Izvorni znanstveni članak
Contemporary Male-Female Constructs in American TV Series Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives and Rescue me
Silvana Kosanović
orcid.org/0000-0002-5160-4715
; Sveučilište u Splitu, Split, Hrvatska
Sažetak
Research concerning gender representation in popular culture was initiated by feminist studies on the construction of femininity. Representation of men tended to be implicitly included as normative so was not studied separately. With socio-economic changes, assertion of feminist theory, British cultural studies, American television studies, post feminist and queer theory, question of media representation of gender, especially of masculinity, gains a more important position.
This article aims to examine contemporary media constructions of femininity and masculinity by using examples from some recent American television shows (Res-cue Me, Desperate Housewives, and Sex and the City). The aim is to illustrate traits attributed to men and women which arise as a result of our consumer society needs. The idealization of looks, cult of the body and sexuality have become some of the most important gender expectations. Our mass consumer society establishes new criteria and suggests that an attractive appearance conveys a greater sense of power, success, self-centeredness and self-control, so media representations sup¬port these socially dominant gender categories and position them as desirable identity.
The methods employed are based on secondary analysis of theoretical bodies of work and on the analysis of the above mentioned television series.
Results show that conventional understanding of gender is not potentially threat-ened, but the once rigid gender division is no longer so unbending. Independent of gender, preferential and dominant cultural imperatives become sexualized looks, body, entertainment, pleasure, self-consciousness and personal choice. An important role is assigned to the objectification of the male body, while some other stereotypically accepted male traits are beginning to lose their primacy, intersect with some traditionally accepted female traits or disappear. Even though some feminist critics claim that women have freed themselves from their phallocentric, patriarchal position and have become mistresses of their own destinies by consciously permitting women’s appearance for media employment, this article aims to show that that liberation is really deceptive. Women and men have become vic-tims of the consumer culture which, obsessed by youth, looks and body, primarily fixes its concentration on the visual and physical, and only secondarily on other social indicators of identity, such as language, performativity or belonging to some social group.
Ključne riječi
contemporary media constructions of gender; representation; con-sumer culture; cult of the body and looks; objectification
Hrčak ID:
31325
URI
Datum izdavanja:
10.12.2008.
Posjeta: 6.323 *