Devaluing and revaluing seriality: The gendered discourses of media franchising

Abstract

Gender anchors cultural negotiations over what media franchising is and how its serial production practices and narratives are valued. Cultural tensions between the economic viability and cultural legitimacy of seriality are both smoothed and exacerbated by the gendered discourses of media franchising. These discursive interventions are evidenced through examination of popular and trade talk about three television serials for which the term ‘franchise’ inflects, reworks, or disrupts the gendered values ascribed to them. First, although the CW’s Gossip Girl fits squarely into feminized models of serial narrative, franchise discourse claimed institutional and masculine legitimacy by stressing the economic rationality of its serial production. Second, in the case of ABC’s Lost, franchise discourse highlighted the serial repetition of industrialized culture production, challenging masculine valuation of the program based in perceptions of authenticity and singular artistic vision. Lastly, cultural backlash against Sci-Fi’s Battlestar Galactica demonstrates how franchise discourse has directly linked critique of serialized industrial production to moral panic about the feminine. Although dynamic franchise discourses have been deployed across an eclectic, even contradictory range of industrial and narrative practices, in common across each is that the accrual of serial value depends in great part upon gendered meanings ascribed to and by franchising.