At the outset of
Henry Jenkins’ article, “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence,” the stated
goal is “to identify some of the ways that cultural studies might contribute to
[debates about major sites of tension and transition shaping the media environment]
and why it is important for us to become more focused on creative industries”
(34). There are actually two goals embedded in that sentence; the first is
clear enough, but the second – “why it’s important for us to become more
focused on creative industries” – obfuscates his actual goal, at least as it's fleshed out in
the remainder of the article. For when Jenkins calls for more “focus” on
creative industries, he means specifically that cultural scholars should
“imagine new possible relations with corporate and governmental interests” and
should “engage in active dialogue with media industries” (42). If convergence,
to Jenkins, represents “a reconfiguration of media power and a reshaping of
media aesthetics and economics,” and if “our media future could depend on the kind
of uneasy truce that gets brokered between commercial media and collective
intelligence,” then he is calling for cultural scholars to become increasingly
visible, widely accessible, and willing to forego the state of privileged
seclusion or separation from corporate/governmental interests (35). Jenkins’
call for more scholarly involvement in the culture industry reflects his belief
that not all participation in the consumer economy constitutes cooptation. As
he states, audience researchers “need to abandon their romance with audience
resistance in order to understand how consumers may exert their emerging power
through new collaborations with media producers” (36).
This type of
rhetoric – that consumers (and consumer-scholars) can shape the content of cultural
commodities according to their desires by engaging actively/creatively with
media producers – has its critics. One of these critics, Christian Fuchs,
writes in “Social Media as Participatory Culture” that this celebration of
participatory culture as a structure that allows consumers to participate in
the production and distribution of cultural goods “does not much engage with or
analyze the downsides of [the media industry]” (58). Jenkins may hope for
“victories in the struggle for political freedom and cultural diversity” (42),
but Fuchs claims that he “tends to idealize the political potentials of fan
communities” and that fans’ engagement in dialogue with media producers does
not necessarily lead to “protesting against racism, neoliberalism, wage cuts,
the privatization of education or welfare, lay-offs in the companies, etc.”
(58). Essentially, while Jenkins envisions a mutually-accessible feedback loop
wherein producers and consumers are continually inspired by the preceding
practices, themes, and materials of media culture, Fuchs questions who is
benefiting from, excluded from, or being harmed by such a feedback loop. At one
point in Jenkins’ article he expresses dismay that Truman Burbank from The Truman Show (dir. Peter Weir, 1998)
walks away from the media instead of using it to generate his own content,
deliver his own message, and exploit the media for his own purposes (37). Jenkins
would like to see Truman learn to use these media technologies rather than walk
away from them; Fuchs might interpret such an act as neglecting “structural
constraints of human behavior and the dialectic of structure and agency” (66). Ultimately, I suppose the question is whether liking or mastering a media activity makes
it less exploitative.
Fuchs,
Christopher. “Social Media as Participatory Culture.” Social Media: A Critical
Introduction. (Sage, 2014): 53-67.
At the beginning of the article, the author
points out the differences between daytime soaps and the prime-time continuing
melodramatic serials. The “content” is the significant distinction between the
two forms, for catering to the audiences at different times of the day.
However, the term “television melodrama” provided the two forms with a
similarity. Then, following Willemen’s logic of the films of Douglas Sirk, the
author uses the prime-time continuing serials Dallas and Dynasty as examples to
introduce the two texts: melodrama as a form and as an ideology. The author quotes psychoanalytical and
feminist critics to open up the ideological contradictions in the domestic
sphere. To be specific, “the main contradiction melodrama explores is the
expectation that the family should fulfill all needs society can’t
fill” (7). At the same time, the author points out the filmmaking
characteristics of television melodrama, such as mise-en-scene, acting,
editing, musical underscoring, and the use of the zoom lens.
I am not very
familiar with Dallas and Dynasty, but this article reminds me of the
Chinese melodramatic text Kewang, which can be seen as the first television
melodrama in China. It was released in 1990 and got the unprecedentedly highest
rating, about 90% in China, during that time. I would like to point out the two
texts of Kewang, which correspond with the ideas in this article. The “primary”
text, or the narrative level, of Kewang describes a tragic story that
happened between the main female character called Liu Huifang, who represents
all virtues of the Chinese traditional female, and her husband, Wang
Husheng, who represents a bad, ungrateful, and irresponsible man. It is
the typical narrative model of melodrama that “the good can never ultimately
receive their just rewards, yet evil can never wholly triumph.” The plot
focuses on the ordinary Chinese people during the time of the Cultural Revolution
(1966 to 1967) and the reform period of the early 1980s, so the
secondary text of Kewang reveals the miserable life of the Chinese people who
experienced the difficult time by formalist characters. This point is in
accordance with the idea mentioned in the article that “the emergence of the
melodramatic serial in the 1980s represents a radical response to and
expression of cultural contradictions” (13).
Four of us from Cinema and Media Studies Division have collaborated to organize a theme week titled (Im)Possible Asias for In Media Res. Three posts have already been published and the next two will be published on Thursday and Friday. This theme week was organized as a provocation to rethink the nationalistic rhetoric within which discussions of nation-state and geographic imagination of space are mostly couched. http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/theme-week/2016/11/impossible-asias-march-14-18-2016
On January 27, 1926, John Logie Baird, a Scottish inventor gave the first demonstration of television system in London. He called his new equipment "Televisor" that used mechanical rotating disks to scan moving images into electric impulses. In 1928, he made the first overseas broadcast from London to New York over phone lines. Here are some of the brochures used to publicise Baird Television.
http://www.earlytelevision.org/pdf/baird_televisor_brochure.pdf
http://www.earlytelevision.org/pdf/baird_televisor_brochure.-2.pdf
Interesting article on the origins of the laughter track in Television
http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/13/5207136/Charley-Douglass-laff-box-laugh-track
For White Girls Only? Post-Feminism and the Politics of Inclusion
Jess Butler argues that post-feminism is more complex, more multilayered than it has been theorized in recent history. To propose a more “intersectional approach to post-feminism,” Butler outlines a number of key concepts in the development of post-feminism: sexuality as discursive formation, different (oppositional) movements in feminism, neoliberalism and its influence, and postfeminism as a sensibility which affirms a white, middle-class, heterosexual subject while including/policing identities outside this norm. Butler’s intention is to look at how dominant power structures are reproduced through post-feminism, but also to push the conversation around post-feminism beyond an exclusionary approach. It is through inclusion (via assimilation), she argues, that whiteness and heterosexuality are normalized, but also through inclusion (via visibility) that gender/race hierarchies in the US can be potentially destabilized. Thus, post-feminism always already represents the intersection of gender, race, class, and sexuality, and cultural icons like Nicki Minaj can reveal the ways in which scholarship at this intersection is ripe for exploration.
(1). “Understanding postfeminism as a sensibility, in Gill’s words, ‘emphasizes the contradictory nature of postfeminist discourses and the entanglement of both feminist and anti-feminist themes within them’.” (44)
Postfeminism is a “collective ambivalence” which cannot be pinned down as one clear ideology but contains contradictory ideologies, being both feminist and anti-feminist. Everyone can be whoever they want to be — individual is empowered; but “just as long as it is not a feminist” — this self empowerment must be done through consumption/commodification rather than political activism.
(2). “Clearly, the versatility of postfeminism functions as a double-edged sword with regard to women of color: on the one hand, it allows nonwhite women to participate in its deployment and enjoy its rewards, albeit in narrowly circumscribed ways; on the other, it works to conceal the underlying power relations that reproduce hegemonic ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and class.” (39-40)
Sex and sexuality are understood as individual rights. Sexual freedom promoted by postfeminism conceals the unequal power relations the in the mainstream heterosexual system. It goes in line of the postfeminist discourse that gender inequality has been accomplished and feminist activism is no longer necessary. Sex/sexuality becomes a token of freedom because it is about deployment of one’s body, but postfeminism conceals the underlying unequal power relations in the disguise of political and economic gender equality, as well as gender freedom. Postfeminism ignores and colludes to reproduce hegemonic ideologies on race, sexuality and class.
(3) “Unchained from political activism, postfeminism constructs gender as a consumer product that women can try on—and take off—as they choose.” (46)
In line with neoliberalism, postfeminism commodifies feminism. In postfeminist discourse, feminism is depoliticized and trivialized as a product; it’s no longer about political activism, but about self-improvement or self-empowerment through consumption. This metaphor delineates the relationship between feminism and individual, and how consumerism becomes the main mechanism of feminism, which foundation is understood as individual freedom (which goes in line with neoliberalism). Postfeminism converts our focus from political activism to the issues of aging, body, fashion, relationship, and desires, and confine self-empowerment within these issues.
Clip:
Kardashian family is a celebrity royal family, a white upper-class family who brand themselves as princesses from Armenia. On one hand this is an embrace of their race, on the other this is also commodification of race.
Sundi Sundaram suggests that Kim Kardashian is an “overlooked face of feminism” (see http://www.newster.co/?news=188726#news=188726). He argues that Kim Kardashian is a new brand of feminism because she has great control over the media empire to showcase her sexuality and power in the way she wants. But as Tracie Egan Morrissey argues in her article, Kardashian are completely contradictory to the feminism agenda, because rather than sending positive, constructive and powerful messages to women, they are commodifying woman insecurities. Their narrow definition of femininity and sexuality has great influence over the public. This goes in line with Butler’s argument on postfeminism’s commodification, and how it promotes self-empowerment through self correction and regulation.
^ Keeping Up with the Kardashians is a post-feminist media representation which emphasizes and capitalizes upon bodily femininity: The bodies (butts, in particular) of the Kardashian women are both celebrated and sold.
At the same time, if you search ‘Kardashian tutorial’ on Youtube, there are almost 800,000 hits. Butler cites Jennifer Lopez and Nicki Minaj as cultural icons whose ambiguity of appearance has disrupted the “binary logic and essentialism” of black/white race dichotomies in America. To a greater extent than them both, the Kardashian family has demonstrated the possibilities of reshaping idealized norms of race and beauty; however, their trenchant materialistic agenda reinforces the notion
Post-feminism and Popular Culture
--- Angela McRobbie
Summary:
Angela McRobbie defines postfeminism as a new dilemma that not only took the equality achieved by feminism into account, but also abandoned the term feminism. She suggests that postfeminism is a thing of the past and no longer needs to be stressed since it has achieved and transcended the need for equality. She engages with the term to understand the complications of rejecting feminism and the coexistence of both “neo-conservative values in relations to gender, sexuality, and family life with processes of liberalisation in regard to choice and diversity in domestic sexual and kinship relations” -- what she calls double entanglement.
Quotes:
“We would also need to be able to theorise female achievement predicated not on feminism, but on “female individualism,” on success which seems to be based on the invitation to young women by various governments that they might now consider themselves free to compete in education and in work as privileged subjects of the new meritocracy.” (p258)
---Up to this point, McRobbie described the hatred toward the term “feminism”, and how post- feminism should be interpreted as “female individualism” instead.The equality achieved through feminism is assumed, while at the same time, their individual freedom to choose is added on.
2. “We are witness to a hyper-culture of commercial sexuality, one aspect of which is the repudiation of a feminism invoked only to be summarily dismissed… There is quietude and complicity in the manners of generationally specific notions of cool, and more precisely an uncritical relation to dominant commercially produced sexual representations which actively invoke hostility to assumed feminist positions from the past in order to endorse a new regime of sexual meanings based on female consent, equality, participation and pleasure, free of politics.” (p 259-260)
---McRobbie argued that the normalisation women showing their bodies in popular culture are their individual choices. Post feminists are fully aware of the criticism they received from the feminists, and it is their freedom to withhold that critique.
3. “ Young women are, as a result, now ‘disembedded’ from communities where gender roles were fixed. And, as the old structures of social class fade away, and lose their grip in the context of ‘late or second modernity,’ individuals are increasingly called upon to invent their own structures. They must do this internally and individualistically, so that self-monitoring practices replace reliance on set ways and structured pathways. Self-help guides, personal advisors, lifestyle coaches and gurus, and all sorts of self-improvement TV programmes provides the cultural means by which individualism operates as a social process. “ (p260)
McRobbie emphasizes that young women are free to have and act on their own agency because of the loosening of traditional gender structures. There is a focus on individuals to monitor and depend on themselves thereby creating a life no longer based upon fixed roles. The increase of female agency, independence, and power through self motivation and self improvement is positive and empowering, but also gives rise to new fears and anxieties that must be dealt with alone. The weight of self dependency and internal management become so heavy that fears such as not finding a husband/being single are conjured -- returning to the ideas of old traditional roles.
"What's Your Flava?"
--- Sarah Banet-Weiser
Sarah Banet-Weiser borrows a lot of her ideas about “post-feminism” from McRobbie. She also views it as a kind of anti-feminism that recognizes feminist concerns superficially (ambiguously) only to dismiss them and relegate them to the past. Banet-Weiser does, however, focus more on the commodification of gender and racial identity as an “entry point” to postfeminism, and she describes a “turf war” between Second Wave feminists (who opposed commercialism and the mainstream) with Third Wave feminists (who, in the name of visibility, embrace commodification) that creates a paralysis that allows postfeminism to dominate culture.
“Like race, gender identity is constructed in the present “postfeminist” cultural economy as a “flava ,” a flexible, celebratory identity category that is presented in all its various manifestations as a kind of product one can buy or try on.” (202)
This quote explains the meaning of “the commodification of gender,” which depoliticizes it.
“This move toward focusing on individual empowerment rather than coalition politics or structural change forces consideration of several questions. Once feminism is represented as a commodity in precisely the mainstream it has traditionally challenged, can we still talk about it as political?” (208)
This quote relates to the differences between Second Wave feminism and Third Wave feminism.
”There is, however, no lack of the image of diversity and gender within media culture; images of savvy, urban individuals and empowered girls function as lucrative commodities in the media marketplace.” (216)
This quote gets her point about the result of using media visibility to commodificate gender.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjJQBjWYDTs
Always’ 2014 ad is a perfect example of the commodification of feminist concerns; its emotional power- extolling the freedom and empowerment of female identity- builds in a carefully constructs montage, only to climax with the brand product. In its vague inspiration it echoes Sarah Banet-Weiser’s critique of the way post- feminist ideology shies away from a specific political context in order to target a commercial demographic; consumerism as “identity.”
