Rebooting Inequality eBook

Explores how nostalgia-driven reboots, revivals, and remakes perpetuate systemic biases around race, gender, and sexuality amid global nationalism

From Ghostbusters to Will & Grace, One Day at a Time to Jurassic Park, the past decade has seen Hollywood reach a new peak in its obsession with reboots, remakes, and revivals. Spearheaded by media giants like Disney and Netflix, these projects promise progressmore diverse casts, timely social commentary, and redemptive nostalgiayet they often reproduce the very inequalities they claim to address.

Rebooting Inequality brings together twelve concise, theoretically rich essays that interrogate how Hollywoods recycling of intellectual property sustains entrenched systems of racial, gender, and sexual inequality. Across genres and platforms, contributors explore how the industrys nostalgic return to familiar stories masks an ongoing reliance on white, patriarchal, and heteronormative frameworks of storytelling and production.

Blending critical race, feminist, and media studies, the collection analyzes dozens of recent film and television revivals, remakes, and reboots from Roseanne to Charlies Angels to ask what it means when entertainment markets strive for diversity while leaving the structures of inequality intact.

Accessible yet deeply analytical, Rebooting Inequality exposes how nostalgia has become both a marketing strategy and a political tool, revealing how the new Hollywood continues to reanimate the pastprofitably, repeatedly, and unequally.