Having it both ways: Two and a Half Men,Entourage, and televising post-feminist masculinity

This article explores representations of juvenile post-feminist masculinity across two television texts: Two and a Half Men and Entourage. These programs exhibit a contradictory continuum of masculine performances allowing men to “have it both ways,” or to be both sensitive and casually sexist within contemporary culture. By detailing how similar kinds of masculinity exist across two seemingly disparate channels and television programs, this analysis also decouples automatic assumptions about representation as being primarily linked to notions of “quality” or “complex” TV emerging from cable and pay cable channels, and instead demonstrates the importance of looking for representational similarities as much as differences and distinctions across channels in order to fully understand the relational shifts between constructions of masculinity and post-feminist illogics.     

Television crime series,women police,and fuddy-duddy feminism

This essay argues that Prime Suspect has become a canonical text for feminist television studies and that Helen Mirren's performance of Lynda La Plante's creation has provided an influential template for television, and the broader culture, to imagine what a senior female police officer is like. So Jane Tennison is important not only within the depicted world of the “canteen culture” of the police in Prime Suspect, but also within the broader context of television production where she has demonstrated that crime shows with female leads can be extremely successful. Juxtaposing Prime Suspect with two later “girly” British TV police series, I ask how we might approach the “daughters of Jane Tennison” found in series such as Ghost Squad (2005) and Murder in Suburbia (2004–2006). Are these “postfeminist” shows? I argue that attention to these programmes can productively inform our understanding of what is entailed for women in not being “fuddy-duddy,” and my comments thus engage, in the continuing debate about the utility and periodisation of the notion of “postfeminism.”     

Chicks,Dicks, and Contradictions

This essay examines Playgirl as a rich, yet overlooked, archive in the history of American pornography. Although the magazine often is dismissed as the token attempt of a masculinist industry to equalize its representational politics, I argue instead that a significant synergy exists between Playgirl and entwined debates over pornography, gender, and commercialized sexuality in 1970s America. Employing established conventions of the women's magazine, Playgirl utilized that form toward granting women access to explicit images. Yet given its “better lifestyling” advice on how the sexually liberated woman might find empowerment by viewing male nudes, Playgirl's reluctance to display full-frontal nudity until the midpoint of its first year fashioned an initially compromised aesthetic. Not only were women interpolated as untutored viewers within this regime of genital obstruction, but models also were all but emasculated. Consequently, the degree of male exposure that could be handled by both viewers and models was questioned, critiqued, and debated across Playgirl's letters to the editor section, aptly entitled “In-ter-course.” As an artifact of sexual media history, Playgirl is invaluable because readers are able to trace throughout its pages the ways in which changing tides of gendered power began to problematize pornography's routine dichotomy between masculine subjectivity and female objectification.     

Reader Letters to Women's Health Magazines

Women's health magazines emerged as a new cultural industry at the end of the twentieth century, representing a commercial application of the “will to health” developing in neoliberal societies. This paper explores recurring discourses in reader letters published between 1997 and 2000 in two Australian health magazines targeting white, middle-class women. Both GoodMedicine and Nature & Health are engaged in a similar cultural politics, tempting their audiences away from the established women's lifestyle, beauty, and fashion publications by representing health magazine content as natural, practical, and generally “good for you.” Reader letters published in these magazines deploy the discourses of pragmatism, authenticity, and critical engagement as new cultural imperatives for performing the “normal, healthy woman.” However, they offer little recognition of the social determinants of health, or the connections between individual practice and global biopolitics. Reader letters inscribe both the successes and failures experienced in performing the “will to health,” and have considerable potential to facilitate new ways of negotiating these cultural imperatives.     

Mumbling Beauty: Louise Bourgeois—portraits of the artist as a much older woman

Abstract

This article examines how Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) plays with different modes of self-presentation in Mumbling Beauty (2015), a photo book consisting of 81 photographs of the artist taken in the final years of her life by Alex Van Gelder. I start by outlining connections and divergences between these self-presentations and interpretations of Bourgeois’ late style. As the portraits make the artist hypervisible as a much older vulnerable woman, I ask how Mumbling Beauty can resist abjection. I will argue that strategies of performance, masquerade, and displacement, in combination with playful interactions with mirror surfaces and images, and flirtations with photography’s death drive, enable these portraits to diversify notions of self and beauty. Furthermore, through the concepts of the ethical stare and the holding gaze, I interpret the relational, intercorporeal, and affective potential of this particular photographic practice. To conclude, I speculate on how these particular portraits of the artist as a much older woman can be inspirational in terms of conceptualizing creative skills that even people who are not professional artists may need in their quest for meaning in later life beyond hegemonic discourses of “successful” and “healthy” ageing.     

Love,Lust, and Loss in the Early Age of AIDS: The Discourse in the Body Politic From 1981 to 1987

ABSTRACT

This article explores the idea that the AIDS epidemic constituted a defining moment for the Canadian gay rights movement and illuminates the intricate power dynamics of the development of a community identity. Using grounded theory inductive and deductive content analysis, and interviews with activists from the Body Politic magazine, this article considers notions of health “from above” and “from below” by examining relations between the community and government and their confrontation with medicalization and the medical profession. I also examine how the magazine reported and negotiated issues related to the community’s self-policing and “self-managed oppression” through efforts to promote safer sex and risk reduction.     

Boys will be boys

While lad's magazines such as FHM and Loaded have been subject to critical attention with respect to the way they represent and negotiate models of masculinity, there has been a significant absence of work that addresses the representation of women in these and other publications, such as Zoo and Nuts. In this paper I argue that these magazines normalise pornography through an invocation of the “real,” by encouraging reader action and interaction, and through alignment with women's magazines. The construction and representation of the “real” is difficult to reconcile with the claims of irony used to excuse representation of women as sexual objects. Such claims are indefensible and are symptomatic of hegemonic gender norms in which women are not yet recognised as human.     

Exploring Media Representations of Argentina's President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

In the last decade, Latin America has seen several women taking up the top job. However, even as Presidents, far from being treated as equal with their male counterparts, they still suffer from media coverage filled with prejudice about their status as women. This article examines the media landscape portraying a woman in power; namely the president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK), by looking at news pieces published in two main national Argentinean newspapers, Clarín and La Nación. In order to document this trajectory, I identify three “roles” that media assigns to CFK: the Stupid Girl, which accounts for the questionings of her validity as a candidate; the Wicked Widow, which speaks of CFK after her husband died in 2010 through the lens of a revival of that stereotype; and finally a role that arises from the moment in which CFK catches media attention by becoming the first lady in 2003, the Frivolous Diva. The first section briefly introduces CFK's trajectory as a prominent leader. Then, the body of the article discusses the three roles introduced earlier. Finally, the conclusion argues that despite the media's power, sometimes they fail at getting their message across, making obvious their gendered discursive operation.     

Getting Out in the “Real World”: Young Men,Queer and Theories of Gay Community

ABSTRACT

A recent opinion piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald expresses a widely held perception that, among young same-sex attracted men in Australia, “queer” has well and truly supplanted “gay” as the language and lens through which self and practice is generated. In this article, I discuss findings from a qualitative research project that studied notions of community among young gay men, and argue that this assumption should not be taken for granted. The article explores participants' understandings of the concept of “gay community,” arguing that the young men studied share a common definition of community: one based on a conventional liberal model which prioritizes sameness and the cooperation of individuals to achieve common goals. This is of particular importance in that problems around “fitting in” with these understandings are also raised. In examining the potential place for queer alternatives to these formulations, however, the article finds that queer attracts little support among participants, raising questions about the bind young men may find themselves in if they prioritize sameness as fundamental to community, yet feel themselves to be excluded from community by their own or others' perceived difference.     

Preposterous Histories

This article explores maternal desire, loss, and control by reading Carolee Schneemann's performance Interior Scroll (1975) through Tracey Emin's photographic print I've Got It All (2000). More specifically, I consider Schneemann's work on the energy of female sexuality and maternal desire through Emin's recurrent visualizations of sexuality and maternal loss. The artists' refusal to disengage with the commodified (dis)pleasures of femininity leads me to consider the differently contextualized handling of these issues in each artwork. I explore the mediation of the body of each artist by positioning Emin's work as a “source” for my reading of Schneemann's performance. Invoking the notion of “preposterous history” (Bal 1999), I argue that the concepts of the “live” and the “mediated” are differently intensified by operating outside of the constraints of chronology. Hence the inter-generational dialogue between these particular female artists, whose work has been produced at different historical moments, is itself generative of thoughts and ideas that are irreducible to the individual works.     

“You Bring Great Masculinity and Truth”: Sexuality,whiteness, and the regulation of the male body in motion

This study contributes to analyses of how heterosexuality and whiteness work together in the embodied social practice of dance and the representational realm of television. It does so by attempting to destabilize theories of sexual difference dependent upon the concept of a stable, “natural,” and unitary body by highlighting the representational work that underpins heteronormative (white) masculinity within the first season of the syndicated reality dance television series So You Think You Can Dance Canada. The paper argues that though the presence of male dancers in the (often feminized) representational realm has the potential to challenge simple heteronormative dichotomies of masculine/feminine, reality dance television in this case plays with, yet ultimately reaffirms, heteronormative masculinity and does so relationally, through the juxtaposition of racialized male and female dance contestants over the span of a series. While it is not surprising that a reality show depends heavily upon heteronormative stereotypes, these discursive mechanisms are rendered invisible, in this case, when couched in a discourse of authenticity, technical ability, and dance aesthetics, resonating beyond the context of television, into the ways we think about dance practice.     

An Interrupted Postcolonial/Feminist Cyberethnography: Complicity and Resistance in the "Cyberfield"

Informed by Foucault's theorisation of the docile body, the gaze, and the Panopticon, we analyse how the gaze is operationalised in the popular makeover show How to Look Good Naked (HTLGN). We explore how a regime of discipline is (re)produced through the drawing of boundaries constructing the feminine/masculine and straight/queer binaries. We analyse the delineation of rules and the performance of practices to maintain these boundaries, which support emphasised femininity and hegemonic masculinity. Whilst HTLGN claims to challenge the “body fascism” prevalent in the fashion, beauty, and advertising industries and rid women, and more recently men, of the shame associated with not meeting these ideals, we argue that the show's resistance is far from radical, functioning instead as a mediated ritual of rebellion, endorsing and sustaining key elements constituting prevailing constructions of femininity and masculinity.     

Making E.T. Perfectly Queer

In the wake of E.T.'s 1982 debut, film critics Marina Heung and Vivian Sobchack established that the enduring appeal of E.T. inheres in the dissolution of the nuclear heterosexual family over the latter half of the twentieth century and the film's “fairy tale” stand-in for the “mythology of family relations” that Dana Cloud terms “conservative familialism.” As Carl Plantinga puts it, E.T. offers a “virtual solution … to [a] traumatic problem.” Despite this, however, E.T. remains for many an inconsolable tragedy. Approaching E.T. from the perspective of the queer child who grows “more sideways than up,” in the real absence of a fairy tale solution to the traumatic problem of conservative familialism, I here seek to identify and celebrate E.T.'s “complex range of queerness” that has until now remained largely closeted.     

Lesbians Bait the Military

This article analyzes the racial and sexual politics of the “don't ask, don't tell” storyline on Showtime's series The L Word. It situates The L Word within a political economy of media industry and policy advocacy organizations to argue that the show participated in a form of “policy-tainment” by producing critique of both existing government policies and the role of racial representations in oppositional political strategies, and finally exercising influence in policy networks.     

Television And The Domestication Of Cosmetic Surgery

An exploration of the discursive production of cosmetic surgery on the television shows Extreme Makeover and Nip/Tuck illustrates that these programmes contribute to and reflect the processes through which cosmetic surgery has become domesticated within increasingly globalised contexts. I demonstrate that across a range of cultural sites, including some feminist scholarship, the press, and surgical television, post-feminist frames have displaced feminist frames for comprehending cosmetic surgery, enabling the culture's surgical turn. Feminist attention to risk, oppressive standards for appearance, and the cultural and discursive location of suffering around the deviant body is displaced by the post-feminist celebration of physical transformation as the route to happiness and personal empowerment. It is this logic that is played out through Extreme Makeover's rendering of surgery as the solution for personal suffering and a meting out of justice to the “moral” individual. Extreme Makeover explicitly domesticates cosmetic surgery by publicising its benefits and undoing the former imperative to hide surgery rather than be viewed as “inauthentic.” As a corollary, the show promotes a system of visual eugenics where “unaesthetic” raced and gendered facial and bodily features are erased. Nip/Tuck gestures toward feminist responses to surgical culture through making its violent interventions into the body explicit, by including a feminist character, and through incorporating plot lines which critique the narcissism and gendered cruelty of surgical appearance work. However, these gestures serve as dramatic devices, the political potential of which is curtailed by the requirements of the melodrama to favour sensational story arcs and to retain a degree of sympathy for the surgeon leads. Thus, both shows contribute to a post-feminist mediascape which renders the inevitability of the culture's surgical turn, providing limited frames for viewers negotiating their own responses to the meanings of cosmetic surgery.     

Recycling Judy and Corliss

This article analyzes the racial and sexual politics of the domestic sitcom Gimme a Break (NBC, 1981–1987). Gimme a Break starred black actress and singer Nell Carter as “Nell,” a former nightclub singer who was now the lascivious caretaker of a white family. As a single woman living with a single (widowed) white man and his children, the show's use of sexual humor clashed with its refusal to breach the interracial sex taboo. This article argues that Gimme a Break relied upon the delightful difference signified by Nell's black sass and sexuality, but labored to contain it. Part of this strategy was imbedded in Carter's grotesque body; its fat blackness was accorded hypersexuality through its link to the black blues tradition and aberrant black sexuality, but was also deemed unappealing, and therefore “safe,” within a white context. Another important strategy was to repeatedly deny that Nell and the white father were attracted to each other. However, the gags and storylines meant to disavow this attraction also had to first invoke it. The result of these contradictions and negotiations was that as long as the white father was present on the show, Nell's sexuality was potentially disruptive.     

Endless Interrogation

This paper takes a revisionist look at the first episode of Prime Suspect (1991–2006)—hereafter known as Prime Suspect (1)— in what was to become a cycle of dramas, conceptualised, and in the first instance, written by Lynda La Plante, based upon the female Detective Chief Inspector character, Jane Tennison. Critical attention has hitherto tended to shift away from Brunsdon's (2000) ground-breaking work on Prime Suspect (1)'s “equal opportunities discourse” toward critiques which emphasise its noir, hardboiled and literary, traditions. The paper thus seeks to rehabilitate Prime Suspect (1)'s televisual—rather than derived—lineage, in an adapted form of dramatised documentary practice. By using insights drawn from Kristevan psychoanalytic analysis I undertake an analysis of the programme in order to demonstrate how the masculine police series drama genre may be not only intervened, but is ultimately deconstructed by, the abject female body.     

“Nyota Uhura is Not a White Girl”

This essay examines the online debate surrounding representation of the Black/African character of Lt. Uhura in the 2009 prequel film, Star Trek. Some fans, particularly those viewing the film from a gender/race intersection, applauded her portrayal, while others, including many “slashers” who espouse a homoerotic reading of classic Trek from an ostensible gender/sexuality standpoint, disapproved—especially of Uhura's romantic storyline. Virtual observation and appraisal of these discourses demonstrate the adaptability of Patricia Hill Collins' intersectionality framework to studies of media reception, especially in terms of hegemonic and interpersonal domains of power and cultural studies notions of articulation. Accordingly, the investigation finds the first fan faction's rhetorical efforts more authentically and pro-actively oppositional.     

Sluts that Choose Vs Doormat Gypsies

The UK primetime series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (Channel 4, 2010, 2011, 2012) offered audiences the opportunity to be armchair matrimonial ethnographers, to reveal the courtship curiosities of “one of the most secretive communities in the UK.” In spite of claims to social realist documentary, however, we argue that this programme has clearer resonances with “sexposé” reality television, producing and circulating a moral, visual economy premised upon the cultural figuration of “the gypsy bride.” The gypsy girl and gypsy bride are marked as victims of male gypsy oppression, of “backwards” and repressive cultural practices, of age-inappropriate sexualisation and “excessive” consumerism, and is thus defined by her failure to be a good aspirational postfeminist subject. In this paper, we explore the intersecting discourses around gender, sexuality, class, and race operative within Gypsy Wedding and analyse online forums responding to the programme. We use psychosocial methodologies and theories of affect to argue that the gypsy bride becomes a figure of abjection, desired and despised, and that the (readily accepted) invitation to be appalled by her “oppression” reveals the strategic potency of postfeminist notions of empowerment and the racist, sexist, and classist agendas it can serve.     

Remaking Charlie's Angels

From their initial appearance on US broadcast network television in the mid-1970s to their feature film incarnations in 2000 and 2003, the characters known as Charlie's Angels have been at the center of American popular culture's negotiations over feminism, femininity, and the relationship between the two. This article analyzes the “remaking” of Charlie's Angels over the past 30 years as a means of considering the “remaking” of discourses of feminism and femininity in a changing historical context. In addition to considering the original television series, this analysis also examines attempts to “clone” the series in late 1970s TV, parodies of and homages to the series in 1990s television and film, and the twenty-first-century feature films. I argue that analyzing the various re-imaginings and remakes of Charlie's Angels can be a means of revealing how post-feminism, as a series of cultural responses to feminism, has wound its way through American popular culture over the past 30 years, achieving an increasingly naturalized, and thereby more hegemonically entrenched, position over time.