Patrice A. Oppliger

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About Patrice A. Oppliger
Patrice is an assistant professor of media science at the College of Communication at Boston University. She has a PhD in mass communication from the University of Alabama. Her research interests are gender, humor, and media effects, with a special focus on adolescent viewers. She has been the past president and an active contributor to the International Society of Humor Studies conferences for over 20 years.
Books By Patrice A. Oppliger
This book explores how television and streaming services portray transgender characters who identify as male or nonbinary in television media.
Transmasculinity on Television takes a closer look at transmasculine and nonbinary characters on broadcast, cable, and streaming services between 2000 and 2021. Significant changes have occurred since the release of the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry, and in particular through the increase in transgender producers, writers, and actors playing those roles. While a great deal of research has been published on gay, lesbian, and female transgender characters, very little analysis has been done on trans male representation in American media. This book examines the history of how film and television have portrayed transgender characters, how these depictions have developed over time and what impact these representations may have on audience attitudes.
This accessible and engaging study is suitable for students and scholars in Gender Studies, Media Studies and LGBTQ Studies.
Topics include the powerful effects of cultural phenomena such as revealing fashions, plastic surgery, and beauty pageants in influencing teen and preteen girls to willingly participate in and promote their own sexualization. These chapters also explore other cultural factors contributing to this early sexualization of young girls, including absentee parenting and material overindulgence. Later chapters focus on the sexual representations of females in the mass entertainment media, focusing specifically on how popular magazines, television programs, films, and the Internet prey upon, promote, and reinforce young girls' physical and sexual insecurities.
This book addresses media role models in television, film, picture books, and the Internet in the realm of bullying and relational aggression. It highlights portrayals with unproductive strategies that lead to poor resolutions or no resolution at all.
Young viewers may learn ineffective, even dangerous, ways of handling aggressive situations. Victims may feel discouraged when they are unable to handle the situation as easily as in media portrayals. They may also feel their experiences are trivialized by comic portrayals. Entertainment programming, aimed particularly at adolescents, often portray adults as incompetent or uncaring and include mean-spirited teasing. In addition, overuse of the term "bully" and defining all bad behavior as "bullying" may dilute the term and trivialize the problem.