About this Issue
While the first two volumes of The Scholar & Feminist Online
grew directly out of the Center's programming, volume 3.1 represents the
rewards of our first open call for proposals. We felt extremely
fortunate when we received Lisa Johnson's outline for an issue exploring
sex, gender and desire on recent HBO series. Professor Johnson's
proposed investigation into representations of women, family, and
relationships in this particular (and increasingly popular) corner of
pop culture promised to bring new complexities to a conversation that
the Center began with its April 2004 Scholar & Feminist Conference—Power &
Representation in a Media-Saturated Age—which featured
a keynote address by Janeane Garofalo.
Having garnered 109 Emmy nominations last September and won 18
awards, HBO is clearly doing something that appeals to both the masses
and the critics, but the nature and implications of this
something remain unclear. Do these original series truly break
new ground or merely offer new packaging for old cultural scripts? Has
cable television finally broken through network limits that often keep
entertainment media from functioning as social critique, or has it
simply gotten slicker at encouraging its audiences' complacency? Are we
still, in Neil Postman's words, amusing ourselves to death? Taking such
questions as their point of departure, contributors to Feminist
Television Studies: The Case of HBO give us radical new readings of
the channel's three most celebrated programs. In Part I, Katherine
Hyunmi Lee and Lisa Johnson address ideas of masculinity and sex work
feminism in The Sopranos. In Part II, Janet McCabe and Sherryl
Wilson unpack the complicated psychologies of the women of Six Feet
Under, while, in Part III, Kim Akass, Beth Montemurro, Cristy
Turner, and Stephanie Harzewski take up issues of sexuality, politics
and motherhood in Sex and the City. "Even if we ultimately
decide that [these shows] and other popular original series are
not feminist," writes guest editor Lisa Johnson in her
Introduction to the issue, "the narrative
arcs and visual rhetoric of these texts provoke rich, energetic conversations about
feminism." As a counterpoint of sorts to the essays, which focus
primarily on HBO's positive (and even progressive) influence in
mainstream media, we feature a selection of poems by Daphne Gottleib,
fashioned on the concept of the "final girl" in horror films, which
"imagin[e] a range of situations in which girls face horrific social
conditions in the media and in real life."
At the end of her rousing introduction, Professor Johnson advocates a
brand of criticism that strikes a balance between appreciation and
skepticism, between pleasure and danger. We offer issue 3.1 in that
spirit, and hope you find the conversation presented here informative,
thought provoking, and, yes, fun.
We hope you enjoy this issue and, as always, look forward to your
input.
Janet Jakobsen and David Hopson Editors S&F Online
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