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.
