New Sound, a member of Serbian Musicological Society and founder of the Center for Popular Music Research from Belgrade. Her field of research covers possible cultural contextualizations and interpretations of contemporary music production and reception practices. She is the author of Muzika u tehnokulturi [Music in Technoculture, University of Arts, Belgrade, 2004] and Lica srpske muzike: neoklasicizam [Faces of Serbian Music: Neoclassicism, Faculty of Music, 2009], as well as numerous studies and articles in journals and proceedings of international and national conferences.

Adriana Sabo

Faculty of Music, University of Arts, Belgrade
Serbia

Adriana Sabo (1989) is a PhD candidate at the department of musicology at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, with master degrees in musicology (2012) and gender studies (2015). She is a recipient of the scholarship given by the Ministry of Education, Science and Cultural Development of the Republic of Serbia, member of the Serbian Musicological Society and a contributor for the Center for Popular Music Research (Belgrade). Her research mainly focuses on the issues of gender and music, popular music, otherness and connections between music and politics.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i17.272music