4th December

Based on the feedback I got on my contextual review last week, I've decided to dedicate the next couple of weeks to broadening my horizons and looking at some texts about wider gender studies/queer theory, as opposed to just looking at stuff about asexuality and aromanticism, which I now have a fair bit on. Sorry to Ace Voices by Eris Young I guess you will continue to not be read for a while. I also want to look at some more texts about general issues of media and society, since as Emma and Willem pointed out the Croteau and Hoynes book is pretty fucking old. like it's so old there's a chapter where it lists different search engines and doesn't mention google. Perhaps this is an indicator I need more up-to-date sources.

I started by looking at Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture : A Comprehensive Guide to Gender Studies, a collection edited by Rosemarie Buikema, Liedeke Plate, and Kathrin Thiele and published in 2017. These are my notes from the three essays I read, thinking they'd be the most relevant to my topic.

Notes from Rosemarie Buikema - Sarah Bartmann and the Ethics of Representation:

• "In the first as well as the second feminist wave, the efforts of feminist politics and sciences were focused upon effectuating an adequate representation of women in the public sphere, art, and culture. In this context, the concept of representation refers to ensuring that women are present in political and other public bodies, as well as in historiography, literary history, art criticism, etc." - p.83
• "At this level, representation is concerned with ‘presence’." - p.83, most basic understanding of representation
• If you take it one step further you start thinking about how people should be represented - "Gender sensitive research in the area of representation thus involves ‘adding women’ as well as analysing sexism and racism, and – by extension therefore – thinking about alternatives to these in words and images. The concept of representation refers to the act of making present what was absent – in reality, language and culture, or the symbolic order. Once a woman is ‘added’, then how do we want her to be addressed, discussed, and represented?" - p.83
• "it is necessary to return to the European fascination with Sarah Bartmann’s body. Although this fascination can be explained in historical and geopolitical terms, it is blatantly racist and sexist from our current perspective. It is obvious that such fascination was subject to the laws of capitalism and the production of ostensibly objective knowledge." - p.86 - makes for an interesting companion piece to Sherronda J Brown's discussion of Sarah Bartmann
• "The Khoi-San held a special fascination for Europeans because of the women’s broad hips and protruding buttocks. Khoi-San women store body fat in their thighs and buttocks, indeed resulting in a rather imposing behind. However, this physical characteristic was not simply perceived in terms of physiological difference, but labelled as a deviation for which the term staetopygia was coined. The voluminous buttocks then became the signifier for both primitiveness and active sexuality." - p.86, Khoi-San are the group Sarah Bartmann was part of - again this is an interesting companion to Brown's discussion of how Bartmann was sexualised and how this was linked to her race
• A similar point: "It was customary for Khoi-San women to physically alter their labia according to a certain ideal of beauty, with the effect that the labia became elongated. The travel books of naturalists such as François Le Vaillant and John Barrow describe this type of physical alteration as a distinguishing (p.86) characteristic of the Khoi-San woman referred to as the ‘Hottentot apron’ (Le Vaillant 1790; Barrow 1806). This matter of form was not recognised as the result of customary physical manipulation, but was instead perceived to indicate intrinsic black voluptuousness and excessive sexuality" (p.87)
• Bartmann had an "excessive sexuality" "ascribed" to her (p.87)
• "The tradition of displaying the black female body as a spectacle for the colonial gaze" continues to affect representations of Black women in modern day (p.87)
• "The specific discourse on black people that originated in early eighteenth-century travel literature had also seeped into scientific discourse. For example, the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon describes the black human being as lecherous, ridden with animal sexuality, and afflicted with physical characteristics that are closer to orangutans than to humans" (p.87)
• "The excessive sexuality attributed to Khoi-San women would contribute to their primitiveness and thus to their inferiority compared to civilised Europeans." (p.87)
• "Studying representations is not only about the referent of the text or image, but also concerns the material context in which this text or image operates." (p.88)
• "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." - p.89, BANGER quote
• "The feminist analysis of representations makes use of the tools of semiotics; a theory of signs" (p.89)
• Key semiotic point for feminist theory: "Rather than reflecting a given experience of masculinity and femininity, the symbolic order produces masculinity and femininity" - when a child is born they are assigned as a boy or girl and assumptions are made about them based on this, rather than waiting to see their own personality, taste etc. (p.90)
• Semiotics involves signifiers and signified - in the case of feminist semiotics, there are many signifiers of femininity or masculinity e.g. pink is today seen as a signifier of femininity (p.90)

Notes from Anneke Smelik - Lara Croft, Kill Bill and Feminist Film Studies

• Discusses "gendered and racial stereotyping" in cinema, "such as the fetishist exoticism of black women in European films, or the image of the black man as sexually threatening in American films" (p.198)
• "‘Another’ ethnicity in films is nearly always linked to sexuality (Young 1996)" (p.198)
• "To summarize, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, classic voyeurism has changed, because the spectator does not look from the perspective of a dominant male gaze. This means that the gaze of the camera has become more neutral, allowing both the male and the female viewer to enjoy the erotic spectacle of either sex. Moreover, the fetishization of both the female and the male body has strongly increased in an eroticized body culture." (p.199) - potentially relevant?
• " Today’s visual culture depicts narcissism even more often than before, but now it rather points to the character’s power and independence. The fact that Lara Croft does not enter into any relationships underlines her narcissistic autonomy. In addition to an active role in the story, narcissism enables the female star to be in charge of her to-be-looked-at-ness. In this respect, Lara Croft fits the trend of contemporary representations of female (and also male) beauty of film or pop stars that serve a narcissistic rather than voyeuristic gaze" (p.201) - TO BE CLEAR I believe narcissism is being used as a neutral term here
• "The conventional film story has the following structure: good wins over bad, son wins over father, hero gets girl, the dangerous woman, or (‘even worse’) the homosexual, is punished or killed, and the symbolic order is restored (Kuhn 1999)" (p.202), refers to these as "Oedipal motifs" which I'm less sure about but whatever
• Argues that "female characters in cinema are always defined as the object of male desire" (p.202)
• The article discusses the work of Deleuze and Guattari, who offer an alternative approach to film studies to the traditional psychoanalytical approach - an approach more focused on "the sensory and emotional experience of the audiovisual medium of film" and "rhythm, energy, and affect" (p.206)

From Christine Quinan - Alison Bechdel and the Queer Graphic Novel

• Is it worth looking at all at poststructuralism? "Sees fixed or rigid definitions as doing ‘epistemic violence’ by claiming some sort of truth-value against all other possible interpretations." (p.160)
• "another key feature of poststructuralism: multiple interpretations of any text, event, or phenomenon will always exist. And such multiple interpretations are the result of our unique subject positions, based on our location at the intersection of various and competing discourses" (p.161)
• "Deconstruction chips away at – and even upends – western metaphysics, which is built on polarized dichotomies." (p.161) - key aspect of poststructuralism
• "Deconstruction is particularly important in gender studies because it questions rigid categorizations, while simultaneously uncovering how assignations (e.g., ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’) that we are taught to take as ‘true’ or ‘natural’ are instead social constructions with real (sometimes violent) impacts on bodies and lives." (p.162)
• "Indeed, deconstruction forces a radical rethinking of what has previously gone unquestioned or been taken for granted: there are no truths, no stable signifiers, no fixed social categories" (p.162)
• I mean they do say queer theory is "indebted" to the concept of deconstruction (p.166)

Possible further reading:

• Fear of the Dark by L Young - race gender and sexuality representation
• Classic Hollywood Cinema by A Kuhn - conventional film narratives

There was definitely some useful information in these essays, especially some of the explanations of feminist and queer theory concepts (and the essay tying neatly into Brown's discussion of Sarah Bartmann was certainly a nice surprise) but I still felt like I hadn't found what I was looking for. I'd hoped that the film theory essay in particular might include some more general discussion of how media is influenced by stereotypes and social attitudes, since this is really the heart of my research. It was time to go looking for more sources.

7th December

In the interests of looking at broader sources, I read a wide range of essays in Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader. This book collects essays covering a broad range of topics related to cultural studies. The articles also span a broad time frame, including articles from the 1980s up until 2015, when this reader was published. My hope was that this would give me a lot of more recent sources I can reference over the Croteau and Hoynes book, which is from the early 2000s.

• The first of the essays is Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture by Douglas Kellner, which discusses how "Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture" and how media can "demonstrate who has power and who is powerless" and "dramatize and legitimate the power of the forces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be oppressed" - so clearly Dougie Boy here is very firmly on the side of media having a lot of influence on people (p.7)
• "The media are a profound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy: They contribute to educating us how to behave and what to think , feel, believe, fear, and desire - and what not to [...] how to react to members of different social groups [...] how to conform to the dominant system of norms, values, practices, and institutions" (p.7)
• "Media culture articulates the dominant values, political ideologies, and social developments and novelties of the era" (p.8)
• "Television, film, music, and other popular cultural forms are thus often liberal or conservative, or occasionally express more radical or oppositional views - and can be contradictory and ambiguous as well in their meanings and messages" (p.8)
• A good example the artile gives of media reflecting attitudes of the time: in the years leading up to the election of Obama, there was an increase in major roles for African American actors, including as "president, corporate executive, crime figure, and even God, attesting that U.S. publics were ready to see African Americans in major positions in all arenas of society. This is not to say that Hollywood 'caused' Obama's surprising victory in 2008 but that U.S. media culture anticipated a black president" (p.9)
• "British cultural studies, for example, analyzed culture historically in the context of its societal origins and effects. It situated culture within a theory of social production and reproduction, specifying the ways cultural forms served either to further social domination or to enable people to resist and struggle against domination." (p.9)
• "For cultural studies, the concept of ideology is of central importance, for dominant ideologies serve to reproduce social relations of domination and subordination. Ideologies of class, for instance, celebrate upper-class life and denigrate the working class. Ideologies of gender promote sexist representations of women, oppressive ideologies of sexuality promote homophobia, and ideologies of race use racist representations of people of color and various minority groups. Ideologies make inequalities and subordination appear natural and just" (p.9)
• Bit of a tangent but interesting that the writer mentions the LGBTQ community but describes it as "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning" (emphasis mine) - which. that's not the only thing the Q stands for Dougie Boy. Dougie Boy do you know that (p.9)
• Another example of his very strong stance: "Media culture manipulates and indoctrinates us" (p.10)
• "Inserting texts into the system of culture within which they are produced and distributed can help elucidate features and effects of the text that textual analysis alone might miss or downplay" - sounds a lot like what I'm doing! (p.10)
• "Semiotic analysis can be connected with genre criticism (the study of conventions governing long-established types of cultural forms, such as soap operas) to reveal how the codes andd forms of particular genres construct certain meanings" - more techniques I can use! (p.12)
• "Ideologies refer to ideas or images that construct the superiority of one class or group over another" (p.13)
• Also discusses the concept of "intersectionality" which depicts "how gender, class, race, sexuality, and other components intersect and co-construct each other in complex cultural ways" - that thing that I intend to do! (p.13)
• Acknowledges that "because there is a split between textual encoding and audience decoding, there is always the possibility for a multiplicity of readings of any text of media culture" (p.14)
• However, he then returns to his strong position by saying he "would warn against a tendency to romanticize the 'active audience' by claiming that all audiences produce their own meanings and denying that media culture may have powerful manipulative effects" (p.15)
• "Members of distinct genders, classes, races, nations, regions, sexual preferences, and political ideologies are going to read texts differently" - something I can look at with my focus groups! (p.14)
• Mentions the seven "subjectivity positions" that affect how people interpret cultural texts: "self, gender, age-group, family, class, nation, ethnicity" - also mentions that "sexuality" can be added (p.15)
• James Lull's essay on Hegemony defines the concept as "the power or dominance that one social group holds over others" (p.39)
• "According to Gramsci's theory of ideological hegemony, mass media are tools that ruling elites use to 'perpetuate their power, wealth, and status [by popularizing] their own philosophy, culture and morality'" (p.39)
• "Mass-mediated ideologies are corroborated and strengthened by an interlocking system of efficacious information-distributing agencies and taken-for-granted social practices that permeate every aspect of social and cultural reality" (p.40)
• "Gramsci's theory of hegemony, therefore, connects ideological representation to culture. Hegemony requires that ideological assertions become self-evident cultural assumptions. Its effectiveness depends on subordinated peoples accepting the dominant ideology as 'normal reality or common sense" - similar to Croteau and Hoynes' argument and how media messages are most powerful when they match up with common sense (p.40)
• The essay Women Read the Romance by Janice Radway was fairly interesting in terms of social attitudes to romance - suggests that "Romance reading, it would seem, can function as a kind of training for the all-too-common task of reinterpreting a spouse's unsettling actions as the signs of passion, devotion, and love" - could be connected to widespread social attitudes (p.65)
• "It is easy to condemn this latter aspect of romance as a reactionary force that reconciles women to a social situation which denies them full development, even as it refuses to accord them the emotional sustenance they require" (p.65)
• The introduction to the Representations of Gender, Race, and Class argues for "the need to develop and ground theory within an understanding of how media texts may either contribute to or undermine the inequalities that exist in post-industrialized societies like our own" (p.99)
• The Whites of Their Eyes by Stuart Hall discusses racism in the media, as well as the concept of ideology, which it defines as "those images, concepts and premises which provide the frameworks through which we represent, interpret, understand and 'make sense' of some aspect of social existence" (p.104)
• Really good section on how "ideologies produce different forms of social consciousness" and "work most effectively when we are not aware that how we formulate and construct a statement about the world is underpinned by ideological premisses" - uses the example of "Little boys like playing rough games; little girls, however, are full of sugar and spice", which is assumed by many to be "grounded, not in how masculinity and femininity have been historically and culturally constructed in society, but in Nature itself" (p.105)
• "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" (p.105)
• "It would be simple and convenient if all the media were simply the ventriloquists of a unified and racist 'ruling class' conception of the world. But neither a unifiedly conspiratorial media nor indeed a unified racist 'ruling class' exists in anything like that simple way" (p.105)
• The essay heavily discusses the issue of stereotypes, mentioning common stereotypes of Black people like the "devoted 'Mammy'" and the "slave-figure" who is "dependable, loving in a simple, childlike way" (p.106)
• Other stereotypes mentioned are the "native" who has a "certain primitive nobility and simple dignity" but also "cheating and cunning" and "savagery and barbarism", as well as the "clown" or "entertainer" (p.107)
• I found James McKay and Helen Johnson's essay Pornographic Eroticism and Sexual Grotesquerie in Representations of African American Sportswomen really interesting, and it tied in very well with Sherronda J Brown's discussion of stereotypes of Black women.
• "Rowe (1990, p.409) argues that gender hierarchies are threatened whenever women's bodies are deemed to be excessive: 'too fat, too mouthy, too old, too dirty, too pregnant, too sexual (or not sexual enough) for the norms of conventional gender representation'" (p.118)
• The concept of "pornographic eroticism" could be useful - means that "sexuality is constructed as the 'primary characteristic of the person represented' (Heywood, 1998)" (p.119)
• "The categorization of black women's bodies as hyper-muscular and their targeting for lascivious comment mirrors the public and pseudo-scientific response to nineteenth century exhibits of Saartjie Baartman, the South African woman labeled the 'Hottentot Venus'" - SHE'S RELEVANT AGAIN (p.119)
• Some examples of this attitude to Black women: Serena Williams' "breasts and bottom were fetishized via headlines such as 'Size up Serena Williams at your own risk' (Stevens, 2006), 'Serena out to kick butt' (Epstein, 2006), and 'Easybeat? Fat chance' (Crawford, 2006a), and photographs of her allegedly abnromal gluteal muscles and weight" (p.122)
• An even more egregious example is a jounralist stating "It is the African-American race. They just have this huge gluteal strength. With Serena, that's her physique and genetics' (Stevens, 2006)" (p.122)
• Points out that Serena's defeat of Maria Sharapova could have been "embedded in several stock heroic sporting narratives" such as the comebacck or the battle against adversity, but was instead sexualised: "'Serena ignores the knockers' (Pearce, 2007), 'Cyclone Serena slams Maria and her knockers' [...] Niall, 2007b)" (p.123)
• Maybe the most egregious quote of all: "Cartoonists would have been hard pressed to create Serena. First there was the body - all bosom, bottom and muscle. In her skintight faux leather bodysuit she gave Lara Croft a run for her money" (p.123, quoting S Hattenstone 2007) - jesus christ.
• "The complex and ambivalent ways in which the Williams sisters have been constructed - exotic/erotic yet deviant and repulsive, athletic yet animalistic and primitive, unfeminine yet hyperfeminine, muscular yet threateningly hyper-muscular - is a reinscription of the 'Hottentot Venus' genealogy" (p.124)
• Mary F. Rogers' Hetero Barbie? essay was interesting - mostly a queer reading of Barbie but does also discuss some stuff about societal norms
• "As they get heterosexualized, then, girls and young women face pressures to give boys and dating a lot of priority" (p.128)
• Compares this to the character of Barbie, who Rogers points out that Barbie is "insistently single and perpetually childless" and "seems not to have her heart in her relationship with Ken", which "means that hers is no 'normal' femininity" (p.128) - while this is a valid point it is also deeply funny to me in light of Gerwig's Barbie movie. Greta did u write this
• The most interesting part of the essay to me is the mention of asexuality in an essay from 1999!! When discussing possible queer interpretations of Barbie, Rogers mentions that "most radically of all, Barbie might be asexual. She might be sexy without being sexual, attractive without being attracted" (p.129). It's fine. this didn't make me want to cry a little bit.
• Transgender Transitions by Kay Siebler briefly discusses queer representation in media - "Popular television shows and films reinforce gender rigidity, and online fan sites debate and celebrate these representations" (p.134)
• A very relevant point to me - "Some may argue that the mainstream presence of trans people is revolutionary, but as many media theorists have pointed out [...] the presence of a traditionally marginalized group does not necessarily equate to advancement" - goes on to discuss harmful stereotypes of trans people (p.135)
• Gilad Padva's essay Educating The Simpsons is another essay on portrayals of queerness in media that argues that "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" (p.203)
• "...The popular subgenre of animated TV sitcoms in the late 1990s and 2000s ... integrates semi-anarchistic humor and spectacular imagery that often challenge conventional ethnic, social, gender and sexual patterns of representation" - this essay's discussion obviously focuses on The Simpsons, but you know what else this quote could apply to? BoJack Horseman. (p.203)
• "Earl Jackson (1994) suggests that a truly subversive gay representational practice must contest not only the gay subject's experience of heterosexist persecution, but also his experience of patriarchal privilege. He notes that certain gay male cultural practices that transvalue deviance as a positive mdoe of self-identification contain at least an implicit critique of the normative male ideal (and the dominant heterosexual sex/gender system) from which the gay male deviates" (p.206) - unsure why I quoted this but kind of interesting
• "The outwardly naive medium of animation here mediates sexual pluralism through (unexpected) comic situations that parody homophobia rather than homosexuals" (p.208) - would be good to compare to BJH's portrayal of asexuality!
• The next essay I looked at was Chong-suk Han's essay on Contemporary Gay 'Western' Narratives About Gay Asian Men, which ties in well to a lot of the writing on Asian representation I've looked at
• Main argument is that "The response of mainstream 'gay' publications has been to marginalize gay Asian men by simply ignoring their existence or employing existing stereotypes about Asian men in general, thereby maintaining 'gay' as largely a 'white' category and relegating gay Asian men to the margins of the gay 'community'" (p.220) - could be argued there's a similar issue with ace and aro communities, which are often represented as white
• "Through various historical periods, Asian men have routinely been portrayed as meek houseboys, asexual deviants, or domestic servants who fill 'female' roles when women are scarce" (p.220)
• "For Asian men, both in the USA and abroad, stereotypes have often taken on an explicit sexual tone" (p.221)
• "Even the 'masculine' images of Asian men have been desexualized in American media" (p.221)
• "The representation of Asian men as sexually appealing scarcely figures into mainstream American popular culture" (p.221, quoting N.T. Hoang 2004)
• "Clearly, all forms of media produce and reproduce inequality to varying degrees and by extension are sites of contested identity formation." (p.221)
• Even though Asian men are desexualised, their bodies are also "commodified" (p.223)
• Rosalind Gill's essay Supersexualize Me! put me off mildly by crediting its namesake Super Size Me as a "powerful critique of the fast-food industry" as opposed to a fucking scam made by a guy who lied about shit, but it had some pretty good discussion of gender stereotypes!
• Argues that "there has also been a shift in the way that women's bodies are presented erotically. Where once sexualized representations of women in the media presented them as the passive, mute objects of an assumed male gaze, today women are presented as active, desiring sexual subjects who choose to present themselves in a seemingly objectified manner because it suits their liberated interests to do so" compares this to Foucault's concept of "(sexual) subjectification" as opposed to objectification (p.280)
• In portrayals of women in advertising "Empowerment is tied to possession of a silm and alluring young body, whose power is the ability to attract male attention and sometimes female envy" (p.281)
• Points out that this style of advertising excludes "anyone living outside the heterosexual norm. Contemporary midriff advertising operates within a resolutely hetero-normative economy, in whcih power, pleasure and subjectivity are all presented in relation to heterosexual relationships" (p.281)
• "Others excluded from the empowering, pleasurable address of midriff advertising are older women, disabled women, fat women and any woman who is unable to live up to the increasingly narrow standards of female beauty and sex appeal that are normatively required" - significant overlap with groups discussed in that one Asexualities essay as being portrayed as 'asexual' (but not really) (p.281)
• I decided to read the whole section on Representing Sexualities, the introduction of which has a useful section about representations of different sexualities: "A proliferation of images in pop culture that make non-hegemonic genders and sexualities visible through a range of representations that are, as Booth argues, nuanced and complex. In large part this increased nuanced visibility is due to the organization of activists on local and national levels to both educate and agitate for media representations that speak to the diversity of gendered identities and sexualities that are embodied in the contemporary world." (p.341)
• So reading this whole section did mean I ended up reading multiple essays about Twlight. It's like being 14 years old and convinced I'm the smartest little boy in the world because I could recognise Twilight was a bit sexist again. At least one of them referenced Buffy (and was kind of wrong about it)
• Deadly Love by Victoria E Collins and Dianne C Carmody has at least one useful quote about social attitudes to relationships: "Dating has traditionally been defined within the context of heterosexual relationships and is influenced by socially accepted forms of masculinity and femininity" (p.354)
• Also sorry this essay contains the dodgiest statistic I have ever seen quoted in my life. "It has been estimated that between 20% and 96% of dating relationships contain psychologically abusive behavior" (p.355) WHAT KIND OF FUCKING RANGE IS THIS. WHAT ARE YOU DOING VICTORIA AND DIANNE. THE WHY COUNTING COUNTS GUY IS GOING TO REPORT YOU TO THE STATS POLICE.
• 
• Speaking of things people published in Research Methods for Cultural Studies, Martin Barker would fucking hate the assertion that "Although causality has not been established, the media have been found to influence teenagers' attitudes and indirectly to affect behaviors" (p.356) HAS CAUSALITY BEEN ESTABLISHED OR NOT GUYS. BECAUSE YOU SEEM A BIT CONFUSED ABOUT THAT POINT.
• Gail Dines' essay The White Man's Burden is an interesting discussion of racism in pornography and stereotypes of Black men.
• "A body that has been constructed, coded, and demonized as a carrier for all that is sexually debased, namely the black male" (p.366)
• "The elevation and mythification of white masculinity relies on the debasement of black men as sexual savages, Uncle Toms, and half-wits such as Stepin Fetchit." (p.367)
• "In the United States, and indeed most of the Western world, there is a general consensus that a real man (read: white) works hard, puts food on the table and an SUV in the driveway, shows some interest in his children's welfare, and exhibits a somewhat restrained set of sexual practices within state-sanctioned heterosexual marriage" while Black men are "portrayed as shiftless, they need welfare to get food for their families, they drive pimp cars (when they can afford cars), and they engage in what Cornel West mockingly refers to as 'dirty, disgusting, and funky sex'" (p.367) - good outline of stereotypes!
• "White they would not swap their material privileges with black men, many white men would indeed like 'black' sex as it is seen in the white racist imagination, as 'more intriguing and interesting'" (p.367, quoting James Snead 1994)
• Mentions other stereotypes: "vicious stereotypes of blacks as savages, Coons, half-wits, Mammies, and Jezebels" - this "debasement of blacks is linked to the elevation of whites" (p.370)
• "Thus, in this wholly mythical world, to be white is to be the opposite of black: hard-working, law abiding, intellectual, rational, and sexually restrained and controlled" (p.370)
• The next essay I looked at was The Pornography of Everyday Life by Jane Caputi, which discusses social attitudes to sex, and especiallly how they affect women
• "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)" (p.374)
• There's like. a weird section where I think the author vaguely implies that people get into BDSM because they were sexually abused as children which I'm not a huge fan of (can I get a source on that please Ms Caputi? Maybe?) but I do think some good points are made about consent: "Our ability to freely consent (or not) to specific sexual practices often remains compromised by social inequalities and hatreds (including self-hatreds) based in gender, sex, race, age, sexuality, ability, and so on" (p.376) - I think Chen and Brown have better examples of this than "child abuse causes BDSM" but that's just me maybe
• Might be worth looking at Sharon Marcus' discussion of the "'rape script' coded into" our culture (p.378)
• "Men have much greater sexual latitude than women. Hence, women are split into 'pure' or 'dirty, 'virgins' or 'whores', 'keepers' or 'trash', often along race and class lines" - intersectionality is important here! (p.378)
• "Patriarchal cultures commodify women's sexuality and reproductive powers and then define women as the paradigmatic 'natural resource,' something men can exploit to accumulate wealth and services" - an important part of objectification (p.379)
• Much like Dougie Boy, Ms Caputi has a very strong stance on the impacts of the media - "Repeated negative mass representation of a group is a public form of psychological abuse" - can't say I fully agree but I respect it (p.382)
• I thought Tricia Rose's article on how women are portrayed in hip hop music: There Are Bitches and Hoes, very interesting, especially from an intersectionality perspective
• Discusses the "common portrayal of black women as ugly, aggressive, and hypersexual" and the influence of the "welfare queen" discourse in the 80s - the podcast You're Wrong About actually has an episode on this topic that might be worth checking out! (p.388)
• "Conservative responses to hyper-sexual popular culture usually involve an anti-sex agenda, one that functions to contain women's sexuality while failing to fight sexism or to work toward women's overall freedom" - argues that these two seemingly opposite poles of "sexual exploitation and sexual repression" are "birds of a feather" and that both are opposed to "genuine sexual freedom of expression", especially from black women (p.389)
• "Although hip hop isn't primarily responsible tor [sic] America's sexism, it is the most visible and extreme engine for it in the black popular culture, which means that it has a special impact on black women and men who, because of the racist and sexist world in which they live, rely on black culture as a source of reflection, support, and affirmation" (p.389)
• Jay Clarkson's essay The Limitations of the Discourse of Norms was really useful for me - "At the heart of the politics of gay representation are two intersecting considerations: the meanings and fucntions of visibility, and the role of gender performance in our understanding of sexuality" - this essay is primarily concerned with the first point (p.392)
• "The visibility of straight-acting gay men, or men who cannot be read as gay, may challenge the notion of a hegemonic and monolithic gay identity, but they reflect the historic need for the marginalized to remain obedient, silent, and invisible in order to be recuperated into dominant ideologies" (p.392) - UNSURE WHY I THOUGHT THIS WAS PARTICULARLY RELEVANT BUT I SUPPOSE IT COULD BE
• Points out that "visibility is not in itself an unproblematic concept. Peggy Phelan criticizes identity politics for its reliance on the assumption that a lack of media visibility of a minority group reflects and reproduces inequality, and accordingly, these groups should seek great power through increased visibility" (p.392)
• Makes a similar argument to the essay on talk shows in Asexualities: "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" (p.392)
• "Gay and lesbian media critics have long recognized that media visibility of gay men and lesbians often functions only to make a certain type of homosexual natural and normal" - is the same true of visibility of ace/aro people? I'd say yes probably (p.392)
• "The reliance on this discourse of normalization suggests that what media representations contribute to is a single norm for gay men, and all else are abnormal or less than acceptable" - this represents the difference between normalisation and conventionalisation (p.395)
• Robert Alan Brookey and Kristpher L. Cannon's Sex Lives in Second Life discusses expressions of sexuality in the titular MMORPG
• Brings up Judith Butler's concept of a "heterosexual matrix" - "a grid of gender rules and sexual laws that favor and enforce procreative heterosexuality" (p.400)
• Very useful section on Foucault's History of Sexuality, which "explains how sexuality became a part of identity" - Foucault argues that the idea that there was a "move to repress and censor the discussion of sex and sexuality" in the 19th century is a myth, and there was actually "a great deal of discourse [...] at this time articulating sexual norms, and delineating sexual perversity. In this discourse, sexual practice became an indicator of the psychological health of the individual, because sexuality was thought to reside in the psyche of the individual. Consequently, the individual was invested with the responsibility of maintaining proper sexual practices, and seeking out help for perverse sexual behavior" - "Once sexuality was invested in the person, individuals aligned their sexual practices with established norms, and actively assumed the responsibility for their own sexual health" (p.400) - very relevant to discussions of medicalisation
• Another banger from Michel: "(W)e must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power", in reference to his "suspicions about the liberatory promise of the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies" (p.406)
• Final essay in this section is Queering Queer Eye by E. Tristan Booth - this essay mainly discusses the trans experience, but some of the points may be relevant to my work on aspec identity!
• The writer mentions that bisexuality can be seen as a "liminal (and some would still argue, unstable) position between the conventional norms of gay and straight" - same could perhaps be argued of asexuality/aromanticism (p.410)
• Speaking of asexuality, it's interesting that the essay specifies that a trans person "might identify as heterosexual, bisexual, or gay" HM I'M NOTICING A MAJOR EXCLUSION THERE. LIKE GUYS IF THE BARBIE ESSAY FROM 1999 COULD - (i am pulled off stage with a crook like an old timey vaudeville performer) (p.411)
• Also some interesting discussion of "queer resistance against an established instittution - in this case, The American Psychiatric Assoociation", mentions the "stigmatization" of trans people by assigning them "gender identity disorder" (unsure if this is still correct the essay is from 2011) and how gay men were "similarly pathologized prior to 1973" - very relevant to the current pathologisation of asexuality (p.414)
• The essay Growing Up Female in a Celebrity-Based Pop Culture by Gail Dines had some interesting insights into sexual norms in contemporary culture and referenced a lot of useful-looking sources, even if I perhaps disagree with some of the conclusions Dines draws
• Discusses how sex and consent are portrayed in women's magazines like Cosmopolitan - "What is not on offer is the option to refuse his demands since he has (an unspoken and unarticulated) right of access to the female body. Indeed, readers are warned that not having sex on demand might end the 'relationship'. Psychologist Gail Thoen, for example, informs Cosmopolitan's readers that 'constant cuddling with no follow-through (i.e., sex) can be frustrating to guys' and what's more, 'he is not going to like it if you leave him high and dry all the time' EVERYONE I AM ONCE AGAIN CONSIDERING BECOMING A MISANDRIST (p.436)
• "Media targeted to women create a social reality that is so overwhelmingly consistent in this it is almost a closed system of messages. In this way, it is the sheer ubiquity of the hypersexualized images that gives them power since they normalize and publicize a coherent story about women, femininity, and sexuality. Because these messages are everywhere, they take on an aura of such familiarity that we believe them to be our very own personal and individual ways of thinking" - so Dines clearly believes in a strong impact of the media (p.436)
• There's a whole section about the emergence of 'hookup culture' that I found quite interesting - mentions a Michael Kimmel survey of 7000 students finding that "by their senior year, 'students had averaged nearly seven hookups during their collegiate careers. About one-fourth (24 percent) say that they have never hooked up, while slightly more than that (28 percent) have hooked up ten times or more" - guys after the 20-96% incident I have never been more happy to see meaningful statistics (p.438)
• "Studies are finding that women do hope for more than just sex from a hookup encounter, as many express a desire for the hookup to evolve into a relationship" - I feel kiiiiiiinda weird about this point because it does feel like it just. reproduces gender stereotypes. (also not to sound mean but I'm hesitant to label this a structural problem I think straight people just can't communicate with each other (THIS IS A JOKE THAT WILL NOT BE INCLUDED IN THE THESIS)). That said it does reference the Katherine Bogle study that this info comes from so I guess I'll check that out! (p.438)
• I do like the following section that discusses negative impacts hookups have on women and the possible reasons for the "lower self-esteem and higher levels of depression" - theorises that "one possible explanation for this is that 'depressed females may be seeking external validation from sex. They may be maintaining a vicious depressive cycle by unconsciously engaging in sex in doomed relationships. Possibly, these females' negative feelings of self-worth or isolation may increase their desire to be wanted by or intimate with another" (p.438)
• "Probably one of the most interesting findings of this study is that males who engaged in hookup sex reported the least depressive systems of any group [...] One reason for this could be the way that masculinity is socially constructed, since the more sex partners a man has, the more he is conforming to the idealized image of manhood" - the contrast between experiences of men and women definitely seems to reflect Something about social attitudes to gender (p.438)
• "With hookup sex comes, for women and girls, an increased possibility of being labeled a slut - a term that is used to control and stigmatize female sexual desire and behavior. There is, after all, no male equivalent of a slut since men who are thought to be highly sexually active are called a stud or a player - labels most men would happily take on" - we all know this but good to have a source (p.438) - ALSO GOES WITHOUT SAYING that these attitudes are another possible reason why women who have hookups might be having a bit of a shit time - ALSO ALSO insert caveat about how there are a lot of factors that influence this and men of colour, for example, often don't get this positive reception here
• An issue I do take is Dines' statement that women "experience 'unwanted sex' (in other words, rape)" frequently in hookups - like I'm being a tiny bit pedantic here and I haven't actually checked the study where she got this stat from so it may clarify but I do think that unwanted sex = rape is a little bit of an oversimplification. Angela Chen (and possibly Sherronda J Brown but I don't have a photographic memory of every book I've read) puts this better than I could but I think it can be a mistake to label any negative or not-wholly-wanted sexual experience as rape - it erases grey areas like someone consenting to sex and regretting it after, someone consenting to sex because they think it's what they 'should' do, etc. (p.438)
• My other pedantic little quibble is Dines' comparsion of hookups vs relationships: "In an ongoing relationship, couples can discuss and negotiate sexual boundaries as the relationship develops, but in a hookup, there will typically be little discussion regarding who is thinking of doing what and how far each one wants to go sexually" (p.439) - not to sound overly cynical but considering the discussion of attitudes to consent in relationships earlier in this very essay, I think this is perhaps a little optimistic about how much respect is given to sexual boundaries in relationships vs hookups
• Constructing the 'New Ethnicities' by Meenakshi Gigi Durham is an interesting essay in terms of its contribution to the discourse on media reception, as well as its discussion of gender norms
• "At the same time that immigrant families exercise rigid restraint over adolescent girls' sexuality, Western culture continues to hypersexualize girls and women of color" (p.456)
• The interesting insight the essay gives through interviewing immigrant teenage girls is that while the teenagers affirm their understanding that the media isn't realistic, they all believe that their parents are more influenced by media than they are - as one of the girls puts it "Everybody knows that those movies are nothing like real life! High school is never like that! But I think our parents believe it" - "The girls perceived their parents to rely on media characterizations of American high school life in the absence of first-hand experience of it" (p.457)
• "The girls believed their own oppositional decoding of the television text was diametrically opposed to their parents' dominant reading" (p.458)
• "A number of studies indicate that viewers who are socially margninalized are better able to read media oppositionally than mainstream audiences" (p.462)
• HIV on TV by Kathleen P. Farrell is another essay on queer representation on TV
• "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" - does this apply to aspec characters now? (p.465)
• Just as a general history of queer representation point, the essay discusses the show Queer as Folk as being a groundbreaking show for depicting gay characters - "First television drama in the USA to deal explicitly with queer culture" (p.466)
• Also I can take something from the methodology discussed here - the author describes their focus groups: "Each group meeting lasted 3-4 hours and took place in a seminar/conference room or an empty classroom. In these groups participants were asked to watch three separate 20-minute collections of edited clips" - maybe getting people to watch clips instead of full episodes could be a shout? Since most of the episodes in question don't have the asexuality plot as the main focus? (p.467)
• The final essay I looked at was Six Decades of Social Class in American Television Sitcoms by Richard Butsch which went by far into the most detail about how media replicates social attitudes and ideology
• Butsch mentions that "Seldom have studies of the television industry pinpointed how specific content arises. well fuck me I guess (good quote for contextual review tho) (p.508)
• "In the words of Connell (1977), 'No evil-minded capitalistic plotters need be assumed because the production 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'" (p.508)
• "The cost of drama programming limits buyers to only a handful of large corporations and dictates that programs must attract a large audience and avoid risk" (p.509)
• "The second factor affecting network decisions on content is the need to produce programming suited to advertising. What the audience wants - or what network executives imagine they want - is secondary to ad revenue" (p.511)
• Butsch also makes the interesting argument is that much use of stereotypes in TV is influenced by the time pressures on production - "The time pressures contribute in several ways to dependence on stereotypes for characterization. First, sitcoms are based on central characters rather than plot and development [...] All this means that, to sell a new series, writers should offer stock characters (i.e., stereotypes)" (p.513)
• "Producers, casting directors, and casting agencies freely admit to stereotyping but argue its necessity on the basis of time and dramatic constraints. Typecasting is easier and much quicker. They also argue that to diverge from widely held stereotypes would draw attention away from the action, the story line, or other characters and destroy dramatic effect" (p.514)
• "The time pressures also make it more likely that the creators will stick to what is familiar to them as well" - could be argued this applies to lack of aspec depictions (p.514)

Possible further sources:

• Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words by Sharon Marcus - rape culture
• You're Wrong About - Ronald Reagan and the "Welfare Queen"
• Guyland by Michael Kimmel - hookup culture
• Hooking Up by Kathleen Bogle - I mean what do you think it's about
• No Strings Attached by Catherine Grello - hookup culture
• Hookups and Sexual Regret Among College Women by Elaine Eshbaugh
• Risk Factors and Consequences of Unwanted Sex Among University Students by William Flack Jr - hookup culture and consent
• The relevance of cultural identity in audiences' interpretations of mass media by J.R. Cohen - oppositional readings
• Television Audiences and Cultural Studies by D Morley - oppositional readings
• The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo
• Ruling class, ruling culture by B Connell - ideology in media

8th December

Today I've started rewriting my contextual review based on the feedback I got and new stuff I've learned from my further reading. This involved cutting a lot of stuff out.Some of this is just stuff where I was getting too in depth that would be better served in the main thesis, and some of it is. the noir detective framing device.

The contextual review cutting room

This is not to say that there were no asexual characters to be found in TV at this point, in fact, major asexual characters have appeared as early as 2007, when the New Zealand soap opera Shortland Street introduced asexual character Gerald Tippitt.

Other asexual characters on TV in this time period included Voodoo from the 2014 sitcom Sirens, revealed to be asexual in the sixth episode of the show’s first season (Sirens, The Finger, 2014).

The asexual characters in both Sirens and House (though admittedly it’s debatable whether House’s characters can really be called asexual considering what we learn in the episode) are depicted in romantic relationships (and notably, specifically in heteroromantic relationships), and god forbid anyone ever acknowledge that aromantic people who aren’t asexual might exist (I’m cutting that part out of the actual contextual review don’t worry). The few possible depictions of aromanticism that might have existed were consigned to the realm of subtext.

Although not as explicitly as the infamous House episode, these depictions do also “restrict our cultural understanding of asexuality to be one defined by its relationship to trauma, pathology, and abnormality". In the case of Dexter, lack of sexual attraction (and potentially romantic attraction – Dexter claims to “fak[e] all human interactions”, including with his girlfriend (Ibid., p.169)) is linked to “abnormality” and “psychosis” (Ibid.), while in Mysterious Skin, it is explained as a trauma response to childhood sexual abuse (Ibid., p.170).

Although his sexuality is never explicitly confirmed either in the show (understandably considering the medieval-inspired setting) or in interviews with writers, the actor etc., this dialogue does point towards what could be considered an asexual identity. While his romantic feelings are less clear, there is no evidence in the show that he has any romantic interest in anyone, and the scene where he explains his lack of sexual interest implies that his priority is not pursuing relationships with other people, but pursuing the Iron Throne. Therefore, Varys can be considered subtextually both asexual and aromantic. The portrayal of Varys is also notable in how it avoids the portrayal of asexuality or aromanticism as a “disorder” (Flore, 2014, p.21); although Varys is a eunuch, the writing goes out of its way to specify that his possible asexuality and aromanticism predate him becoming a eunuch (Game of Thrones, The Laws of Gods and Men, 2014).

More recent depictions have tended towards depicting asexuality as a sexual orientation in its own right instead of taking a pathologizing approach, like House, or associating it with abnormality, like Dexter. For example, one episode of Sex Education shows a conversation between sex therapist Jean and student Florence, who is beginning to realise she doesn’t want to have sex “ever, with anyone”. Jean explains the concept of asexuality to her and reassures her that she is not “broken” (Sex Education, Episode 12, 2020), directly refuting the idea that one can have an “insufficient [level of] sexual desire” (Flore, 2014, p.19).

Another important development is an increased attention to the distinction between asexuality and aromanticism. In the Sex Education episode, Florence mentions that she “still want[s] to fall in love”, prompting Jean to explain that “some asexual people still want romantic relationships, but they don't want the sex bit” (Sex Education, Episode 12, 2020). BoJack Horseman features a similar scene, where Todd gets some advice on his newly discovered asexuality from an asexual meet-up group, one of whom tells him “Some asexuals are also aromantic, but others have relationships like anyone else.” (BoJack Horseman, Stupid Piece of Sh*t, 2017). While explicitly aromantic characters are still rare, with most asexual characters either being explicitly interested in romance or it being left unspecified, in 2023 Heartstopper included a storyline in its second season about the character Isaac discovering he was both aromantic and asexual, making it a rare example of a show that directly labels a character as aromantic (Heartstopper, season 2, 2023).

In all my long years as a detective, I’ve never seen anything quite like this case. It seemed simple at first – just figure out what the relationship is between onscreen depictions of asexuality and aromanticism and societal attitudes to sex and romance. Easy, right? But as soon as I pulled on one thread, it untangled into a whole conspiracy. How could I hope to get the bottom of this mystery without first figuring out what the hell these societal attitudes in question even are? It was a daunting task – even a lone wolf detective like me knows that this a thorny topic, with so many different people having different attitudes. Like many of my cases, people’s stories were always contradicting each other, or even contradicting themselves. I resolved to get on the case and try and make some sort of sense of the mess, otherwise this baffling mystery would slip through my fingers completely.

I was beginning to feel like I had some answers to this mystery, but some things still weren’t adding up. I felt like I wasn’t getting the full story. You see, it was rapidly dawning on me that this mystery was all entangled with another, far older mystery: a mystery concerning the relationship between two real characters known as ‘media’ and ‘society’. The question of how the two of them influence each other has stumped better detectives than me, but I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere until I had some idea of what this mystery could mean. All sorts of so-called ‘detectives’ have stepped forward claiming to have an answer, but are any of them actually onto something?

Finally, I felt like I was getting somewhere with cracking this case. It had been a tough investigation, but I now understood what societal attitudes might affect asexual and aromantic people and how media is influenced by societal attitudes. It was time to return to the crime scene, and figure out what everything I’d learned meant for the actual depictions of asexuality and aromanticism in question. I had my hunches about what the link would be with societal attitudes, but I needed to know for sure if I was right before I started making any wild accusations. As a detective, my reputation is more precious than gold, after all.

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