Plan for the week

Right so it turns out I was extremely optimistic about how much I'd be able to get done last week and the week before considering I spent a decent chunk of both of them fucking off to London and then to Spain. However this week I'm gonna turn everything around I promise.

TO DO THIS WEEK:

I can do this. I can do at least 75% of this. I believe in myself.

Tutorial time!!

Had a tutorial with Willem and Emma on Tuesday, as usual we were focused on the issue of my focus groups. I've also sent off my current draft of my participant information sheet to them, as well as a list of my potential interview questions, but this is the feedback I got already:

Reading of the Week

Now that I'm from Barcelona, that means I can once again sequester myself in the BU library until I've exhausted their TV studies collection. I decided to start with The New Television Handbook (Fifth Edition) by Patricia Holland, as it seemed like the best broad overview, and was published in 2017 so should be relatively up to date with TV developments:

While this was the most up-to-date version of the Television Handbook I could find, I did also want to look at the previous edition because it seemed like it might go a bit more in-depth on some areas, particularly in its discussion of the sitcom genre (which a lot of the shows I'm looking at fall into). Notes from The Television Handbook: Fourth Edition by Jeremy Orlebar:

As I briefly mentioned before, one pattern that has emerged in my research is that a lot of the most popular and notable shows to depict asexuality/aromanticism in recent years have been teen shows. Sex Education, Heartstopper, Heartbreak High: these are all shows aimed at teenagers, with teenage protagnonists and secondary/high school settings. In light of this, I decided to look at some of the essays in Teen TV: Genre, Consumption and Idenity, edited by Glyn Davis and Kay Dickinson. While obviously the teen show as a genre has evolved a lot since 2004 when this collection was published, I still hope that looking at some of the literature around this genre will prove useful for analysing it, or at least will provide useful context.

I also briefly looked at the essay Lost in Transition: From Post-Network to Post-Television by Roberta Pearson in Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond edited by Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (2014). I mostly just read it because I am (regrettably) a Lost fan, but it did contain this great quote about the then-current TV landscape, which I think applies even more today: • “Says Spigel, ‘If TV refers to technologies, industrial formations, government policies, and practices of looking that were associated with the medium in its classical public service and three-network age, it appears that we are now entering a new phase of television – the phase that comes after TV’ (2004: 3)” (Spigel, Television After TV, quoted p. 239)

In addition to all this wonderful TV studies stuff, I also spent this week reading all the academic articles about aromanticism I obtained from Phil, which have been great for beefing up my sources on aromanticism in particular.

Notes from Sexuality, Sexual Behavior, and Relationships of Asexual Individuals: Differences Between Aromantic and Romantic Orientation by Ana Catarina Carvalho and David L. Rodrigues:

Notes from Aromanticism, asexuality, and relationship (non-)formation: How a-spec singles challenge romantic norms and reimagine family life by Hannah Tessler:

Notes from The investment model of commitment: examining asexual and aromantic populations using confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis by Lijing Ma, Hailey A. Hatch and Eddie M. Clark

Overall, the findings of this paper seem a bit limited, the authors acknowledge the limitations of their small sample size, and I feel like the difference between monogamous vs non-monogamous participants would make it hard to draw strong conclusions. It was useful to get at least some data on the prevalence of non-monogamy among a-spec people, though (even if, again, the small sample size means these numbers are a bit dubious)!

Notes from The stability of singlehood: Limitations of the relationship status paradigm and a new theoretical framework for reimagining singlehood by Hannah Tessler:

Notes from the infamous Ace and Aro: Understanding Differences in Romantic Attractions Among Persons Identifying as Asexual by Amy N. Antonsen, Bozena Zdaniuk, Morag Yule, and Lori A. Brotto:

In conclusion, I feel pretty weird about this article: It was good for stats but I do think it's perhaps a little irresponsible to put out an article claiming that aromantic people are statistically colder etc. Like they do acknowledge that there may be other factors at play there but only towards the end, not in the introduction or abstract. It just seems like kind of an irresonsible thing to be putting out there if you haven't replicated it or explored all the possible factors, you know? Especially if other people are then gonna be citing you as saying that aro people are colder and less nurturing than non-aro people, which people are demonstrably doing. Also as I said, limited in how it only talked about aromanticism as a subset of asexuality.

MOVING ON to Sexuality, romantic orientation, and masculinity: Men as underrepresented inasexual and aromantic communities by Hannah Tessler and Canton Winer:

Possible further reading:

On a final reading note, and not to bring up the Buffy family of shows again (SORRY EVERYONE) but I did finish reading the collection of essays about the show Angel I've been slowly crawling through for months this week. Mostly bringing this up because there was some very interesting stuff written in there about the gender politics of the show and how the show portrays female characters. In particular, the essay Angel’s Monstrous Mothers and Vampires with Souls: Investigating the Abject in ‘Television Horror’ by Matt Hills and Rebecca Williams discusses at length how when women are presented as "monstrous" in horror it is almost always linked to reproduction and them being mothers. Which I think sucks quite badly but also considering how much of the feminist writing I've read for this project boils down to "WOMEN ARE OFTEN REDUCED TO SEX OBJECTS AND/OR THEIR ABILITY TO HAVE CHILDREN" it's not exactly surprising. Anyway I think TV studies is a beautiful field.

TV of the Week

In terms of the TV side of things, I rewatched the second season of Heartstopper this week, which includes a storyline about secondary character Isaac discovering that he is both aromantic and asexual. I have pretty mixed feelings about this storyline: on the one hand, it was nice finally getting an aromantic storyline and I think at least some parts of it are very resonant and a lot of people could see their experiences in them, on the other hand, I think for the most part it's a pretty bare-bones and basic plot. Isaac isn't a very well-developed character - we don't know much about him other than he's aromantic, he's asexual, and he likes to read - and he seems to get less focus than the other characters do. Admittedly, the show is ongoing, so maybe these problems will be resolved in a third season? But for now I'm not thrilled with what we have.

Dug up my initial thoughts on the season from when I first watched it last summer and immediately went to complain to the group chat about it. Honestly my position hasn't really changed.

Other than that, I have transcripts of the show here!

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