Stepparents and Blended Families on ScreenGender and Genre in American Film and Television

Explores the blended family on screen through gender and genre

• Provocatively rereads the concept of family through analysis of non-traditional families in American film and television
• Takes gender and genre as the focus and organisational strategy
• Takes an interdisciplinary approach across film and television studies, family studies, sociological approaches, and social and political contexts
• Case studies include films and television series such as Mrs Doubtfire, Three Men and a Baby, The Parent Trap, Jerry Maguire, Stepmom, Juno, The Fosters and Grey’s Anatomy

Stepparents and Blended Families on Screen: Gender and Genre in American Film and Television explores the representation of non-traditional families in American onscreen examples. Through a range of case studies, the book takes genre as its organising strategy in order to interrogate how different generic conventions channel the representation of the stepparent and the blended family. The book is therefore designed to sit alongside the many examples of scholarship of families on our screens, but with the original contribution of families that do not conform to normative and dominant ideologies of the traditional nuclear and biological family. Gender forms a key focus, and the book explores how concepts of masculinity and femininity are core to the ways that parents are depicted on our screens. The book therefore calls into question dominant norms of the family, what family is, and importantly what it can be.