On Living with Television

Console-ing Passions: Television and Cultural Power

by Amy Holdsworth

In On Living with Television , Amy Holdsworth examines the characteristics of intimacy, familiarity, repetition, and duration that have come to exemplify the medium of television. Drawing on feminist television studies, queer theory, and disability studies as well as autobiographical life-writing practices, Holdsworth shows how television shapes everyday activities, from eating and sleeping to driving and homemaking. Recounting her own life with television, she offers a sense of the joys and pleasures Disney videos brought to her disabled sister, traces how bedtime television becomes part of a daily routine between child and caregiver, explores her own relationship to binge-eating and binge-viewing, and considers the idea of home through the BBC family drama Last Tango in Halifax . By foregrounding the ways in which television structures our relationships, daily routines, and sense of time, Holdsworth demonstrates how television emerges as a potent vehicle for writing about life.

192 pages, Hardcover

Published December 17, 2021

Reviews

[tapewitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely loved the connections being made between television and care, plus a compassionate and loving consideration of disability and media consumption (and comfort.) So happy I stumbled upon this book.