700 words essay
annallee
powerpoint.pptxMay the circle stay unbroken: Friends, the presence of absence, and the rhetorical reinforcement of whiteness
Shows like Friends may shape and reinforce both white audiences’ perceptions of the racialized Other and of marginalized audience members’ perceptions of themselves as raced beings
Ross and Julie
whiteness remains central and invisible
unquestioned power
Unearned racial privilege
whiteness is an expression of hegemonic force (Gramsci, 1971)
hegemony – In this case hegemony is dominance of one social group over another
“Whiteness desires to be seen as object, yet insists on remaining invisible as subject. In other words, whiteness resists the kind of intense scrutiny that might result in its becoming effectively fixed to a specific position and revealed as a system of privilege and power”
Friends limits and regulates the racialized other in a place like New York that is the opposite
Popularity of friends, comfort food, transcends tragedy
When there are non white characters there is no mention of race
Reference to white rappers
“overt claim to the value of white authenticity, I contend that any number of contemporary media texts have made similar, if less blatantly overt, assertions in recent years about whiteness’s enduring worth as a subject position”
Can we relate any of this to last week?
Nothing Queer about Queer television
It’s All Relative
Increased visibility does not always translate into social tolerance
Most of these shows ignore the political issues
Sexuality is culturally essentialized to inscribe heterosexuality as normal and all other sexualities as deviant
Queer represents a resistance to anything that is socially defined as normal
“Gramsci’s (1973) notion of hegemony shifts the focus of scholarly attention from explicit ideologies or agendas to the common-sense norms that influence everyday interactions and are taken for granted.”
It doesn’t matter how many representations there are but rather the complexity of the representations
Images of gay men are being presented in a way the reinforces traditional values like family, monogamy, and stability
Queer has come to mean gay men
It usually excludes and ignores other issues of feminism, lesbians, race, and other minority groups
Gender, sex, class and race also need to be taken into account
There is nothing queer about queer television when the flexibility of the term is reduced to an interpretation that reinforces the traditional homosexual/heterosexual binary
Stereotypes of the feminine and masculine roles in gay relationships, gender traditions
Gay men have to accommodate straight men’s activities but not the other way around
Queer Eye - five asexual fairy godmothers that appear, transform a straight man’s love life, but are themselves denied love lives of their own
In the end they’re all just a bunch of guys
Although maybe they got better, Glee, Modern Family
The gay characters are not the only focus of either show and there are still some desirable values like family values, or young good looking white men
Class identity and gay men, is this still a focus?
