Key Quotes

This is a place for me to keep important/interesting quotes in one place.

Sex and Society:

• “Sexuality is everywhere, and in every place that sexuality touches society, asexuality does too” - Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, 2020, p.5 - this quote really cuts to the heart of the matter in my opinion. Issues around sex and relationships that affect aspec people will also affect everyone else, and this is something I want to really shine a light on
• “Sexuality of any kind never exists in a vacuum. It is […] affected by biology and culture, by our emotional state and mental health, by race and class and gender and the passing of time” – Chen, Ace, p.32
• "A suspicious mind might wonder if taking so many precautions in order to give the history of sex such an impressive filiation does not bear traces of the same old prudishness: as if those valorizing correlations were necessary before such a discourse could be formulated or accepted" - Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p.6
• "Things appear in a very different light: around and apropos of sex, one sees a veritable discursive explosion" over the last three centuries - Foucault, p.17
• "What differentiates sex morally from massage or wrestling, for instance?" - Brake, p.69
• "Sex became an issue, and a public issue no less" - Foucault, p.26
• "Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against minor perversions were multiplied; sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old age, a norm of sexual development was defined and all the possible deviations were carefully described" - Foucault, p.36
• "This whole sexual 'revolution', this whole 'antirepressive' struggle, represented nothing more, but nothing less - and its importance is undeniable - than a tactical shift and reversal in the great deployment of sexuality" - Foucault, p.131
• "'Sex' is historically subordinate to sexuality. We must not place sex on the side of reality, sexuality on that of confused ideas and illusions; sexuality is a very real historical formation; it is what gave rise to the notion of sex, as a speculative element necessary to its operation. We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim - through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality - to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures" - Foucault, p.157

Queer Theory/Studies Context:

• "A concentrated study of asexuality... is most appropriately begun at the crossroads of feminist and queer studies, as asexuality challenges many existing assumptions about gender and sexuality" - Cerankowski and Milks, New Orientations, quoted in Kristian Kahn, Asexuality's Sinthomatics, p.57
• "Queer theory was a response to the limitations of Gay and Lesbian Studies, which did not necessarily account for the variation and diversity of sexualities and gender expressions, including cross-dressing, bisexuality, gender ambiguity - and, as we know now, in light of the recent emergence of an asexual identity and politics, it did not account for asexuality. Queer theory refers to the impossibility of defining any 'natural' sexuality, perpetually challenging normative categories of identity and subjectivity" - Sinwell, p.163

TV Studies Context:

• "Television is a transnational business and a national institution. It remains our most-watched form of entertainment and our most important source of information. It is an outlet for creativity and a medium through which social concern and political views may be expressed [...] Yet changes in recent years have been so great that it has been questioned whether 'television' as a separate medium is still a viable concept" - Patricia Holland, The New Television Handbook, p.3
• "By 2012 all television sets in the United Kingdom had been converted to digital, and the analogue signals were switched off. Various types of set-top box now give access to the established channels and to 'on-demand' programmes streamed via the internet on channels such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. The introduction of the 'smart' television, integrated with the internet, has increased the range of material available and further blurred the distinction between television and other media" - Holland, p.17
• "As John Corner (1992: 98) notes, realism has been regarded as 'television's defining aesthetic and social project'" The notion of realism operates as a standard of value within television institutions and for audiences, since each of these regard the connection of television programmes with reality as a basis for judging the value of television programmes" - Orlebar, p.54
• “Says Spigel, ‘If TV refers to technologies, industrial formations, government policies, and practices of looking that were associated with the medium in its classical public service and three-network age, it appears that we are now entering a new phase of television – the phase that comes after TV’ (2004: 3)” - Spigel, quoted in Roberta Pearson, Lost in Transition, p.239

Compulsory Sexuality:

• “One of the most tenacious ideas about sex […] there is one best way to do it, and that everyone should do it that way” - Chen, Ace, p.59
• “So long as [people] don’t know that saying no forever and for any reason and in any context is okay – sex education, sex therapy, and popular depictions of sex are incomplete and people don’t have the relevant information to fully consent” – Chen, Ace, p.140
• "Compulsory sexuality is a set of assumptions and behaviors that support the idea that every normal person is sexual, that not wanting (socially approved) sex is unnatural and wrong, and that people who don't care about sexuality are missing out on an utterly necessary experience" - Chen, Ace, p.35
• "Narratives about the ubiquity of sexual desire do more than make it hard to say no; when oversimplified, they also make it hard to speak honestly about sexual experiences." - Chen, Ace, p.142
• "The logical implication of these messages about the necessity of sex is that asexuality is an existential threat to any hope of a lasting relationship." - Chen, Ace, p.156
• "Again and again we see the conflation of sex, marriage, and reproduction with true adulthood, and the criteria for that adulthood is tied to reproduction and the patriarchal nuclear family" - Brown, 2022, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality, p.63
• "Because having a 'normal' sexuality and 'normal' sexual desire are conflated with sexual health, a significant amount of acephobia is rooted in healthism and ableism" - Brown, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality, p.81
• "It is in these fictional writings that we can perhaps most clearly see the reproduced mythology that '(a) all women are filled with [sexual] desire deep down, even if they often seem cold on the surface; (b) frigid women need men to awaken them; and (c) women who criticize or resist domination by men have perversely chosen to be frigid.' Fictional writing and medical writing informed one another, and together they worked to broaden the general public's exposure to the term and concept of frigidity as a distinct and pathologized failure of womanhood. Indeed, 'through repeated affirmation and narrative representation, they established a number of functional 'truths'' about frigidity and those who allegedly or apparently suffered from it" - Cryle and Moore, 2011, Frigidity: An Intellectual History, quoted in Brown, p.90
• "Asexuals then are perceived of embodying a failure to experience or perform sexuality 'appropriately', which according to the DSM involves a sexuality lived within certain bounds - not excessive, but not too scant, either" - Jacinthe Flore, Mismeasures of Asexual Desire, p.24
• "Despite an increasingly visible asexual community that rejects medical labels in favor of more affirmative models of minority identity, psychiatric professionals nonetheless persist in interpreting the asexual disinterest in sex as a sign of repression, traumatic avoidance, or other forms of psychological blockage" - Cynthia Barounis, Compulsory Sexuality and Asexual/Crip Resistance in John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus, p.180
• "In our often hypersexualized society where the (hetero)sexual matrix determines more people's identities and where sexuality is often seen as at the core of identity formation, people who do not experience sexual attraction or desire have largely been ignored, pathologized, and/or ridiculed" - Jana Fedtke, Asexual Subjectivity in Keri Hulme's The Bone People, p.329
• "One should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated" - Foucault, p.81
• "We are often reminded of the countless procedures which Christianity once employed to make us detest the body; but let us ponder all the ruses that were employed for centuries to make us love sex, to make the knowledge of it desirable and everything said about it precious" - Foucault, p.159

Amatonormativity

• "If the vast majority of stories posit romantic love as the ultimate goal and unpartnered people as losers, people are unlikely to think outside those narrow lanes." - Chen, Ace, p.126
• "Even in the ace community, she explains, there's a narrative that romantic aces can have relationships and regular lives but aromanticism is one step further from normal." - Chen, Ace, p.133
• "Without really being taught, most of us know what a romantic relationship is supposed to look like: heterosexual, often; monogamous, usually; sexual, pretty much always [...] I knew all this, though I couldn't have told you exactly how I learned or been able to point to who shared this knowledge." - Chen, Ace, p.150
• "Again and again we see the conflation of sex, marriage, and reproduction with true adulthood, and the criteria for that adulthood is tied to reproduction and the patriarchal nuclear family" - Brown, 2022, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality, p.63
• "'Aromantic asexuals' thus further challenge discourses that suggest intimate connections are desirable, healthy, and necessary endeavors. Learning to desire in 'sexusociety' or within the realm of 'sexualnormativity' makes the directionality of desire compulsory, whether this desire is 'romantic' or 'sexual'" - Flore, p.24
• "Ace activists have had to challenge the notion that sex and sexual attraction specifically are universally healthy and natural. Part of this strategy has been the rhetoric of 'we fall in love just like anyone else'. And just as in the LGBT community, this pressure to assimilate, to prove that we are 'otherwise normal' despite being asexual, leaves some members of our community behind" - Young, Ace Voices, p.40
• "I've begun to see hints of another, parallel maturity narrative running alongside this one: the idea that 'sex without love' isn't something that healthy, stable, fully grown people do. One-night stands are fine for your twenties or the odd midlife crisis, this narrative says, but you won't reallly be happy unless you ultimately end up in a committed romantic partnership" - Young, p.45
• "I learned from nursery rhymes and TV shows, young adult fiction and adult gossip, that the normal form of adult life was in married families and that a child's normal trajectory to adulthood would bring him or her, eventually, to this goal, which also happened to be where fairy stories conveniently ended. I gleaned, too, that unmarried female adults were somehow to be pitied in a way their male counterparts weren't and that there was an extra urgency for young women to marry, that it had a significance that went beyond 'happily ever after.'" - Elizabeth Brake, Minimizing Marriage, p.x
• "Many people who do not hold religious views or believe that marriage is the only permissible context for sex nevertheless associate marriage with a special moral status and with goods like stability, love, and trust" - Brake, p.2
• "Arguments that marriage promotes virtues like committedness have been influential in recent political discourse. Marriage-promotion policies in the United States take commitment as an an essential element of marriage and blame female and child poverty on male irresponsibility, which is to be remedied through marriage. Conservatives have blamed feminism, permissive divorce law, and premarital sex for creating irresponsible parents, rudderless children, and selfish citizens." - Brake, p.64
• "Kant suggests that unmarried sex treats another as a mere means because sexual desire takes a person as an object to satisfy an appetite (Kant writes of discarding a sexual partner 'as one throws away a lemon after sucking the juice from it')" - Brake, p.69
• "The fundamental question is whether humans flourish in only one kind of relationship. Where erotic love is concerned, it is more plausible to think that a thousand different kinds of flower may bloom - that is, people flourish in many different ways." - Brake, p.78
• "Empirically, anthropology and observation suggest that humans can be happy in a wide range of love relationships. A Don Juan or Savonarola might flourish without erotic love. [...] By prescribing one form of relationship for all, current marriage law inhibits experiments in living and thereby limits the flourishing of some individuals" - Brake, p.78
• Amatonormativity "consists in the assumption that a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is normal for humans, in that it (p.88) is a universally shared goal, and that such a relationship is normative, in that it should be aimed at in preference to other relationship types. The assumption that valuable relationships must be marital or amorous devalues friendships and other caring relationships, as recent manifestos by urban tribalists, quirkyalones, polyamorists, and asexuals have insisted. Amatonormativity prompts the sacrifice of other relationships to romantic love and marriage and relegates friendship and solitudinousness to cultural invisibility" - Brake, p.89
• "Such amorous relationships are wrongly privileged over friendships, and their members wrongly privileged over 'singles' (by which I mean the socially single, or 'uncoupled', not the legally unmarried). Friendships and adult care networks are not accorded the social importance of marriage or marriage-like relationships, nor are they eligible for the legal benefits of marriage." - Brake, p.90
• "Amatonormativity intersects with other forms of oppression, especially gay and lesbian oppression and women's oppression" - Brake, p.98
• "Although there has been increased visibility on a diversity of family forms and relationship options, romantic relationships, marriage, and nuclear family are still idealized and treated as normative and aspirational" - Tessler, Relationship (non-)formation), p.19

Stereotypes of a-spec people

• "Asexual implies a slew of other, negative associations: passionless, uptight, boring, robotic, cold, prude, frigid, lacking, broken." - Chen, Ace, p.37
• "This belief - that platonic love is serene while intense, passionate, or obsessive feeling must be motivated by sex - is common." - Chen, Ace, p.110
• "The desire for romantic relationships is often necessary to prove one's morality, and so aros are judged, their humanity denied." - Chen, Ace, p.124
• "Asexuals were seen as the least human, as both animalistic and mechanistic, and were believed to have the fewest 'uniquely human' and 'human nature' traits among all sexualities included in the study" - Brown, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality, p.113
• "Singles are seen as lacking a sense of responsibility as well as having empty lives" - Brake, p.93
• "Unfortunately, some of the limited research that does exist on aromantic populations reinforce stereotypes of aromantic people as cold and unfeeling (Antonsen et al., 2020)" - Hannah Tessler, Aromanticism, Asexuality, and Relationship (non-)formation, p.4
• "This activity of ordering, including the use of stereotypes, has to be acknowledged as a necessary, indeed inescapable, part of the way societies make sense of themselves, and hence actually make and reproduce themselves" - Dyer, The Role of Stereotypes, p.12
• "Stereotypes are those who do not belong, who are outside of one's society" - Dyer, p.14
• "The sterotype, which is [colonial discourse's] major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always 'in place', already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated...as if the essential duplicity or the bestial sexual licence of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved" - Honi K. Bhabha, The Other Question, p.312

Overlap with Issues of Race:

• "Discussions of asexuality are inextricably linked to the concept of hypersexuality and the consolidation of its discursive attachment to blackness" - Owen, 2014, On the Racialization of Asexuality, p.121-122
• "[With] the overrepresentation of the Black as sexual, Black asexuality is not simply erased... The idea of a 'Black asexual' is impossible given the logics of anti-Black humanity" - Brown, p.121
• "Filtered through white supremacist logics, the prospect of Black asexuality that does not resemble the undesirable Mammy - a docile servant to whiteness and an ever-present canvas for its violence - cannot be understood as legitimate or possible" - Brown, p.136
• "Given that whiteness is a tacit agreement to misinterpret the world, asexuality is necessarily misinterpreted in order to recruit the orientation's symbolic possibilities to further the project of racial domination. It is my contention that whiteness desires asexuality. By this I mean that whiteness desires to locate in asexuality the success of its own historical endeavors to achieve self-mastery, claiming sexual superiority as an aid to racial superiority and vice versa" - Ianna Hawkins Owen, On the Racialization of Asexuality, p.126
• "At stake here is the reproduction of whiteness either through controlled sexual contact and childbearing or through controlled moral example. The asexual, whose lack of sexual activity cannot be accounted for as working to model moral authority, is instead interpreted by interviewers as an impaired sexual being unable to carry out either reproductive commandment" - Owen, p.128
• "Constructions of hypersexuality and asexuality have been deployed in justifications for slavery, campaigns concerning national inclusion and exclusion, and in conversations about progress such as fitness to rule and the evolution of love. Over and over again, sexuality as a hegemony of relationality has aided the subjugation of particular bodies, populations, and nations." - Owen, p.130
• "Toni Morisson writes of 'the different history of black women in this country - a history in which marriage was discouraged, impossible, or illegal; in which birthing children was required, but 'having' them, being responsible for them - being, in other words, their parent - was as out of the question as freedom" - Brake, p.11, quoting Morisson, Beloved, p.xvi-xvii
• "To be single, however, is to be stigmatized and stereotyped as dysfunctional, as is the case particularly for single Black women with the trope of the welfare queen (Moorman, 2020). Single women often face intense pressure and stigma for not fitting into gendered expectations of marriage and motherhood as the pathway to adulthood" - Tessler, The stability of singlehood, p.445

Overlap with Issues of Gender:

• "The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact" - Mulvey, 2009, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, p.19
• "The function 'marriage' sublimates the erotic into a final, closing, social ritual. This ritual is, of course, sex-specific, and the main rationale for any female presence in this strand of the genre" - Mulvey, 2009, Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, p.37
• "Manliness is thus intimately bound up with not only having sex but also with ostentatiously performing an interest in sex when among other men" - Ela Przybylo, Masculine Doubt and Sexual Wonder, p.232
• "Asexuality radically and undeniably questions the centrality of sex in ideals of masculinity, relationships, notions of personal and relational health, and Western society. It denaturalizes sex, pokes fun at it, and renders it a learned, culturally augmented practice as opposed to a biological and self-propelling drive or impulse. Because asexuality questions one of the central linchpins of modernity, is it any surprise that it is not met with favorable reactions?" - Przybylo, p.239
• "Patriarchal cultures such as our own also associate nakedness and sex with shame and sin, and identify women with the essence of sex (in contrast, men can be viewed as sexual but are seen as having other attributes as well, such as intelligence)" - Jane Caputi, The Pornography of Everyday Life, p.374
• "We live in a world saturated with images, drenched in sexuality. But this is one of the reasons why it is in fact difficult to write about. Male sexuality is a bit like air - you breathe it in all the time, but you aren't aware of it much" - Dyer, Male Sexuality in the Media, p.111
• "It is clear that a bearded man with a silly expression, woolly socks and moccasins does not suggest the same things as the sickly smile of the booted and black-stockinged woman, not simply because there is no comparable tradition of erotic imagery addressed to women but rather because of the particular signification of woman as body and as sexual. There is a basic asymmetry, inscribed into the language of visual representation which such reversals serve to expose" - Griselda Pollock, What's Wrong with 'Images of Women'?, p.143
• "The very fact that we can speak of a woman 'using' her sex or 'using' her body for particular gains is highly significant - it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way, but that he doesn't have to" - Mary Ann Doane, Film and the Masquerade, p.235
• "insistence upon a gendered dualism of sexual desire [...] maps homosexuality on to an assumed antithesis of masculinity and femininity. Such an assumption precludes a description of homosexual positionality" - Jackie Stacey, Desperately Seeking Difference, p.249)
• "Toni Morisson writes of 'the different history of black women in this country - a history in which marriage was discouraged, impossible, or illegal; in which birthing children was required, but 'having' them, being responsible for them - being, in other words, their parent - was as out of the question as freedom" - Brake, p.11, QUOTING SOMETHING ELSE CHECK WHAT IT WAS
• "According to Susan Maushart, married women suffer more health and psychological problems than do unmarried women, they face an unequal division of domestic labor, and they benefit less from marriage than do men. 'Wifework', the extra work married women typically do, has economic and emotional penalties for women, and and economic vulnerability makes it difficult for women to exit abusive marriages. But marriage also protects economically dependent wives through divorce law; ironically, it enacts measures to protect against the vulnerabilities and dependencies that gender-structured marriage creates." - Brake, Minimizing Marriage, p.59
• "The feminine body was analyzed - qualified and disqualified - as being thoroughly saturated with sexuality; whereby it was integrated into the sphere of medical practices, by reason of a pathology intrinsic to it" - Foucault, p.104
• "To be single, however, is to be stigmatized and stereotyped as dysfunctional, as is the case particularly for single Black women with the trope of the welfare queen (Moorman, 2020). Single women often face intense pressure and stigma for not fitting into gendered expectations of marriage and motherhood as the pathway to adulthood" - Tessler, The stability of singlehood, p.445
• "Representations of single women in pop culture show how singlehood is temporally celebrated for young women but ultimately pathologized as deviant from heteronormative romantic and nuclear family desires" - Tessler, The Stability of Singlehood, p.458
• "“Men want sex and women want love.” Although crude, contested, and at least partially unfounded (Allen, 2003, 2007), this cultural narrative plays an important role in constructing gender identities " - Hannah Tessler and Canton Winer, Sexuality, romantic orientation, and masculinity, p.2
• "We find that while sex is fundamental in both constructing and reflecting masculinities, romance is another factor that shapes masculinities, and thus asexuality is positioned as inadequately masculine and aromanticism as excessively masculine" - Tessler and Winer, p.2
• "Our findings suggest that framing romantic attraction as a solely feminine pressure is overly simplistic. Although men may face less pressure (and certainly less structural violence) to participate in romantic relationships than women, the performance of romance fits well within hegemonically masculine tropes. Instead, we find that compulsory sexuality and compulsory romance norms persist regardless of gender, which renders illegible alternative forms of intimacy and connection beyond sexual/romantic partnerships." - Tessler and Winer, p.15

Media Effects

• "All of us who consume popular media absorb messages about what certain groups are like, even when the messages are biased and wrong, even when we know that they are biased and wrong. We learn, and we grow biased too." - Chen, Ace, p.74
• "Although audiences are active, their activity is still subject to a variety of structural complaints. The media messages themselves matter - even if they can have multiple meanings - because they make some interpretations more likely than others. The cultural tools that audiences bring to the interpretation of media are not uniform; different people from different social locations will not have the same resources at their command. By ordering the distribution of cultural tools, social structure serves as a constraint on the process of meaning-making." - Croteau and Hoynes, Media/Society, p.293
• "Cultural studies' conceptualisation of cultural products and practices as texts emphasises their polysemic nature, which means they contain various meanings and can be interpreted in different ways" - Anneke Meyer, Investigating Cultural Consumers, p.69

Media Representations of Groups

• "'Symbolic annihilation': the systematic underrepresentation of a particular group or groups and/or media representations that favour stereotypes and omit realistic portrayals" - Douglas, Susan J., Media, Gender, and Feminism in Media and Society (ed. James Curran and David Hesmondhalgh), 2019, p.40
• "How can we effect a conscious and political interaction between the cultural forms of representation on the one hand and economic and social relations on the other? How does one affect the other? Should one show what is, what should be, or the dreams that escape from what is and what should be?" - Mulvey, 2009, Images of Women, Images of Sexuality, p.64
• "The visual media, mainly popular films and TV programs, offer an excellent tool for high school and university educators to encourage sexual tolerance, and in particular to promote a supportive attitude towards queer students" - Gilad Pavda, Educating The Simpsons, p.203
• "Equating visibility with power is problematic, for it invites increased surveillance ... The notion that the power visibility promises may be reduced to quantity is nonsensical, since visibility is often used to signify deviance and not to promote tolerance" - Jay Clarkson, The Limitations of the Discourse of Norms, p.392
• "In the end, when the ethics of representation are at stake, it is the image that has the final say in the matter, and never the artist." - Rosemarie Buikema, Sarah Bartmann and the Ethics of Representation, p.89
• "How social groups are treated in cultural representation is part and parcel of how they are treated in life, that poverty, harassment, self-hate and discrimination (in housing, jobs, educational opportunity and so on) are shored up and instituted by representation" - Dyer, The Matter of Images, Introduction, p.1
• "Representations here and now have real consequences for real people, not just in the way they are treated as indicated above but in terms of the way representations delimit and enable what people can be in any given society" - Dyer, p.3
• "A stereotype can be complex, varied, intense and contradictory, an image of otherness in which it is still possible to find oneself" - Dyer, Coming out as going in, p.74
• "Considering how texts look outwards to the real world has led to other important areas of study, in particular analyses of 'representation' (Hall 1997) - identifying ways in which various groups, including women and people from ethnic minorities, are portrayed, sometimes stereotypically, sometimes narrowly, sometimes negatively [...] the literature on misrepresented identities and communities continues to expand, focusing on sexuality, ethnicity, disability and other forms of discrimination" - Holland, p.60
• "For many years, feminists, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) groups and campaigners from BAME, disability and other disadvantaged minorities have argued against the ways in which they have been stereotyped across the media, and real changes have been achieved" - Holland, p.228
• "Both British and US sitcoms have recognised the need to engage with cultural change, especially the changing position of women (see Hallam 2005), if only as a response to broadcasters' need to deliver a new generation of affluent and confident women consumers to the advertisers who sponsor or support programmes" - Jeremy Orlebar, The Television Handbook, p.38
• "In relation to television, the study of ideology looks at how people and ideas are represented in programming, to identify whether such concerns as race, gender, age-group or ethnicity are being distorted in ways that need to be modified - Orlebar, p.53
• "At issue in representation are two, often opposing, ideals: communities and markets. Niche marketing purports to ascribe market value to communities, shading out differences to create a unified, comprehensible type that can be sold to advertisers" - Christian, p.114
• "In general, streaming TV distributors either matched or trailed already-lagging broadcast and cable distributors in representations of race and gender behind and in front of the camera" - Christian, p.249

Media Ideology

• "Most media scholars believe that media texts articulate coherent, if shifting, ways of seeing the world. These texts help to define our world and provide models for appropriate behaviour and attitudes. How, for example, do media products depict the 'appropriate' roles of men and women, parents and children, or bosses and workers? [...] What are the underlying messages in media content, and whose interests do these messages serve?" These are, fundamentally, questions about media and ideology." - Croteau and Hoynes, Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences, 2000, p.157
• "The most sophisticated ideological analysis examines the stories the media tell as well as the potential contradictions within media texts, that is, the places where alternative perspectives might reside or wehre ideological conflict is put into the text. Ideological analysis, therefore, is not simply reduced to political criticism, whereby the critic loudly denounces the 'bad' ideas in the media. Nor, in our view, is analysis particularly useful if it focuses on the ideology of one specific media text without making links to broader sets of media images [...] This inquiry will move from party conversation to serious analysis only if we think more carefully about the patterns of images in media texts, rather than analyzing one film in isolation." - Croteau and Hoynes, Media/Society, p.160
• "The fear is that media images normalize specific social relations, making certain ways of behaving seem unexceptional. If media texts can normalize behaviors, they can also set limits on the range of acceptable ideas. [...] Ideas anda attitudes that are routinely included in media become part of the legitimate public debate about issues. Ideas that are excluded from the popular media or appear in the media only to be ridiculed have little legitimacy. They are outside the range of acceptable ideas. The ideological influence of media can be seen in the absences and exclusions just as much as in the content of the messages" - Croteau and Hoynes, Media/Society, p.161
• "We argue that the creators of media content have often reproduced the race, class, and gender inequalities that exist in society. This is not to say that the media have acted as a mirror, passively reflecting the inequalities of society. Rather, white, middle-and upper-class men have historically controlled the media industry, and media content has largely reflected their perspectives on the world. Therefore, the inequalities in the social world have affected the organization of the media industry that produces media products." - Croteau and Hoynes, Media/Society, p.193
• "The dynamic relationship between media content and the social world is complicated. Is media content cause or effect? A sociological approach would suggest that it is both. The social world affects media producers and media products [...] In turn, media content certainly influences our understanding of the social world" - Croteau and Hoynes, Media/Society, p.225
• "Ideological representations are most powerful when they pervade the realm of 'common sense' such that competing meanings are no longer even entertained" - Croteau and Hoynes, Media/Society, p.269
• "Media culture articulates the dominant values, political ideologies, and social developments and novelties of the era" - Douglas Kellner, Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism and Media Culture, p.8
• "In modern societies, the different media are especially important sites for the production, reproduction and transformation of ideologies. Ideologies are of course, worked on in many places in society, and not only in the head" - Stuart Hall, The Whites of Their Eyes, p.105
• "In the words of Connell (1977), 'No evil-minded capitalistic plotters need be assumed because the production of ideology is seen as the more or less automatic outcome of the normal, regular processes by which commercial mass communications work in a capitalist system'" - Richard Butsch, Six Decades of Social Class in American Television Sitcoms, p.508
• "When taking the first approach, and looking at the ways in which texts convey signs of their production, some critics, particularly in the neo-marxist mode, have noted the ways that a text may encode the 'ideology' of its makers or of its context, and hence convey the 'dominant ideology' of its times - Holland, p.60
• "Ideology refers to the 'natural' and common-sense values that keep civil society running. It was an idea most thoroughly developed by radical Marxist writers who looked for ways of explaining how social injustice can continue without people recognising it and changing things. What ideology does is to make ways of thinking about ourselves and others seem self-evidently right, whereas a more careful analysis of the way things are might reveal that there is much that should be changed" - Orlebar, p.53

Representation of LGBTQ+

• "Gross (2001) describes gay characters on television, in general, as primarily being defined by their problems and absent from any sort of larger gay culture" - Kathleen P Farrell, HIV on TV, p.465
• "It is important to understand these images [of homosexuality in film noir] as one aspect of the armoury of gay oppression and indeed of sexual oppression generally. How gays are represented is always part and parcel of the sexual ideology of a culture" - Dyer, Homosexuality and Film Noir, p.52
• "The scope, for both men and women writers, has become wider. Across the genres, dramas are now able to deal with issues of sexuality, exploring gay and lesbian themes as well as a more nuanced reflection of the relations between the sexes " - Holland, p.205
• "A number of theorists have argued that television as a medium has developed in such a manner that its institutionalised form is antipathetic or inimical to queerness." - Glyn Davis, 'Saying It Out Loud': Revealing Television's Queer Teens, p.129
• "The problem is, of course, that even though queer characters now appear on television in notable numbers, they are absorbed into the heterosexuality of the medium and its representations. In relation to television, that is, queers always have to find a place in the heterosexual structure and system." - Davis, p.130
• The genre of the teen show "offers great potential for the representation of teen lives and desires, including those of queer teens" - Davis, p.131
• "Almost all televisual representations of queer teens are remarkably 'positive': their potential as role models or transmitters of politicised messages messages seems to have been recognised by liberal drama writers, service producers and television executives. It is possible to detect here the Reithian 'public service broadcasting' notion that television can serve as an educative tool to improve and inform its audiences" - Davis, p.134
• "'Given this critical state of affairs,' writes Ben Gove, 'popular representations and debates hold an especially intense significance as informal methods of sex education, and as self-validation, for gay and lesbian youths'" - Ben Gove, 1996, p.179, quoted in Davis, p.135
• "Although more visible, women, gay men, lesbians, and ethnic minorities are limited in the degree to which they can challenge stereotypes as characters and in their chances to lead franchises and marquee properties as characters (p.110) and producers" - Aymar Jean Christian, Open TV, p.111
• "After decades of virtual invisibility, the 1990s and 2000s saw a sharp rise of popular and niche media targeting gay (p.112) men, lesbians, and, to a much lesser degree, bisexual and transgender people. Still, media representations focused almost exclusively on portraying gays and lesbians as 'normal', eradicating the sexual revolution's promise of celebrating difference and confining GLBTQ politics to matters of the home, primarily love, marriage, and military service. What was lost was the power of nonnormative sexuality to expand mainstream views of sex" - Christian, p.111

Representation of A-spec Identities

• "At what expense does asexuality become interesting or accessible? Must it be presented as a spectacular object of fascination in order for it to be interesting and desirable? Must it again be subsumed within a language system that cannot account for it in order for it to be made accessible?" - Karli June Cerankowski, Spectacular Asexuals, p.150
• "Though asexuals have been increasingly visible over the last several years on television talk shows and news programming, there has been a smaller increase in the visibility of asexuals in other media such as fictional television and film" - Sarah E.S. Sinwell, Aliens and Asexuality, p.162
• "Film and TV frequently construct asexuality by desexualizing bodies and identities that do not fit cultural codes of desirability. Fatness, disability, Asian-ness, and nerdiness, for instance, have all been associated with asexuality. These characters are represented as asexual not because they do not experience sexual attraction, but rather because they are not sexually attractive" - Sinwell, p.166
• "It is important to note that in very few of these instances, do the 'asexual' characters in these television shows and films self-identify as asexual, nor do their describe their asexuality as a sexual preference or a sexuality identity category. Thus, whereas narratives of homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, and transsexuality often revolve around the idea of 'coming out', the relationship between speech and silence, and sexual self-identification, asexual characters do not often 'name themselves as such. Indeed, one of the reasons asexuality may be unseen (and unheard) onscreen is precisely because it is not recognized as a cultural category of sexual identity" - Sinwell, p.168
• "When asexuality is represented within contemporary media, it is often limited to representations that blur the lines between asexuality and desexualization. These representations misname and misrepresent asexuality as a lack of (normative) sexual attractiveness rather than a lack of sexual attraction. Even when asexuality is represented as a lack of sexual attraction or desire as in Dexter and Mysterious Skin, these representations restrict our cultural understanding of asexuality to be one defined by its relationship to trauma, pathology, and abnormality." - Sinwell, p.171
• "Fiction as a medium provides a safe space for asexual identities because it allows for commonly held assumptions about sexuality and gender to be questioned, challenged, and deconstructed" - Fedtke, p.330
• "It would be great to see in popular media a-spec characters with meaningful relationships be it strong friendships, queerplatonic relationships or romantic relationships to show that a-spec people are very well able to love and feel strong emotions" - Young, p.220
• "In Hollywood romantic comedies, for example, the single heterosexual man is stereotyped as an unkempt and irresponsible man-child, waiting for marriage to make him a responsible adult, whereas the unmarried woman is stereotyped as lonely, desperately seeking love, and filling her empty life with cats" - Brake, p.93
• "There has been an increased interest in the study of asexuality over the last 15+ years, along with a change from a pathological to a more affirming perspective [...] This change is arguably linked with the increase presence of asexuality in online communities, such as the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), and the inclusion of asexual characters in mainstream media (e.g. BoJack Horseman TV show). - Ana Catarina Carvalho and David Rodrigues, Sexuality, Sexual Behavior, and Relationships of Asexual Individuals, p.2159

Methodology

• "Focus groups are a particularly useful method for researching attitudes, experiences and understandings of cultural consumers because meaning production is a social and shared process" - Meyer, p.74
• "It is important for interviewers and moderators to create an atmosphere where respondents feel safe and talk freely; this includes building a rapport and going along with the flow of the conversation, gently steering rather than domineering. Any issues which are not raised during conversations can be directly brought up at the end" - Meyer, p.81

Miscellaneous:

• "I always think how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own science. Suppose for instance that we had developed our own physics and chemistry: would not the techniques and industries based on them have taken a different form" - Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 1977, p.14
• "By now it should be clear that looking only at media content - the most common way to talk about 'the media' - provides us with an incomplete picture of the media and their significance for society. Instead we must be alert to the relationships that exist within in our model, relationships that involve the media industry, media messages or products, technology, active audiences, and the social world beyond the media." - Croteau and Hoynes, Media/Society, 363

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