The Golden Girls, Designing Women, Living Single, Sex and the City, Girlfriends, Cashmere Mafia and Hot in Cleveland stand out as some of America's favorite television series. Their lovable ""female foursome"" characters engage in witty banter as they challenge American stereotypes about sex, love, family, work and community. Theses sitcoms and comedy-dramas live on as cable TV re-runs and through online fan communities, demonstrating mass appeal across generations of women and men. Connecting fan commentary with analysis by television scholars, this collection of new essays explores the development of these series from the 1980s on, with a focus on the role of fan cultures in ""reproducing"" these popular American shows.

Co-opting Culture: Culture and Power in Sociology and Cultural Studies represents a collection of new scholarship on culture from the social sciences and from work done under the rubric of 'cultural studies'. Working from the idea that Sociology and Cultural Studies have developed distinct and valuable toolkits for understanding culture, the editors have brought together a collection of essays that address the ways in which the cultures around race, sex, and gender are mediated through or intersect with politics, society, and economy. Some essays deal directly with the theoretical nature of this mediation, while others adopt these theoretical approaches to investigate specific cultural objects or communities. In doing so, these essays call attention to the particularities of form that constitute a kind of cultural logic around the objects under consideration.