Way More Than a Tag Line: HBO, Feminism, and the Question of Difference in Pop Culture
"[T]he self-analysis involved in the kind of feminist
criticism I would advocate may well provide an antidote to the
narcissism I suspect to be at the heart of much reader-oriented popular
culture criticism—a criticism which, although claiming a certain
objective validity by appealing to the pleasures and tastes of others,
often seems to be based on an unspoken syllogism that goes something
like this: 'I like Dallas; I am a feminist; Dallas must
have progressive potential.' It seemed important at one historical
moment to emphasize the way 'the people' resist mass culture's
manipulations. Today, we are in danger of forgetting the crucial fact
that like the rest of the world even the cultural analyst may sometimes
be a 'cultural dupe'—which is, after all, only an ugly way of
saying that we exist inside ideology, that we are all victims, down to
the very depths of our psyches, of political and cultural domination
(even though we are never only victims)" (45).
Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a
'Postfeminist' Age (1991)
I begin with these words from Tania Modleski because the fear of
lapsing into simplistic syllogisms—"I like HBO; I am a feminist; HBO
must be feminist too"—functions as one bookend of this issue of The
Scholar and Feminist Online. As professional feminist scholars, the
contributors carefully avoid facile generalizations about HBO's gender
politics based on our own moments of euphoric fandom. All too aware
"that we exist inside ideology," that, in other words, our attraction to
certain television shows may arise from socially constructed desires
tainted by the patriarchal capitalist culture that produced us and HBO
in the same historical moment, we remain skeptical of our own
subscriptions, scrutinizing claims of "difference," "newness," and
"subversion" asserted by cable advertising campaigns and feminist
criticism alike. The "It's Not TV. It's HBO" ad is "way more than a
tag line" to us, as it is to the marketing execs at AOL
Time Warner,[1]
and the longing felt by certain audiences for television programming
that does something different with gender and
sexuality—that serves something other than the heartland
return-to-the-family ideology of CBS or the thin gloss of hip topics
over ultimately conservative stereotypes and story lines offered by NBC
or the woefully unfeminist line-up on Lifetime's version of "Television
for Women"—may lead to prematurely embracing a corporate
conglomerate with a bottom line of profits, not progressive social
change. Yet caution is not the whole story of this collection.
In many ways, we have taken the claim that television is more than
feminism's bad object and run with it.[2]
There is a greediness among
current feminist media scholars for a forum in which to discuss visual
pleasure and fandom without shame or self-deprecation. I suspect that
the attraction so many intelligent women feel towards the shows on HBO
cannot be reduced to false consciousness and that there is a clue in
this avid spectatorship to the riddle of how to move feminist
conversations about gender roles, relationships, and non-normativity
forward, how to keep feminism relevant to young women's lives in this
moment. Even if we ultimately decide that shows like The
Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, and other
popular original series are not feminist, the narrative arcs and
visual rhetoric of these texts provoke rich, energetic conversations
about feminism—over drinks at professional conferences as
well as in the everyday feminist classroom. Thus the other bookend
against which to balance Modleski's view of pop culture as unredeemably
patriarchal might be usefully drawn from the reader-oriented criticism
she upbraids.[3]
Henry Jenkins recuperates fandom as not only an
acceptable but a privileged position from which to analyze pop culture,
a vantage point from which one sees ardently into the dynamics of a
television show, producing "new insights into the media by releasing
[the critic] from the narrowly circumscribed categories and assumptions
of academic criticism and allowing [her] to play with textual materials"
(5). The creative energy that comes from playing with texts—as
opposed to holding them at arm's length as agents of cultural
dupery—will lead ideally to more complex theories of
representation and pleasure.[4]
Indeed, the tension between
these bookend ideologies produces a third position of some importance to
this collection and to my own interests as a scholar, what I would
identify as an emerging third wave feminist media theory. Although few
have written about film or television from this perspective,[5]
other fields of representation have come under third wave feminist analysis.
For instance, Leslie Heywood and Shari Dworkin put the icon of the
female athlete under a third wave lens, arguing that "we need a much
more flexible paradigm for interpretation than the objectification
thesis" and asserting that "images can do negative and affirmative
cultural work simultaneously" (11). Heywood and Dworkin outline the
current ideological climate in terms that can help illuminate the
importance of subversive gender scripts on HBO:
What
particular shape of the female body 'plays in Peoria' follows cyclical
trends that are determined to some extent by racial, political, sexual,
and economic codes. There was, for instance, some acceptance of a more
muscular female body in the gender-progressive flapper era of the
Roaring Twenties, an acceptance that followed gains made by the
suffragettes who successfully canvassed for a woman's right to vote.
But this acceptance decreased with the more conservative gender
relations that developed out of the 1930s Depression, an occurrence
perhaps parallel to where we seem to be moving in the post-Enron,
post-9/11 world of the early twenty-first century. . . . From Louise
Brooks to Rosie the Riveter to Angela Bassett, there is more public
acceptance of a muscular ideal for women in or immediately following
periods of prosperity like the '20s, '60s, and '90s, when definitions of
traditional womanhood are being challenged. One can only hope that the
economic downturn in the early twenty-first century won't be followed by
a similar historical shift back to traditional femininity and all its
implications of limitation for women. (xviii)
Recent attacks on abortion rights and gay marriage suggest that
gender and sexuality are in fact being reined in by mainstream culture.
In such a context, the revisions of gender scripts on HBO, while often
not as radical as feminist audiences might like, are a welcome relief
from full-on backlash and parochialism. As much as it may be part of
the pop culture machine, I still experience HBO as a "felicitous space"
in television, an area that makes room for wide-ranging images of the female body
notwithstanding what "plays in Peoria."[6]
The shortcomings of
"primetime feminism," as Bonnie J. Dow articulates them—"a white,
middle-class, heterosexual bias, an assumption that a 'seize the power'
mindset and more vigorous individualism will solve all women's problems,
and a conflation of feminist identity with feminist
politics" (207) —are not as pervasive on HBO as they are on
network television. Certainly the heterosexism and hyper-individualism
are explicitly called into question on many of its series. Dow
cautions, "we need to appreciate media for what it can do in giving us
images of strong women; yet, at the same time, we need to maintain a
very keen sense of the limitations of media logic" (214). This balance
between appreciation and skepticism, or pleasure and danger (to recall
parallel terms in the feminist sex wars), leads the contributors in this
issue to raise a range of stimulating questions about various
characters, story lines, and feminist dilemmas. Altogether, the essays
posit HBO's original series as a medium of oppositional culture[7]:
- exposing sexist and classist bias against strippers
- revealing the social construction of masculinity
- defending
the sexual female adolescent from the disciplinary discourse of
psychoanalysis
- celebrating the fifty-something female libido as
a carnivalesque rejection of propriety and ageism
- rejecting
mainstream madonnifications of mothers as well as feminist
interpretations of motherhood as always compulsory or confining
- problematizing liberal feminism as a guise for postfeminist
traditionalism[8]
- blurring boundaries between straight and gay
characters
- examining the commodification of romance
These progressive moves are all, to some degree or other, intercut
with moments of containment, flashes of stereotypes, plot crutches, and
predictable jokes, yet they constitute a significant and sustained
effort at writing outside the box of essentialism (the idea that
femininity and masculinity are natural inborn identities) and beyond the
walls of identity politics (the idea that our identity categories are
rigid, stable, and directly related to our politics). For this reason,
the following essays focus on the conversations made possible by
HBO without feeling the need to subordinate this positive approach to an
obligatory deprecation of television culture.
We like HBO.
We are feminists.
Is it so crazy to think HBO might have some
feminist potential?
Works Cited
Alberti, John, ed. Leaving
Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional
Culture. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003.
Applebaum, Simon. "Hall of Fame." Multichannel News 24.29 (2003): 3A.
Infotrac.
Brunsdon, Charlotte, Julie D'Acci, and Lynn Spigel,
eds. Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader. Oxford:
Clarendon, 1997.
Dow, Bonnie J. Prime-Time Feminism:
Television, Media Culture, and the Women's Movement since 1970.
Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996.
Fryer, Judith. Felicitous Space: Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa
Cather. U of North Carolina P, 1986.
Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters.
Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
Henry, Astrid. "Orgasms and Empowerment:
Sex and the City and Third Wave Feminism." Reading Sex
and the City. Eds. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe. London: I.B.
Tauris, 2004. 65-82.
Heywood, Leslie and Shari Dworkin. Built to Win: The Female Athlete as Cultural Icon.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.
New York: Routledge, 1992.
Karlyn, Kathleen Rowe. "Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism's Third Wave: 'I'm Not My
Mother.'" Genders 38 (2001):
http://www.genders.org/index.html
Modleski, Tania. The
Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New
York: Metheum, 1988.
---. Feminism without Women: Culture
and Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age. New York: Routledge,
1991.
Probyn, Elsbeth. "New Traditionalism and Post-Feminism:
TV Does the Home." Brunsdon, D'Acci, and Spiegel 126-37.
Endnotes
1. HBO's award-winning ad campaign, "It's not TV.
It's HBO," ran from 1997-2003, branding the original series that appear
on this subscription channel as a separate social field from television
or reality. Eric Kessler, AOL Time Warner sales and marketing
president, claims, "This is way more than a tag line to us. This is the
philosophy we infuse with all of the decisions we make, whether
programming or marketing or new product calls. Everything we do is
about doing things differently than somewhere else" (Applebaum).
[Return to text]
2. Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D'Acci, and Lynn
Spiegel assert, "Since the 1970s, feminists have become increasingly
interested in television as something more than a bad object, something
that offers a series of lures and pleasures, however limited its
repertoire of female roles" (1). [Return to text]
3. In order to avoid caricaturing Modleski as a
no-fun, no-frills feminist media scholar, I will use another Modleski
text to represent a positive view of the feminist spectator; in her work
on Hitchcock, she argues against the ordained postures of the female
viewer (either a resisting reader or a masochist or male-identified) to
remind us that another option exists. One might view a Hitchcock film
from the perspective of "a woman who deeply understands the experience
of women's oppression under patriarchy" and recognizes that his films
make possible a feminist interpretation of this social structure, even
if they don't necessarily privilege that interpretation; she emphasizes
"those parts which 'know' more than their author, . . . when woman
resists capitulation to male power and male designs" (119).
[Return to text]
4. The idea that the texts of popular culture
warrant more complex theoretical frameworks is demonstrated with agility
by Judith Halberstam in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of
Monsters (153-54). Her chapter, "Bodies that Splatter," intervenes in
feminist film theory with its heavily psychoanalytic background to
reread The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its sequel without assuming "the
formulation of horror as masculine pleasure" in order to "see if, when,
how the horror film can be recuperated for feminine, feminist, and queer
forms of pleasure" (138). [Return to text]
5. Some explicitly third wave feminist media
analyses include Kathleen Rowe Karlyn's article on Scream and Astrid
Henry's essay on Sex and the City. [Return to text]
6. Judith Fryer uses the term "felicitous space" to
describe the narrative strategies of certain female authors either to
transform the domestic arena into a space of freedom rather than
confinement (Edith Wharton) or to revalence the outdoors as a positive
environment for women rather than restricting it to male adventures
(Willa Cather). [Return to text]
7.For an astute analysis of television as site of
opposition culture, see John Alberti's work on The Simpsons. [Return to text]
8. Elspeth Probyn asserts that postfeminist
television representations of women having "'freely' chosen to return"
to the home in shows like thirtysomething adopt the voice of "liberal
feminism shorn of its political programme—it is choice freed of the
necessity of thinking about the political and social ramifications of
the act of choosing" (128, 134). Beth Montemurro's
essay on Charlotte's choices in this issue
addresses a similar problematic, asserting that
Sex and the City directly problematizes such irresponsible politics. [Return to text]
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