Core Response 2: Girl Power! by Damian Panton

     A few years ago I remember attending a poetry reading given by Dawn Lundy at the University at Buffalo. In response to an audience member’s question about the themes of her work she said: “Let’s be honest, nobody really gives a shit about feminism anymore”. I was so shocked that I wrote it down in my notebook and completely forgot about it until this week’s readings on post-feminism. Knowing what I know now, I suppose it’s understandable that Lundy could hold this belief and one could possibly go so far as to say it’s true. Lundy likely witnessed the rise of female depictions that empowered women as much as they exploited them– it was everywhere in the late ‘90s and early 2000s as Angela McRobbie’s piece suggests. Musical groups like the Spice Girls seemed to coin the term “girl power” while ushering in a new age of female action heroes. Only a few years later, Britney Spears’ whole shtick was flaunting her sexuality while feigning naivety to the use of her body as a commercial product. And in the media, shows like Sex and the City openheartedly embraced the flaunting of sexuality while eschewing traditional cultural values such as getting married or having children. However, some of the media of today seems a far cry from the programming McRobbie describes in that it paradoxically embraces both raunch culture of the postfeminist age and the conservative nature of pre-feminist culture.

     Perhaps the most obvious example of this can be seen in Keeping Up with the Kardashians where the bodies of all the women in the family are utilized for their money making potential. Kris Jenner has no problem asking either of her older daughters to pose nude for a photo shoot or sexualizing her younger daughters by buying them a stripper’s pole to practice on. Many of the Kardashians’ conversations and activities revolve around what they do with their bodies such as shaving each other’s genitalia, walking in on each other during sexual intercourse, and openly discussing their mother’s sex life. At the same time, the show works very hard to portray the fact that these women have fulfilling lives in other, slightly more traditional, ways. As the older Kardashian siblings got married and began having children the same sexual activities are turned into something that benefits the whole family. Suddenly Kim’s nude photos would make a wonderful gift for her husband (who, presumably, has already seen her naked), it’s good that Kim walked in on Kourtney and Scott having sex on the balcony because that means the conflict between them that’s the core of the episode is over and their marriage is healthy once again, and now that Kim is being woken up to the sounds of her mother and her new boyfriend it’s apparent that she’s finally getting over the divorce and moving on. Unlike the women of Sex and the City, the Kardashian’s appreciation of sexual freedom doesn’t come at the expense of long-term relationships or starting a family. You can have it all! Even if it’s just to appeal to multiple demographics.

     This intersection of values that seemingly conflict with one another isn’t necessarily new to reality television either. I would argue that The Osbournes started the trend back in 2002 followed by The Real Housewives which started in 2006, the year after the former ended. As someone who doesn’t watch a lot of “real” television (i.e. stuff that’s not complete trash), I wonder if postfeminist values intersect with pre-feminist culture in fictional programming. At any rate I don’t think that Dawn Lundy was entirely correct. For women in the business of making money like the Kardashians, Britney Spears, and Nicki Minaj feminism is something that gets in the way of doing what they’re doing, so they don’t give a shit about it. For others, the word has shifted definitions once more to encompass more recent forms of resistance to the patriarchy… or something. I don’t know I’m a guy.

CORE RESPONSE: Does It Matter If It's A Man Or A Woman?

When it comes to gender representation, no issue is too small. Such is true for the story of Lisa Hanawalt, Production Designer for Netflix cartoon BoJack Horseman. On an otherwise regular day at the office, Lisa changed two background characters from men to women. This stirred up more controversy than anyone would have expected. You can find the NPR story here.

I thought this story was pretty interesting and highlights how "male" is the norm in American popular culture. Men can be funny, gross, and weird, among millions of other things, but women need to fit into pre-conceived notions of femininity. 

As the show's producers point out, the gender of background characters on a cartoon may seem trivial, but I'd have to agree with third-wave feminists Jennifer Baumgardener and Amy Richards that "media visibility is absolutely crucial to politics." (Banet-Weiser, Sarah, “What’s your Flava? Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture.” 208) Normalizing the diversity of the female experience is a big part of advancing feminist causes. 

I also wanted to bring attention to the conclusion of the piece, in which show creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg talks about the response he has gotten when he tells this story. He says that people have congratulated him for learning a lesson, because, as Susan Berridge points out in a recent article for CST Online, "white men are frequently portrayed as better feminists than female characters.” (“My Mum was a Feminst in the 1970s: Radical Feminism in Fresh Meat,” 2014)

Since we as American media viewers have been programed to see the world through the eyes of white, male protagonists, we relate more to the struggle of the kind white man who is just doing his best to understand the increasingly diverse world around him. He should be applauded for even recognizing the existence of “others,” not to mention understanding and sympathizing with their struggles. 

Because of this problem of identifying white men as better feminists, I was pleasantly surprised that NPR chose to end the story with a focus on the woman who brought up the issue. The point wasn’t that a white man learned a lesson about gender representation. As reporter Neda Ulaby puts it, “The point is that Lisa Hanawalt was right.”

The point is that Lisa Hanawalt participated in active, political feminism at work. Unlike the feminist that Banet-Weiser admonishes, Hanawalt represents a type of feminism that isn’t ambivalent. She took a small issue on a cartoon and made it matter, because as McRobbie says in her essay "Post-Feminism and Popular Culture," “relations of power are indeed made and re-made within texts of enjoyment and rituals of relaxation and abandonment.” (262) The background of a little Netflix cartoon matters - it matters if it's a man or a woman. 

Core Response #3: Responses to Post-Feminist TV

Current Responses to Post-Feminist Television

Stefania Marghitu

A show like the Second and the City depicts successful white upper middle class women from their mid 30s onward living in New York City. They are all for the most part in successful jobs- Carrie’s a sex columnist, Charlotte’s a gallery coordinator/curator of some sort, Samantha’s a high power celebrity publicist, Miranda, the least desirable and hardest working and most educated, is a lawyer. Throughout the show we see these women have some problems with work, but we hardly ever question the gendered dynamics of their jobs or how they got to where they are. Besides Miranda, these jobs are also mostly women-dominated. Miranda navigates through a male-dominated law company as she wants to get partner. She seems to give up a lot of her feminine wiles because of this position.  But these women are still instantly in high powered, high paying positions, we do not see their struggle to get to that job, which is part of the post-feminist assumption that feminism’s work is done, that equality has been achieved because society at large has become a meritocracy and gender is no longer an issue holding women back from their careers. 

We see this in a show like Ally McBeal, the other most popularly written about show in terms of post-feminism, in which again the white upper middle class protagonist already has that Harvard Law degree, and she’s in her new job, and her ex college boyfriend and his new girlfriend are now both their colleague!

Having it all was not a term coined by feminists, but by the backlash of feminism that urged women that they could never be fulfilled with a career because they had no time to become mothers. It’s kind of like the bra burning stereotype, when feminists actually didn’t get the fire permit and no bra bruning was done. No feminist ever said women can have it all, but that they should be entitled to equality to men to have what they choose to want. The Betty Friedan Feminine Mystique Second Wave and the Anne Marie Slaughter Sheryl Sandberg Lean In brand of corporate feminism is problematic because it is only relatable to college educated, upper middle class, white women who can have the choice to work or raise a family, etc. Friedan and Sandberg now fail to acknowledge women of lower income in America who HAD to work to sustain their families, who could not think about leaning in or these kinds of gender dynamics that also deal with race, ethnicity, class, and so on. This doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of global feminism, but since our focus is on Anglo-American TV as well. 

Post-feminist TV attributes to me are all about female protagonists who revert to preoccupying themselves with traditional gender expectations, that successful careers can be easily achieved but are not a main preoccupation, with situations and scenarios that disregard the albeit limited success of post-second wave feminism and beyond. A series like Mad Men for me was in some ways a feminist critique on post-feminist society’s forgetfulness of the struggles of feminism, showing how the characters of Betty and Joan often struggle with their roles in society based on ther femininity and traditional gender expectations while Peggy is a rare career-oriented loner navigating through a male-dominated field.

Sex and the City, Ally McBeal, and Mad Men are all about the Unberable Whiteness of Being too, and in many ways, Shonda Rhimes’ Grey’s Anatomy picked up from the popularity of Sex and the City and ER’s popularity too, of that good looking ensemble medical cast. Rhimes incorporated blindcasting to reveal a diverse cast, although the central protagonists were white, which would change with the historic black female protagonist Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) in Scandal. In some ways, Rhimes’ series play out like a feminist fantasy in which women get their high level positions based on their merit, and they are less concerned, if not downright frightened, of settling down to a home and family, unlike their male counterparts.

Over the break I finally started watching Being Mary Jane, created and showrunned by Mara Brock Akil. I binge watched Season 1 on Netflix and luckily had the hindsight to begin recording Season 2 on my DVR. In many ways, BMJ is a response to many of these series of the past. It shows a career-driven successful late 30s black woman with a beautiful house, luxury car. We see her exercising, eating right, working late, having bad dates, break ups, family problems. She is single because she states she has been so career-driven. As a broadcast journalist for a fictional CNN competitor in Atlanta, she addresses race-related issues with strident passion, as Akil does when she shows the disparity between her protagonist, a single and successful career woman, and her 19-year old niece who has two children with two different fathers and no career or education.

Butler writes:

McRobbie (2009) argues—and Foucault would surely agree—that postfemi- nism becoming so widespread at this socio-historical moment is not a coinci- dence; rather, it is precisely because women are now required to participate in the labor market and the public sphere that postfeminism emerges to re-secure the gender (and racial) order (67). In other words, as women come forward in education and employment and gender equality is allegedly achieved, and as women of color become increasingly visible in the academy and the public sphere, contemporary discourses must adapt in order to reinforce gender and racial hierarchies and ensure that the systems of compulsory heterosexuality and white privilege remain intact.

We are in a really fascinating era of television now in which popular press is writing about television’s relationship with race and gender in a very real way, both in terms of representations behind and in front of the camera. When Tina Fey’s 30 Rock first premiered in the early 2000s, very few folks were outwardly talking about the show’s relationship to feminism, race issues, the workplace and so on. 

With Fey’s latest venture Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Netflix premiere in early March, cultural critics delved into Fey’s newfound more overt feminism but still carefully criticized her problematic take on race and ethnicity, especially in her female characters, but also with the supporting male Asian character, and a truly strange Native American flashback plot. Interestingly enough, the show was first a lot more darker and smarter from what I heard, it toned down for NBC, NBC still wasn't keen on it, so what we see on Netflix is more of an appeasement for NBC when its original conception could have been more apt.

We can reach a Todd Gitlin kind of conclusion based on representations of women in popular TV programming, but we can also see how increased visibility on the importance of women in TV and conveying feminist attitudes, and the recent proliferation of what scholars like Sarah Banet-Weiser are calling “popular feminism,” can change things for future generations. 

It’s a lot like what Constance Wu of Fresh Off the Boat recently said in an interview about her character, career and the show’s significance, despite its clear imperfection:

“Usually I’ll be auditioning for the third lead and there will be Latina actresses, Indian actresses, African American actresses because it will be like, ‘let’s check off this box. We have our lead white girl, and we need an ethnic slot.’ And I've actually been told, ‘We've decided the guy’s best friend is going to be Asian so we needed the girl’s best friend to be black because we couldn't have two Asians. They want to check off their boxes, which in its own way is a kind of perverted gesture.”

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/screen-wars/fresh-boat-star-constance-wu-asians-and-tv

LOL Deadline Tried It

http://deadline.com/2015/03/tv-pilots-ethnic-casting-trend-backlash-1201386511/

Submitted without comment.

Actually I have to comment for my blog participation grade. So...here it goes.

There are a couple of *interesting* layers with this article and the thinking behind it.

There was a noticeable shift toward minority castings last season, with more parts opening up to ethnic actors, a casting term used for non-Caucasian thesps. It was a concerted effort, with more than one instance where a family member role was rewritten as adopted to make them ethnic. Then, following the success of freshman series How To Get Away With Murder, Black-ish, Fresh Off The Boat, Jane the Virgin and especially Empire, which launched to huge ratings at the kickoff of pilot casting season, ethnic castings exploded this season.

1. Casting? Why is the issue casting for the many of the aforementioned shows? Who else is going to be cast as Taiwanese immigrant parents and their kids? Are we going to go for a "The Last Airbender" situation? Oh I wish you would Hollywood, I DARE YOU. Who would be cast in a show about a rapper-turned-mogul which seems to have an express mission to expose the homophobia in the Black community? Where could you even go with that? Blackface. Yes let's do more blackface, it's so timeless! Who would be cast in a show set in Miami that is a loose adaptation and slight parody of a Venezuelan telenovela? Latinos can be White BUT HOLLYWOOD STOP FALLING BACK ON THAT LIKE Y'ALL KNOW THE NUANCES OF RACIAL AND ETHNIC GROUPS (it should be noted that one of the male love interests, a Latino character, is played by an actor who is Italian and Ashkenazi Jewish). Are we going to get some more Ben Affleck beefcake as part-Mexican Tony Mendez? It's so arbitrary to me that casting was the point of entry to write about this supposed problem. Well it's not arbitrary. It mirrors the immigrants-taking-jobs-in-our-country myth and affirmative action phobia in this melting pot of a country.

In one instance, after a number of actors of different ethnicities tested for two roles in a pilot this year, two Caucasian actors ended up being the top choices for the two remaining regular parts. However, because of a mandate from the studio and network, one of the roles had to diverse, so the pilot could only cast one of the top choices and pass on the other to fulfill the ethnic quota. “They need to say the best man or woman wins,” one rep suggested.

2. "Merit aka the best person gets the part." The supposed meritocracy that governs the United States of Amerikkka is used to justify racism in every industry and in general, everything ever. Whiteness is considered the best just by it's very existence, not because of actual talent or merit. The fact that this woman is crying over a White actor not being cast in a show is so laughable all I can say is read a book. And give me my reparations.

While they are among the most voracious and loyal TV viewers, African-Americans still represent only 13% of the U.S. population. They were grossly underserved, but now, with shows as Empire, Black-ish, Scandal and HTGAWM on broadcast, Tyler Perry’s fare on OWN and Mara Brock Akil’s series on BET, they have scripted choices, so the growth in that fraction of the TV audience might have reached its peak.

3. Proportionality. SINCE WHEN IS ANYTHING PROPORTIONATE WHEN IT COMES TO PEOPLE OF COLOR? Certainly not in our injustice system. Certainly not anywhere. This is so laughable I’ve ascended to heaven, then descended to hell, then been around the world in 80 days solely on the power of my convulsions of laughter.  

I could go on but I’ll reserve my Black girl superpowers for something more worthwhile.  

Core Response 2: The Economic Factors of Sensationalism

Core Response 2: The Economic Factors of Sensationalism

Chad Raphael’s “The Political Economic Origins of Reali-TV” distinguishes various Reali-TV formats “according to how much each relies on nontraditional labor… and production inputs (Raphael 124). Seemingly once the predominant format of Reali-TV during the 1980s, network newsmagazines are now a format that have been pushed aside by what shows that focus on has-been/minor celebrities, bachelors, housewives, and so on.  Considering the news magazine and its origins of freelance crews, low budget reenactments, and amateur footage (in some cases), I am interested in the way in which such programs, which heavily relied/relies on the “same mix of studio and location footage as the evening news” have since shifted as a means of ‘keeping up with the Kardashians.’ As reality TV and its production value increases, we now see the hyper-stylized and hyper-dramatized news magazine - if this ‘improved’ format may still bear this title.

This interest stems from somewhat of personal experience. In 2003, a recent high school graduate went missing in my hometown, and the story became the focus of local media for months as clue after clue led to many wrong turns and dead ends. The story is tragic and certainly bizarre in its own right - if anyone is interested in the case itself, you may read a brief overview about it here.

In 2008, this case was picked up by Investigation Discovery’s show Solved. This show operates much like 48 Hours; it is shot on location and edited by professionals, includes minimal, low-budget reenactment, and interviews with police, family, and friends. Much of it narrative relies on following the search for Kelly Bullwinkle and subsequently moves into the search for her killer(s), and its conclusion leaves the audience with assurance that procedural justice has been ‘served’ and another case has been ‘solved’. [A short side note is also worth mentioning: interestingly enough, a show like Solved also speaks to Raphael’s later discussion of reality TV and globalization – though this aired in the US in 2008, we received word from family that it premiered in Ireland as recent as 2013.]

Fast-forward to November, 2014. The Bullwinkle case was once again picked up by Lifetime’s I Killed My BFF. Like Solved, this show contains interviews, on location shooting, and follows the case from start to finish. However, it is riddled with over-the-top reenactments that make this seem like more of a fictional narrative than a ‘news magazine’ of sorts. Instead of heavily focusing on the case itself, the show (which self claims to be a ‘documentary series’) focuses on a narrative of  ‘the Goth lifestyle’ and sexual experimentation. Obviously, given that this is a Lifetime series, there are certain expectations and levels of drama immediately attached to the show and its overarching narrative. Nevertheless, what is important to consider here is format. As a means of competing in the current climate of reality television, crime ‘documentary series’ must amp up both drama and quality. It is not enough to provide short reenactments dispersed through an episode – to show the drama, reenactments seemingly become the entire episode which makes one question whether they are watching a ‘news magazine’ or a ‘based on’ fiction.

From news magazines to the Kardashians and so on, we see a subtle but approaching shift. Quality increases as drama increases, and money is required to increase both. The news magazine itself has seemed to morph from news to tabloid (and may well be on its way to fiction). As we continue to move forward on this path, it is worth questioning the future economics of Reali-TV. Though reality television is still cheaper than the one-million-per-episode drama, how long will this last?

One Step Back (Sorry): Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Race

I know this was last week’s topic, but directly after our discussion on television and racial representation, I binge-watched (twice, in fact) the new Netflix show, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. I watched it so quickly that I didn’t have time to read the trending popular articles/criticisms on the show. However as I watched, I was hyper-aware of its sordid handling of racial representation. Some of it, in my opinion, seemed problematically stereotypical (the performance elements of Native Americans and a Korean immigrant), but at times the show illumined some cultural failures as well (for example: when Titus feels more accepted in public dressed as a werewolf than as himself, a black man). Now, there seems to be a (contained?) storm of controversy surrounding its issues of representation and identification. I’m wondering--for those who have seem the show--if this was on your radar while watching the show.