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.

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).[↑]
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).[↑]
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).[↑]
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).[↑]
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.[↑]
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). [↑]
7. For an astute analysis of television as site of opposition culture, see John Alberti’s work on The Simpsons.[↑]
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.[↑]