English 1102: Television and Feminism

Dr. Casey Alane Wilson • Georgia Institute of Technology

Author: Matthew Ramberger

Careers in Jessica Jones

This is my final blog post for this class. At first, I didn’t know what to write about, but then I remembered the topic of my info graphic project, the portrayal of career women on television. So today I will be doing just that, analyzing the careers of women on Jessica Jones and comparing them to men.

The main character, Jessica, is a private investigator as her main job. She investigates and finds information that her clients want, and she is pretty good at it. Trish Walker, Jessica’s best friend, is a famous celebrity who was on many TV shows as a child and now has a talk show. Hogarth is a very good lawyer and owns an establishment that wins almost every case. Hogarth’s ex works in the medical field as a doctor. Already, Jessica Jones looks to be doing great things for feminism and television. Not only do they have female leads, but they help further the movement by taking women out of their original representation and moving them more equal to men.

The men on Jessica Jones have very standard jobs. We have Malcolm, an ex druggy who lives in a rundown apartment next to Jessica. There is Luke Cage, who owns a small bar in the city. Kilgrave is the main villain who can control people with his voice. Will Simpson is a cop with a military background. The men on this show have typical jobs with nothing too out of the ordinary.

Jessica Jones Cast

Looking at the careers of both men and women on Jessica Jones, women seem to have better and higher paying careers than men. Typically on TV shows, women rarely have high paying jobs or work in important fields, but Jessica Jones is littered with them. This helps show how much Jessica Jones is doing for feminism. They are furthering women on television and making them more accurate with real life. This is very important. In the past, a women was lucky to even have a job on television, much less be working in a STEM field. Jessica Jones shows how far TV has come, and how much more there is to come for television.

Second Chances in Jessica Jones

Theme is very tricky in Jessica Jones. There is no underlining theme that applies to every episode or the whole series as a whole. However, there are certain episodes that have a theme that pushes the whole episode.

Today, I am going to analyze episode 8 of Jessica Jones. First of all, I need to give context about Kilgrave. He has the ability to command people with his voice, and he has used it to kill countless people and ruin countless lives. Jessica, the main protagonist, is living with Kilgrave, so he doesn’t kill any innocent people. In the middle of the episode, Jessica takes Kilgrave and makes him save two children from an abusive father. This makes Kilgrave and the entire audience think the theme is that “people deserve second chances”.

However, the show surprises the audience by having Jessica drug Kilgrave and lock him up at the end of the episode. This hits the audience hard and establishes the new theme of “doing good deeds doesn’t remove your past crimes”. All of the viewers thought that Jessica was going to teach Kilgrave to use his powers for good and be a superhero, but they shut that down very fast at the end.

Kilgrave trapped in cell

This theme helps relate to the show as a whole. It shows that no matter what good deeds Kilgrave does in the present, it doesn’t excuse all of his past murders and crimes. This also helps relate the show to modern law. You could save 1000 people after killing one person, but you would still go to jail for murder and be remembered as a murderer.

This creates a question about how are people redeemable. I believe some people should get second chances after doing a mistake. They should get the ability to redeem themselves and make good in the world. However, there is a certain point beyond return. People like Kilgrave, who have ruined and killed dozens of lives, do not deserve a second chance. It is hard to tell where the line should be drawn between a second chance and not, but some people deserve another chance to make the world a better place.

Jessica Jones’ Suspenseful Writing

Dana Baratta wrote most of Jessica Jones season 1, but today I am going to analyze just episode 5. Baratta is known for writing several other shows such as The Secret Circle and Red Widow, but Jessica Jones is definitely what she is most famous for. She is responsible for most of the dialogue in Jessica Jones which is one of the most important aspects of the show.

The dialogue in Jessica Jones helps define the show and make it the great show that it is. Whether it be dramatic pauses or heated arguments, the dialogue helps add to the characters and plot to make the show amazing. Everything each character says fits in perfectly with their persona which helps make every conversation impacting and meaningful.

Most of the dialogue this episode is between different characters, but there are several points in the episode where there is no dialogue at all for a few minutes over a scene. Silence is used in this episode to make certain scenes more intense or scary for the viewers. These scenes are usually when Jessica is spying on someone or if there is a fight or chase. There is usually music or background noise during these scenes. This leaves the viewers to react in their own way to this scene and add to its suspense.

Jessica Jones Scene

During this scene, Jessica follows her neighbor Malcolm while he meets with her enemy Kilgrave. This is all done without dialogue, which makes certain parts awkward and others intense.

There are several flashbacks in this episode which gives certain characters more character development and lets the viewers know why some things are happening. Flashbacks this episode are primarily used to give viewers more context on Jessica’s past and add to her character.

Overall, the dialogue in this episode of Jessica Jones is mainly just people talking to each other with several flashbacks to give context. There are no voiceovers this episode, and there is rarely ever one in other episodes. Jessica Jones relies a lot on silence and the show wouldn’t be what it is today without it. This show relies solely on conversation dialogue and silence to keep it going and its viewers engaged.

Gender in Jessica Jones

The gender spread in Jessica Jones is pretty even, but it probably edges towards more women. The main protagonist, Jessica, is a female, and the villain, Kilgrave, is a male. The other main characters on the show are Trish, Jeri, Pam, Malcolm, Will, and Luke Cage with the first three being female and the last three being male. Jessica Jones even features mental disorders such as OCD and a main character, Jeri, who is lesbian. The show definitely focuses more on female characters overall, but that is mainly due to the main protagonists being women. The show focuses on Jessica struggling to overcome and defeat an old enemy, Kilgrave, with the help of  a few friends. We see Jessica struggling in both her private and public life as it is thrown around by Kilgrave. However, the show also takes breaks to show the hardships of other characters such as Malcolm with his heroin addiction, and Luke with losing his wife.

Jessica Jones Characters

From what I’ve watched so far, the main characters making tough decisions are mainly Jessica, Malcolm, Trish, and Luke with most of the other characters just reacting to what happens and following orders. Jessica Jones definitely focuses more on women making the main decisions and driving the show than men, which is a nice switch up for a change.  This is important because most TV shows have men as the driving characters in the show who make all the decisions. It is important to show how women have to make tough choices and decisions on television.

Jessica Jones shows a lot more women in higher classes than men. A lot of women characters are very successful in jobs such as TV star, law firm owner, and doctor. The main male characters don’t have it as nice with them being a struggling heroin addict, small bar owner, and police officer. This show does a very good job of showing career women in television in high up jobs in society.  There is also a very big emphasis on mental illness in Jessica Jones with Jessica, Luke, and Will all having trouble with PTSD, and Jessica’s upstairs neighbor having extreme OCD.

Overall, Jessica Jones features and focuses on slightly more women than men, but does a very good job in representing multiple genders, races, and mental illnesses.

Career Representation in TV Over Time – Annotated Bibliography

Elasmar, Michael, Kazumi Hasegawa, and Mary Brain. “The Portrayal of Women in U.S. Prime Time Television.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 43, no. 1, 1999, pp. 20-34. ProQuest, http://prx.library.gatech.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/227281152?accountid=11107.

This paper mainly focuses on how women are portrayed and how that affects children watching it. It illustrates how previous researchers only tracked the presence of women and that the portrayal of women is what really matters. The article also recognized how men were over represented on television with 58% having professional roles compared to 15% in real life. Women were more likely to have non-serious roles than men. They found that only 44% of women were depicted as working and only 21% of married women were depicted as working. This research paper is important because it focuses on a time period outside of modern television. This helps our topic a lot since it is the portrayal of working women over time. It is further important since it is full of statistics that help illustrate the differences between women and men in prime-time television. It is worth reading to understand the difference of working women in the 70s and today.

Grodin, Debra. “Women Watching Television: Gender, Class, and Generation in the American Television Experience.” Women and Language, vol. 14, no. 2, 1991, pp. 35. ProQuest, http://prx.library.gatech.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/198799896?accountid=11107.

This paper analyzes another paper over how and why working women are portrayed the way they are on television. It goes over how women like to identify with certain types of characters over others. This paper goes into further detail on how middle-class women dislike watching women with high paying careers because it is very different from their own lives. It notes how shows with female characters similar to an average middle-class women are more likely to be watched and enjoyed and enjoyed by their average female viewer. This source is importance since it goes into why shows mainly depict middle-class women working normal medium paying jobs or as stay-at-home moms. It does not contain lots of statistics and data on working women in television, but it gives good insight into what types of characters women are most likely to identify and relate too. It will be important to relate the ideas of this article to data and statistics from other articles.

Glascock, Jack, and Thomas E. Ruggiero. “Representations of Class and Gender on Primetime Spanish-Language Television in the United States.” Communication Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 4, 2004, pp. 390-402. ProQuest, http://prx.library.gatech.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/216482966?accountid=11107.

This article goes over class and gender in Spanish-speaking television in the United States. It argues that men are more likely to have higher paying jobs and less childcare responsibilities than women. The paper further argues that lighter skinned characters were more likely to be in a higher class and better position than darker skinned characters. While women were represented equally to men in the shows analyzed, they were less likely to have jobs and even less likely to have higher paying jobs than men. This paper is very important because it relates directly to our topic and focuses on a different subset of American television and viewers. It illustrates that even in Latino television, women are still unequal to men in the roles they play on television. Men are still more likely to be the providers for the household and most women are either stay at home moms or work low paying jobs. Overall, this source is worth reading in understanding the gender differences in a different subset of American television.

Ulaby, Neda. “Working Women On Television: A Mixed Bag At Best.” npr, 18 May 2018, https://www.npr.org/2013/05/18/184832930/working-women-on-television-a-mixed-bag-at-best.

This article goes over careers in characters in prime-time television and compares the statistics to real life statistics. They use statistics from a research Geena Davis’s study. They found that 44.3% of women in speaking roles were gainfully employed on television. The article compares this to the real life percent of 46.7% and decided that prime-time television is pretty decent at depicting women with careers. However, the paper points out that television is not accurate in age and children in working women. Almost none of working women in television have children and most are under 40. This article is important because it goes over important statistics that relate to our topic. It is very important in comparing the statistics from television to real life to see if television is accurately portraying its characters. The article is definitely worth reading as it gives insight on how accurate the portrayal of female characters are in prime-time television.

Smith, Brittany, “Gender Representation and Occupational Portrayals in Primetime Television” (2016). Theses and Dissertations. 1673. http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/1673

This study looked at gender representation and occupational portrayals on primetime television. The paper looks at lots of statistics and compares them to previous studies. While there has been improvement, the portrayal of women is not where it should be and lots of stereotypes of women still exist in television. This paper also looked into which stations had made the most improvement, and which stations had made the least. The study found that there still needs to be lots of improvement to get these shows up to par with reality as lots of women are still portrayed as housewives or blue-collared workers. This study is important because it contains lots of statistics of different news stations that relate directly to our topic of working women in television, and it relates the statistics to previous studies to show the change in recent years. It provides lots of insight on which areas need improvement the most and on what stations.

Emilaire, Sierra. “A Look At Women Represented In Media.” StudyBreak. 17 July 2017, https://studybreaks.com/culture/women-representation-media/

This article takes a look at how women are portrayed in television and how that relates to young girls’ lives. It states that stereotypes that come from TV shows like women are supposed to be housewives and that women cannot become CEOs puts limitations on girls growing up. This piece explains how representation is important because women shape their perceptions of themselves based on what they see in Television and movies. This article states how there is not enough female characters with high-paying jobs or leads in shows. This article is important because it illustrates the importance of having accurate depictions of women in society and the effect it can have on young girls growing up. It is definitely worth reading to understand the effect having different portrayals of women can have on society and individual people. This article also explains how women in these roles in television are already accepted and liked and should appear more often.

Jessica Jones is Living in a Dark World

Jessica Jones stands out from every other marvel character that I’ve seen. She has no motivation in life, lives in a dumpy apartment next to a drug addict, and often spends her nights getting wasted at crappy bars. She doesn’t even try to hide her powers very well, often using them to take advantage over someone when they have something she wants. However, she does have a heart as she chooses to stay in New York City and help rescue a captured teenage girl instead of flee half way across the globe.

Jessica Jones Meme

The first episode starts with dialogue over several quick cut scenes which give the viewers a brief overview of Jessica and what she does. But moreover, it sets the precedent for the rest of the series as a dark and gloomy setting. Almost every scene in the first episode has a dark lighting to it. Even when they are walking around the city in the middle of the day it happens to be overcast and moody. This helps add to Jessica’s character portraying her life as dark and depressing.

The majority of the first episode is quick scenes of 30 seconds to a minute with a few longer scenes of up to around 3 minutes. However, at the end of the episode there is a very long 10ish minute scene with the main bulk of the drama and plot of the episode. This is mainly due to lots of different things happening before the end of the episode which help lead in to the traumatic ending. The quick scenes are necessary because there is a lot of information the viewers need to digest in order to fully understand the very intense ending scene.

This episode in particular definitely stands out from the rest of the episodes that I’ve seen so far. The episode focuses a lot of time on changing Jessica’s character of being selfish into risking her life to save a girl. They want the viewers to understand that Jessica cares about other people’s lives, and that she is willing to risk hers to stop a villain who is constantly hurting others. Furthermore, this episode in particular has more dark scenes than the rest. This is probably because her character is already developed in the future episodes, and the show doesn’t need the darkness to contribute to her character as much.

Overall, the first episode was amazing. It introduces a very complex character and horrifying villain both with lots of backstory leaving the viewers hungry to find out more. It was put together very well and makes most people excited to go on to the next episode.

A Short and Sweet Intro

Hello! My name is Matthew Ramberger, and I am from Cumming, Georgia. I am planning on majoring in Electrical Engineering and hope to graduate by 2022.This is my first English class at Tech as I am a freshman. English was never my favorite class in high school, but it was never my least favorite either. I never liked the seemingly endless papers that I’d have to write which is why I am looking forward to this class since it focuses more on analyzing TV shows. My best form of communication is probably written/electronic since you have more time to think of what to say and how to say it. I struggle with oral communication in front of large audiences as I will more times than not forget what to say and make my presentations and arguments a lot weaker. I want to get more comfortable speaking in front of classrooms and large groups of people in hopes that it will help me succeed later in life.

I wouldn’t say that I’m addicted to TV shows, but every few months or so I’ll get addicted and binge watch a show. My favorite two shows are Game of Thrones and The 100, but I’ve also enjoyed watching The Walking Dead, Arrow, Frontier, and Turn. As you can tell, I mainly enjoy watching shows that have lots of action and adventure, but I have branched out a bit and watched shows such as 13 Reasons Why and Black Mirror. I am excited that this class has a theme centered around television because it will give me a chance to find more amazing shows to get addicted to.

Funny Game of Thrones Meme

I have chosen to review Jessica Jones this semester since I have always enjoyed superhero shows and movies. I may or may not have watched the first episode or two a while ago when I didn’t really want to start a new show which is why this class is great since it gives me an excuse to start it. Also, I’ve never watched a superhero show with a female lead, so it should be super interesting and different. Overall, I am very excited for this class and all the shows that we will get to watch.

Jessica Jones Poster

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