Join us online on Thursday 30th October at 4pm for our next event: Television and Mental Health
Our event features two excellent speakers:
Dr Veronica Heney, Durham University: “Legitimacy, Seriousness, and the Everyday: Anxiety and the Sitcom”
Over the past century there have been many calls to pay attention to rising rates of anxiety or to anxiety as a cultural force; simultaneously, the legitimacy or seriousness of anxiety diagnoses have been questioned and critiqued. This leaves anxiety in an uncertain or liminal position, which can impact the experiences of those who receive a diagnosis or who self-identify as suffering from anxiety as a mental health condition. In considering questions of experience and narration, I argue that fiction and fiction’s interpretation is a useful space of consideration. In this paper I draw on a qualitative study conducted with people with experience of anxiety, and through their reflections explore the way that humour, comedy, and in particular the sitcom genre function as significant cultural spaces through which the legitimacy of anxiety is contested and navigated.
Dr Robert Lawson, Birmingham City University: “Look at that. You’ve helped me find my smile”: Emotionality, connection and masculine practice in Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Long-running police comedy show Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013-2021) has been widely praised for its treatment of men’s emotionality and how it subverts media tropes of ‘police masculinities’ based on physical strength, dominance, risk-taking and violence. Drawing on a purpose-built corpus of scripts from seasons 1-6, this presentation outlines how talk is used to establish emotional connection, communicate vulnerability and facilitate peer group ‘bromances’ between the male characters on the show. I argue that while progressive representations of ‘positive’ or ‘healthy’ masculinities in the show collide with more traditional (and hegemonic) forms of masculinities, particularly to create humour via these collisions, such representations are nevertheless important routes through which alternative ways of being a man are disseminated to audiences.
For the Zoom link, please contact Christina Wilkins (c.wilkins@bham.ac.uk)