12th December

I feel like I'm losing my grip on reality. Time to make a to do list!!!!!

TO DO FOR HAND IN

• Look at a bunch more sources about media and society: Gender in Media Reader, Stereotypes Formation
• Look at some general queer theory stuff: Halberstam, Queer Phenomenology, Richard Dyer, The Celluloid Closet
• Actually look at and think about ethics stuff for focus groups
• Come up with a plan for how I'm gonna use social media in research
• Find sources on aromantic specific stuff
• Rewrite the damn contextual review
• Look at the behind the scenes context for Sex Education season 4
• LOOK AT YASMIN BENOIT'S FUCKOFF HUGE SURVEY (and 2018 LGBT survey. and actually look at the MacInnis & Hodson survey. and 2022 Rainbow Britain Study maybe?)
• Rewrite research proposal
• Try and rewrite research question
• Update annotated bibliography
• Write up my thoughts on the hit Netflix show Sex Education + transcribe some bits of season 4

Ace in the UK Report 2023: spoiler alert - we're doing a bit fucking shit

Notes from Yasmin Benoit and Stonewall's 2023 Ace in the UK report (go check it out!):

• While aromanticism is mentioned at points, this report has "chosen to focus on asexuality for now, as this can be more clearly understood within the established human rights framework of sexual minorities" which is like, I get it I guess but for one dollar can we try to include aromanticism ever (p.6)
• Stats on amount of ace people in the UK are varied - 2021 England and Wales census found 0.06%, while Stonewall's 2022 survey found that 2% of respondents described themselves as asexual, while 1% described themselves as "not attracted to either sex" (p.9)
• "gradual rise in UK searches for the terms ‘asexual’ and ‘aromantic’ over the last five years, with notable spikes around media stories relating to asexuality, often related to new asexual characters being announced in films and TV series, and awareness days, weeks and months" (p.10)
• In the focus groups " there was a clear consensus that understanding was low and explaining and justifying their asexual orientation was common" (p.10)
• "Government’s 2018 LGBT Survey found that Ace respondents had the lowest levels of life satisfaction of all sexual orientation groups." - 5.88 out of 10 for cis ace people and 5.04 out of 10 for trans ace people - and were less likely to say they were comfortable being LGBT in the UK than other LGBT groups (p.11)
• Quote from focus group participant: "It definitely is getting easier now, and it is because more people do know about it. So it just makes it so much easier when you don’t feel like you’re a bit of a caged animal in the circus, where everyone’s asking you all these questions. I feel like representation on the Sex Education show on Netflix and Emmerdale is helping massively because this is on mainstream shows. There are so many people are watching (sic).” (p.11)
• "Ace respondents are less likely to be open about their orientation to people in their personal lives" (p.11)
• "The requirement for schools in England to provide LGBT-inclusive RSHE was only introduced in September 2020, and the statutory guidance makes no acknowledgement of asexuality." "Participants in our focus groups were keen to see schools teaching about the existence of asexuality – or that not wanting to have sex was okay - from an earlier age, both through RSHE lessons and through activity around Pride and LGBT History Month would have helped them understand their sexual orientation much earlier." (sorry am I insane or does this not make any grammatical sense. not to be mean it's a helpful source of stats but did no one proofread this fucking report) (p.13)
• "We can also see that improved representation in popular culture can build up understanding and support over time when our diverse stories and experiences are represented in a sympathetic, authentic manner that challenges reductive or sensationalist stereotypes. We can see that the inclusion of asexual characters in high-profile TV shows is already improving awareness and understanding." (p.14)
• "this analysis paints a picture of a small minority orientation that is becoming better known, particularly with younger generations, as it gains visibility in media and popular culture, and people find a language to describe how they feel. Compared to other sexual orientations and gender identities, it is less well-known, and asexual people are less well-understood within broader society" (p.14)
• Currently only two places in the world with equality legislation that specifically mentions asexuality - New York and Tasmania (Tasmania also explicitly mentions aromanticism, unsure about New York) (p.18)
• " Asexuality is still a pathologised sexual orientation in the UK under the ICD, with the inclusion of “Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSSD. With this classification, those who experience a lack or decreased amount of sexual desire - either in general or towards others - would be considered as having a sexual dysfunction" - LOL I DIDN'T REALISE WE DON'T EVEN HAVE THE "it's fine if they identify as ace tho" disclaimer they have in the US. we're doing so fucking bad (p.20)
• " asexual people are 10% more likely to be offered or to undergo conversion therapy compared to those with other sexual orientations." (p.20)
• "In the UK Government’s 2018 LGBT Survey, 68.6% of ace respondents said they never told healthcare staff about their sexual orientation, compared to 45.5% of all respondents." (p.21)
• FUN MEDICALISATION STATS: "18.1% of ace respondents said that disclosure had a negative impact on their care, compared to 7.4% of all respondents" "5.3% of ace respondents said that they faced unwanted pressure to undergo medical or psychological tests (compared to 1.8% of all respondents). This is the largest sexual orientation group by far." "8.5% of ace respondents said that they avoided treatment or accessing services because of fear of discrimination or intolerant reactions (compared to 4.8% of all respondents)" (p.21)
• "We see an alarming picture of asexuality being treated as a mental health issue. In some cases, this approach leads to ace people being diverted from healthcare support to deal with the problems they are seeking support for. In other cases, it puts ace people off accessing other healthcare or avoiding disclosure. And in the most egregious cases, asexual people experience conversion practices" (p.29)

I thought this graph of search trends in the UK was very interesting - it shows that there has been an increase in public interest in/awareness of asexuality and aromanticism since 2018, even if it's a fairly small increase. I was curious what could be causing the spikes in the graph, so I made an attempt at cross referencing the dates with news stories that could be related. Here's my attempt at tracking it, which I fully admit may be completely wrong lol

As you can see. Not a great deal of progress was made.

The report also linked to the website for LGBT+ charity Galop, which has a page about prejudice against asexual and aromantic people. This page goes more in depth about prejudicial attitudes, including beliefes that asexual people "are less than human or against human nature", "are deficient or broken; that it is a result of mental illness or sexual abuse", "are confused or ‘going through a phase’" etc.

Peer review and tutorial

In the peer review session with Dayna I got some useful advice for the presentation on the 4th January and for using social media in my research. Which was nice because these are both things I haven't put much thought into yet. I'm definitely feeling less stressed about the presentation now - Dayna was saying it should basically be the same information as the contextual review but in a presentation form - it should mostly be about what your plan is with a couple of slides for what you've already done. The social media research I'm still a bit in the dark about but Dayna had some useful advice on websites I could use to possibly find statistics on where the community is situated, and this could help me decide what websites and such I want to look at. Idk man I'm kind of a luddite so I'm doing the best I can here.

In my tutorial with Willem we mostly focused (ha!) my focus group plans, as usual. I actually have more of a concrete idea of what I want to do with the focus groups now, so we were able to discuss specifics! Some key points:

• I mentioned my idea of potentially having separate groups for aspec/non-aspec people, which we discussed the pros and cons of. As Willem pointed out, on the one hand a combined group could have more opportunity for discussion, but on the other hand there would be a danger of outing people or them not feeling comfortable enough to speak freely.
• Another idea Willem suggested that I quite liked was hold a screening where a few people sign up for the focus group after, but people who don't want to do the focus group can fill in a questionaire or something?
• Issue of whether I should include documentaries in my research - there is at least one documentary out there about asexuality!
• Then there's the issue of how to advertise the event and get people to sign up - I could get the SU or LGBT network to help advertise, I could suggest it as an LGBT history month or pride month event (though I'm not sure whether either of those would work in terms of timing), I could possibly advertise to BU as well - as a member of the Improv Society I do know a lot of BU people, a lot of whom are involved with SUBU!
• We also discussed the possibility of using one-on-one interviews as well - could be another solution for people who aren't comfortable in a group setting!
• We also briefly discussed my research question and how to potentially rephrase it into a double question, so it covers both impact of societal attitudes on media and vice versa. My Sisyphus boulder just rolled back down the hill again I guess

15th December

Lads I cannot lie to you. Working through the to-do list is not going great. I've made some additions and edits to the contextual review and I've finished reading the Gender and Media Reader but jesus christ. This to-do list is gonna kill me.

Anyway time to write up my notes from the various articles I read I guess. At least these were genuinely very helpful.

• First, some notes from the Introduction by Mary Celeste Kearney
• There's a good quote here from Beauvoir's The Second Sex: "Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth" - obviously this is focused on gender but could also apply to race, sexuality etc. (p.1)
• "As a result of decades of marginalization and stereotyping in the media, many members of disenfranchised social groups, including women, have challenged media portrayals of their communities which they find offensive and unrealistic yet are used by others to affirm stereotypes" - again, could be applied to many different groups (p.3)
• Methodology point: "Quantitative data have been especially useful in quickly calling attention to disparities in, for example, the percentage of male versus female characters in prime-time television programming, feature films, and video games" (p.3)
• HOWEVAR: "While quantitative data can paint a general picture of what is happening in sociohistorically specific sites of media representation, production, and reception, qualitative studies pursue the more difficult questions of 'how?,' 'why?,' and 'what's at stake?'" (p.4)
• Some good context for LGBTQ activisim - calls it "especially important to the contestation of patriarchal and heterosexual gender norms, and thus theories of gender" - mentions "homosexual, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex individuals" - no mention of aspec identity, not to sound salty but like. people knew what asexuality was by 2012. guys there was already an awareness week. you are writing a collection of essays that deal heavily with gender and sexuality IT'S FINE THIS IS WHY I'M HERE I GUESS (p.7)
• Context about the TV side of it all: "Television studies [...] took much longer to establish [compared to media studies] largely because of the medium's historical construction as the 'low other' to film, literature, and the fine arts" and it "owes a great deal to cultural studies, a multiperspectival and antidisciplinary approach to humanities scholarship" (p.11)
• Feminist Perspectives on the Media by Liesbet van Zoonen was a good overview of different feminist approaches to media studies
• Important point in reference to stereotypes: "Before the advent of the women's movement these [sex-role] stereotypes seemed natural, 'given'. Few questioned how they developed, how they were reinforced, or how they were maintained. Certainly the media's role in this process was not questioned" (Tuchman, 1978, quoted p.25) - connects to Croteau & Hoynes' points about the importance of media matching 'common sense'
• A liberal feminist perspective argues that "media perpetuate sex role stereotypes because they reflect dominant social values and also because male media-producers are influenced by these stereotypes" (p.27)
• VAN ZOONEN IS CLOWNING ON THE RADICAL FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE SO MUCH LMAOOOOOO: Radical perspective is that "since mass media are in the hands of male owners and producers, they will operate to the benefit of a patriarchal society. Apparently this premise does not need further research, given the few media studies that have been conducted from a radical feminist perspective" "In radical feminist media analyses the power of the media to affect men's behaviour towards women and women's perception of themselves is beyond discussion" so um y'know. maybe avoid doing this (p.28)
• Finally there's the socialist feminist perspective: "In its mmost crude form, the socialist feminist communication model of the seventies clings to radical models in which media are perceived to be ideological instruments presenting the capitalist and patriarchal society as the natural order. However, socialist feminism is distinguished by a much greater concern for the way in which ideologies of femininity iare constructed in the media, and to whose avail" (p.29)
• Socialist feminism also takes an intersectional approach: "has tried to incorporate other social divisions along the lines of ethnicity, sexual preference, age, physical ability, since the experience of, for example, black, lesbian and single women did not fit nicely in the biased gender/class earlier model" - interesting that single women are mentioned as a notable group - connection to aromantic perspective! (p.29)
• However, Van Zoonen is critical of the approach, calls it "increasingly complicated and incoherent" and says that it "until now has not produced a satisfactory account of the way material and cultural conditions interact" (p.29)
• One thing these three perspectives have in common is they "share an instrumental perspective on communication. Media are perceived as the main instruments in conveying respectively stereotypical, patriarchal and hegemonic values about women and femininity. They serve as mechanisms of social control: in liberal feminist discourse media pass on society's heritage - which is deeply sexist" while "radical feminism argues that patriarchal media serve the needs of patriarchal society by suppressing and distorting women's experiences" while "socialist feminism assumes that media present the capitalist, patriarchal scheme of things as the most attractive system available" (p.31)
• Points out problems with calling for "more realistic images of women" - "Gender stereotypes for instance do not come out of hte blue, but have social counterparts which many might perceive as 'real'" - there is a "struggle to define what is meant by 'realistic'" (p.32)
• The role media plays depends on "their location in economic structures [...] on their specific characteristic [...] on the particular genres [...] on the audiences they appeal to and on the place they occupy in those audiences' daily lives" (p.34)
• Discusses "Hall's encoding-decoding model" - "three hypothetical positions from which audiences may interpret television texts are identified: the viewer who takes up a dominant-hegemonic position reads the texts in terms of its encoding which makes the model symmetrical; the negotiated positions entail many more contradictions since the negotiating viewer accepts the global sense of the dominant encoding, but lets her own logic prevail at a more situated level; the most radical reading comes from an oppositional position in which the reader/viewer recognizes the text as inflected with dominant codes and recodes it within her own alternative frame of reference" (p.35)
• "People do not only take media as expressions of dominant culture, they also use media to express something about themselves, as women or as men" (p.36)
• The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media by Gaye Tuchman is a clear example of the kind of feminist perspective that was discussed there: "American learn basic lessons about social life from the mass media, much as hundreds of years ago illiterate peasants studied the carvings around the apse or the stained glass windows of medieval cathedrals" (p.41) - maybe van Zoonen has just put me onto it, but man. there sure is no real evidence given for that claim oops
• "Stereotypes present individuals with a more limited range of acceptable appearance, feelings, and behaviors than guidelines do. The former may be said to limit further the human possibilities and potentialities contained within already limited sex roles" (p.42)
• Ok I have perhaps been a bit harsh there is some argument in favour of the point that media influences people's attitudes - quotes "what psychologists call 'modeling' occurs simply by watching others, without any direct reinforcement for learning and without any overt practice" - "opportunities for modeling have been vastly increased by television (Lesser, quoted in Cantor, 1975, p.5), (p.42)
• "The possible impact of the mass media sex-role stereotypes upon national life seems momentous" (p.43)
• Discusses two key concepts: first of all there's the reflection hypothesis - "According to the reflection hypothesis, the mass media reflect dominant social values" (p.43)
• "Representation in the mass media [of certain characteristics of family types] announces to audience members that this kind of family (or social characteristic) is valued and approved" (p.43)
• In contrast, there is "symbolic annihilation", which refers to "either condemnation, trivialization, or 'absence" (p.43)
• Another interesting concept they bring up is the "notion of a time lag (or a 'culture lag,' as sociologists term it)" - "nonmaterial conditions, which shape symbols, change more slowly than do material conditions" - basically values presented in media change more slowly than values presented in media (p.43)
• Useful discussion of the gender stereotypes TV presents: "Television most approves those women who are presented in a sexual context or within a romantic or family role" - at the time this article was written "Two out of three television-women are married, were married, or are engaged to be married. By way of contrast, most television men are single and have always been single" - I'M SURE THIS WILL HAVE NO BEARING ON THE PRESENTATION OF AROMANTIC OR ASEXUAL WOMEN (p.45)
• "Communications theorists agree that the meass media are the cement of American social life" WHICH SCHOLARS GAYE. WHICH THEORISTS. (p.53)
• "All available evidence about the impact of the media upon sex-role stereotyping indicates that the media encourage their audiences to engage in such stereotyping. They lead girls, in particular, to believe that their social horizons and alternatives are more limited than is actually the case. The evidence about the impact of television is particularly compelling" - I wish they'd actually mentioned some of the studies in question but hwhateverrrrrrr (p.53)
• It does mention Leifer's 1975 argument that "television provides many of the same socialization processes as the family. Like the family, television provides examples of good and bad behavior. The family socializes children through the patterning and power of those examples, and television programming also provides variation in the frequency , consistency, and power of examples" (p.53)
• Some useful examples of studies finally!!!! Mentions studies by Greenberg (1972) and Graves (1975) showing that "television programming influences racial attitudes - Graves's study found that "the long a white child watches 'Sesame Street,' the less likely that child will have negative attitudes toward blacks, and that positive portrayals of blacks produce more positive attitudes toward blacks, with negative portrayals producing little attitude changes" (p.54)
• More useful examples!!! References a study by Frueh and McGhee (1975) which found that "the children who viewed the most television (twenty-five hours or more each week) were significantly more traditional in their sex-typing than those who viewed the least (ten hours or less per week)" but does note that "because this study is correlational, one can not know whether viewing determines sex-typing or vice versa" (p.55)
• "The mass media perform two tasks at once. First, with some culture lag, they reflect dominant values and attitudes in the society. Second, they act as agents of socialization, teaching youngsters in particular how to behave" (p.56)
• The next essay I looked at was Beyond Racism and Misogyny by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, a very influential essay in its discussion of intersectional feminism - "An intersectional framework suggests ways in which political and representational practices relating to race and gender interrelate" (p.110)
• Crenshaw specifies that "although the primary intersections that I explore here are between race and gender, the concept can and should be expanded by factoring in issues such as class, sexual orientation, age, and color" (p.111)
• The most relevant type of intersectionality she mentions is "representational intersectionality" which refers to "the way that race and gender images, readily available in our culture, converge to create unique and specific narratives deemed appropriate for women of color" - IMPORTANTLY: "the clearest convergences are those involving sexuality, perhaps because it is through sexuality that images of minorities and women are most sharply focused" (p.112)
• Useful discussion of stereotypes in this case: "The Latina is two sided: She is both a sweet, hardworking ethnic and a loud, unscrupulous, racialized 'other.' The Black woman is wild and animal-like [...] The Asian-American woman is passive. She can be verbally abused and physically assaulted, yet she still stands ready to please. The Native American woman is a savage. She has no honor and no integrity. She doesn't fight rape; in fact, being tied up and ravished makes her smile. She enjoys it" (p.114)
• "The specific image is created within the intersection of race and gender" (p.114)
• "Whatever the relationship between imagery and actions is, it seems clear that these images do function to create counternarratives to the experiences of women of color that discredit our claims and render the violence that we experience unimportant" - mentions that "the actual effect of images on behavior is still hotly contested" (p.115)
• Important point about race and sexuality: "The history of social represesion of Black male sexuality is long, often violent, and all too familiar. Negative reactions against the sexual conduct of Black male sexuality is long, often violent, and all too familiar" (p.117)
• I looked at Imitation and Gender Insubordination by Judith Butler, one of the most important queer theory authors. I love their propensity to spend multiple pages waffling about if they think there's even a point to anything their writing about. Same.
• Brings up a point about visibility that a lot of other scholars have: "Can the visibility of identity suffice as a political strategy, or can it only be the starting point for a strategic intervention which calls for a transformation of policy?" I also love that Butler spends half their essay asking rhetorical questions. iconic (p.127)
• "Oppression works through the production of a domain of unthinkability and unnameability. Lesbianism is not explicitly prohibited in part because it has not even made its way into the thinkable, the imaginable, that grid of cultural intelligibility that regulates the real and the nameable" - perhaps could be applied to the erasure of asexuality and aromanticism (p.128)
• "Compulsory heterosexuality sets itself up as the original, the true, the authentic" (p.128)
• "In its efforts to naturalize itself as the original, heterosexuality must be understood as a compulsive and compulsory repetition that can only produce the effect of its own originality; in other words, compulsory heterosexual identities, those ontologically consolidated phantasms of 'man' and 'woman,' are theatrically produced effects that posture as grounds, origins, the normative measure of the real" (p.129)
• "Gender is performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express. It is a compulsory performance in the sense that acting out of line with heterosexual norms brings with it ostracism, punishment, and violence, not to mention the transgressive pleasures produced by those very prohibitions" (p.130)
• "Although compulsory heterosexuality often presumes that there is first a sex that is expressed through a gender and then through a sexuality, it may now be necessary fully to invert and displace that operation of thought" (p.133)
• I next looked at the introduction to Part III: Texts: Bodies, Identities, and Representation, which has some useful quotes for the ol contextual review: calls "studies of gender in media representation" "one of the oldest and, to date, most fruitful areas of feminist and queer media scholarship" (p.273)
• Compares the work of Tuchman and Mulvey - "Although both scholars were concerned with the stereotypical and, at times, offensive portrayal of women in media, their studies are indicative of the different paths media scholars took in the early 1970s with regard to issues of representation. Tuchman's research was conducted primarily via quantitative methods that found the number of images of women in media sorely lacking, while Mulvey used semiotics and psychoanalytic theory to understand how cinematic representations of women are impacted by the fears and fantasies of those who produce them" (p.273)
• However, it also notes that both approach are less used nowadays than "discourse analysis, which requires researchers to consider the specific sociohistorical context of gendered representations" (p.273)
• Isabel Molina Guzman and Angharad N. Valdivia's essay on Latina Iconicity in U.S. Popular Culture is useful for its discussion of stereotypes: "Sexuality plays a central role in the tropicalization of Latinas through the widely circulated narratives of sexual availability, proficiency, and desirability" (p.311)
• Mentions that women of color generally "have been excessively sexualized and exoticized by U.S. and European cultures" (p.311)
• "The marginalization of Latina bodies is defined by an ideological contradiction - that is, Latina beauty and sexuality is marked as other, yet it is that otherness that also marks Latinas as desirable" (p.312)
• "The physical representations of all three women are informed by the racializing discourses of ethnic female bodies as simultaneously physically aberrant, sexually desirable, and consumable by the mainstream" (p.312)
• Also mentions the "racialized binary narrative of virgin and whore" as being applied to Latina actresses - possibly a relevant point? (p.316)
• There's also a useful queer theory article: Making Her (In)visible by Ann M. Ciasullo, which deals with representations of lesbians in media in the 90s - mentions that lesbians are "at once sexualized and desexualized" (p.329) the sense that "she is made into an object of desire for straight audiences" but "the representation of desire between two women is usually suppressed" (p.330)
• "To be sure, representation promises visibility, but visibility means not only that one is present but that one is being watched" (p.332)
• Mentions that the portrayal of certain Black lesbian characters is "troubling because she is an asexual mammy figure" bla bla bla insert points from those essays about the racialization of asexuality and that one about how characters depicted as asexual are often not truly asexual but desexualised here bla bla bla. I think I've brought these up plenty (p.337)
• The essay Boys Don't Cry and Female Masculinity is another interesting look at queer representation, even if I generally feel kind of. weird about how most of this collection discusses trans people. An attempt was made I guess
• "One partner in the power of heteronormativity to order society is the media and their long history of depicting characters who transgress gender boundaries as comic, weak, or as evil" (p.356)
• "Mainstream narratives are inevitably 'heterosexed'" - also mentions Judith Roof's concept of "narrative's heteroideology" - "the ways narrative and sexuality work together to create and perpetuate a heterosexual ideology in culture and media" (p.357)
• "Privileged sexual subjectivity is maintained through the dominant narratives of a culture - the media for instance - which 'facilitate the smooth telling of some lives and straitjacket, distort, or fracture others'" (p.358, quoting Scheman, 1997)
• "Mass media content and criticism can, therefore, work to problematize heteroideology by expanding and relocating its normative gaze, providing new perspectives of sexual minorities who find themselves marginalized, stigmatized and ultimately excluded from most media content" - idea of media challenging social norms (p.358)
• "At the center of heteronormativity is the traditional nuclear family" (p.358)
• Incredible quote from Vito Russo: "Mainstream cinema is plainly chickenshit when it comes to gay life and lives, and it's time we said so" (p.364, quoting Russo, 1986)
• "More than just entertainment, the mass media are perhaps the most dominant and pervasive storytellers in American society [...] We learn how to think about the world - including about sexual minorities - from mass media" (p.365)
• "Films like Boys Don't Cry that privilege tolerance and acceptance of gender fluidity have the potential to help reduce the kind of societal bigotry and intolerance that result in hate crimes like Brandon Teena's murder" (p.365)
• Richard Fung's essay on The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn beings with a fucking unhinged example of psychologist Philippe Rushton's attempts to prove that "degree of 'sexuality' [...] correlates positively with criminality and sociopathic behavior inversely with intelligence, health, and longevity" and that "race is the determining factor" - Rushton claims that "we reported a study of racial difference in sexual restraint such that Orientals > whites > blacks" (p.380)
• As Fung points out, "since whites fall squarely in the middle, the position of perfect balance, there is no need for analysis, and they remain free of scrutiny" (p.380)
• Important context-y stuff: "Until recently, issues of (p.380) gender and sexuality remained a low priority for those who claimed to speak for the [racial] communities. But anti-racist strategies that fail to subvert the race-gender status quo are of seriously limited value" (p.381)
• "The contemporary construction of race and sex as exemplified by Rushton has endowed black people, both men and women, with a threatening hypersexuality. Asians, on the other hand, are collectively seen as undersexed" - specifies that he is talking about East and Southeast Asian people (p.381)
• "Within the totalizing stereotype of the 'Oriental,' there are competing and sometimes contradictory sexual associations based on nationality. So, for example, a person could be seen as Japanese and somewhat kinky, or Filipino and 'available.' The very same person could also be seen as 'Oriental' and therefore sexless" (p.381)
• In terms of stereotypes of Asian women: "There are two basic types: the Lotus Blossom Baby (a.k.a. China Doll, Geisha Girl, shy Polynesian beauty, et al.) and the Dragon Lady (Fu Manchu's various female relations, prostitutes, devious madames)... Asian women in film are, for the most part, passive figures who exist to serve men - as love interests for white men (re: Lotus Blossoms) or as partners in crime for men of their own kind (re: Dragon Ladies)" (p.381, quoting Tajima, 1984)
• "Because of their supposed passivity and sexual compliance, Asian women have been fetishized in dominant representation" (p.381)
• Meanwhile the Asian man "is sometimes dangerous, sometimes friendly, but almost always characterized by a desexualized Zen asceticism" (p.381)
• I found The Oppositional Gaze by bell hooks a really interesting addition to the discussion of models of media engagement - "From 'jump,' black female spectators have gone to films with awareness of the way in which race and racism determined the visual construction of gender" (p.604)
• "Black female spectators, who refused to identify with white womanhood, who would not take on the phallocentric gaze of desire and possession, created a critical space where the binary opposition Mulvey posits of 'woman as image, man as bearer of the look' was continually deconstructed" (p.604)
• "Mainstream feminist film criticism in no way acknowledges black female spectatorship. It does not even consider the possibility that women can construct an oppositional gaze via an understanding and awareness of the politics of race and racism. Feminist film theory rooted in an ahistorical psychoanalytic framework that privileges sexual difference actively suppresses recognition of race, reenacting and mirroring the erasure of black womanhood that occurs in films, silencing any discussion of racial difference - of racialized sexual difference" (p.604) - really good quote for contextual review!!
• "Just as mainstream cinema has historically forced aware black female spectators not to look, much feminist film criticism disallows the possibility of a theoretical dialogue that might include black women's voices" (p.605)
• The final essay I looked at was There's Something Queer Here by Alexander Doty
• "The most slippery and elusive terrain for mass culture studies continues to be negotiated within audience and reception theory. Perhaps this is because within cultural studies, 'audience' is now always already acknowledged to be fragmented, polymorphous, contradictory, and 'nomadic', whether in the form of individual or group subjects" (p.610)
• Doty mmentions he uses to choose the term "queer" in this essay instead of "gay" because it allows "space for describing and expressing bisexual, transsexual, and straight queerness" - again we see no acknowledgement of asexuality and aromanticism (p.611)
• Another example of this is listing sexual orientations: "whether straight-, gay-, lesbian-, or bi-identifying" (p.611)

Possible further reading:

• Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media by Gaye Tuchman
• When the gaze is gay by Vito Russo

Anywah speaking of gender, I've been watching a lot of videos by Lily Simpson in my spare time - she talks about transgender representation in TV, including an episode of the TV show Bones where Angel from Buffy himself David Boreanaz says the word transgender. This may mean nothing to you, but it means everything to me.

MORE RELEVANTLY, her video on South Park actually mentioned asexuality!! At 3:26 she talks about transphobic attitudes and beliefs that trans women only transition for sexual reasons and that transitioning is a fetish. She points out that not only is this y'know, wrong, but also it fails to take into account trans women who are asexual. Thought this was worth mentioning because it ties into Angela Chen's commentary on how trans women are sexualised and how this affects the experience of ace trans women.

Previous week

Next week

Back to weekly journal

Back to home