Surprise! I watched: "Keeping Up With The Kardashians" S14E18

To no one's surprise, I watched the penultimate episode of this season's "Keeping Up with the Kardashians," a reality TV series I have been watching weekly since its premiere. This episode generally addresses issues of maternal health: Khloe discusses her body's low concentrations of endogenous progesterone (P4) during the first trimester of her pregnancy (putting her at higher risk for miscarriage, or an indicator of relatively higher risk for miscarriage), demonstrates the ingestion of progesterone via vaginal suppositories, and deals with a leak to TMZ about her pregnancy; Kourtney researches oocyte cryopreservation and takes viewers through the procedure with her doctor; and Kim checks in with her surrogate and indicates concern that her decision to have a surrogate risks severing her maternal bond to her new child.

Core Post #2: Mrs. Maisel's Jewishness Elevated to Whiteness

This is sort of just a rambling piece of thought, but not unrelated to the readings...probably most closely tied to Esposito's piece on "An Analysis of Privilege and Postracial(?) Representations on a Television Sitcom" if I had to pick one? But as a longtime fan of the Gilmore Girls-centered podcast "Gilmore Guys" I was listening to their recent spin-off, "Maisel Goys." I was really interested in the latest download this week, which was a special non-episode on the representation of Judaism in the show. The guest (just a fellow fan/listener/Jewish studies girl) spoke about how her background as a Jewish woman informed her viewing of the show and how it depicted specific aspects of Jewish life in the 1950s, and it reminded me of how Esposito handled the discussion of Marc, the gay white man who Betty competes with for the prestigious internship in Ugly Betty. "We're privileged at the same time as we're prosecuted," as the "Maisel Goys" guest describes it. Of course, these are different circumstances--gayness is not an ethnic identity, and nobody in Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is forced to confront their white privilege in any capacity (a staple of Amy Sherman-Palladino's work), but I thought Maisel was an interesting sort of counterpoint to the discussion of TV shows among the three articles for this week, especially in a world where references to "New York values/sensibilities" as coded for Jewish culture abound (called ashkenormativity, I also learned--a somewhat contested term). 

Reading Phil's post reminded me of this part of the podcast in particular: 

"Jews weren't considered white people when we came to the United States, and it's one of my biggest pet peeves when other Jewish Americans who now walk through the world as a part of this privilege -because really if we changed our names and our jewelry, you might not know - forget that we were allowed to be white people when Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics were added to who was considered white to try and reinforce Jim Crow America."

I don't really have any super grand or eloquent conclusions for this, but these are just some things on my mind I guess. 

Core Post 3

First off I want to say that I loved the Herman Gray chapter. I felt that looking at why the networks started targeting African American audiences on an economical and institutional level to be very enlightening—especially thinking from a business point of view. When I think about studying race representation in the media, I usually associate that with looking at the cultural significance and historical context in which it happened. My academic background has touched a lot on what Gray talks about in terms of narrowcasting and targeting niche audiences, but I’ve read a lot more about women in that aspect than in regards to race.  Seeing how the networks went from dominating the market to them scrambling to figure out how to keep their market share once Fox entered the scene was interesting, but I wish there had been a little more quantitative data. The essay felt like a lot of regurgitating what other scholars were saying, but in the context of why African Americans were starting to get more representation in the 1980s.

I think that nowadays the way we target audiences is repeating—because everything goes in cycles—in a way that happened in the 90s with the repeal of the fin/syn rules but on a much larger scale.  Today audiences are purposely designed to be extremely niche because there is so much more content output than ever before. The goal seems to be to get audiences hooked so that they have to watch as much of that content that they can get their hands on. In my digital media class, we have people in the industry telling us that for Netflix hits don’t matter as much as long as you don’t churn out—cancel their subscription. They just have to keep viewers engaged enough so that they either forget about their subscription or they have some upcoming show that could interest enough people to keep them on the site.

Core Post #3: Why was The Real O'Neals even a Television show?

While reading the article by Esposito, there was a passage that I found intriguing with her analysis of Ugly Betty.  She states that “discursive constructions of race are always structured within particular historical, political and economic moments” (Esposito 525).  Granted her analysis is specifically Latinx representation, but I found it to be quite relevant to the specific episodes that we watched last week.  In addition, I couldn’t help while after viewing Black-ish and Fresh off the Boat the article by Lipstiz to be quite relevant.  This is because I found relevance of the characters dealing with negotiating their backgrounds in contemporary American society similar to the ethnic sitcoms that Lipsitz addresses during the 50’s and 60’s negotiating the transition of ethnic immigrant to consumerist American identity.  I view that the episodes that we watched last week were a combination of both articles, because they illustrated a specific epoch of racial discourse within American society.  Not only are Black and Asian-Americans still considered ‘other’ within the politics of racial difference rooted still in historical moments of present day, but the fact that within the narratives, they each negotiate their racial ‘otherness’ within the context of an American society is quite telling.  

I couldn’t help but think of another television series that I’ve still been confused as to why it was even created: The Real O’Neals.  The show is about an Irish catholic family where the parents are getting a divorce, the oldest son is an athlete who tells the family that he is anorexic, and the middle child, the other son, comes out to the family as gay (there are three children, the third one being a daughter).  Esposito discusses how the creation of ‘the other’ has been in comparison to whiteness.  This makes sense relating to the two episodes we viewed and what Lipstiz discusses with specific ethnic sitcoms.  However, when it comes to The Real O’Neals, I’m confused.  My confusion comes from the fact of what Diane Negra states as “Irishness is reliably, invariably, a form of whiteness” (Negra 1).  Being Irish is part of the norm.  One is not ‘other’ within the specific context of racial dynamics if Irishness is the dominant factor.  It’s not an anomaly anymore for Irish families to get divorced or to have a child come out as gay.  The show didn’t make any sense to me because, within the context of the historical moment, Irish people have nothing to negotiate.  As speaking from my own experience as someone with Irish ancestry, I’m specifically part of that whiteness dynamic.  I don’t need to negotiate anything when it comes to my ethnic background because I’m a White European American.  I couldn’t help but fin the show baffling and bizarre at the same time.  

Work Cited

Esposito, Jennifer. "What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty?: An Analysis of Privilege and Postracial(?) Representations on a Television Sitcom." Television & New Media, vol. 10, no. 6, 2009, pp. 521-535.

Negra, Diane.  The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture.  Duke University Press, 2006.  

               

Core Post 1, Week 8 – Race and Class within Ethnicities

This is my first time posting on this blog and it was because I chose to wait to write about the topics that resonated with me deeply. This week’s readings were one of those times where every word and every concept noted struck a chord in me, as a television audience member and a potential researcher. Amongst the multitude of ideas introduced, rehashed and intensely discussed in the three readings, the one sentence that stuck was by Christine Acham. While elaborating on the merits and pitfalls of the Cosby Show, one of the conclusions she extracts is that ‘…although The Cosby Show seemingly broaches questions of race and class, the conclusions drawn in the episode indicate an unwillingness to challenge the conservative dialogue on race, suggesting that one's class status is solely a matter of individual choice rather than the result of a systemic problem’ (Acham, 2013, pp. 109).

As an audience member of both US and Indian television shows, this statement threw light on a stark similarity in the content of television programming between both industries. Even though Acham is talking specifically about the Cosby show, which aired in the late 70s and 80s, I have observed similar notions of class status in the shows I have seen today. Star Trek: Discovery features an African-American character in the lead, where even though they do not factor in her race in her character storyline, it throws subtle hints to it by changing it to being a human raised by Vulcans. She’s an anomaly, who has to work extra hard to achieve even some sense of recognition amongst those she considers her peer group, as well as her ‘family’. And on a similar front, the now defunct Indian soap drama Saat Phere (7 Rounds) focused on the trials and tribulations of a dark-skinned girl who only manages to climb the societal ladder, as well as make a mark for herself within her family spectrum, by marrying a rich, handsome, fair-skinned widower. Her happy ending kept aside, she is constantly told that her insignificance and her success is hindered because of her dark skin. It just goes to show that within local ethnic representation, the discourses of race and class are still prevalent, whether they are in hidden references or in blatant statements.

This brings me to the similarities I observed in the Esposito and Gray readings. Each of these essays has starkly different foundations for their analysis, but the number of similarities in their conclusions is astounding. Esposito’s discussion on color-blindness, postracial content, how ‘race’ matters and the stereotypes perpetuated for the Latino/a culture in television shows references to my above discussion. Additionally, the stereotypes mentioned reminded me of the Hulu show ‘East Los High’, where I remember watching all these ‘cliches’ in action. Finally, Gray’s analysis of the television market is reflective of the upheaval in today’s television industry, where the introduction of streaming platforms has caused a major change in how television networks have to keep up with a more aware audience, in terms of content, representation, and airing strategy.

Core Post, Week 8

One of the terms that stood out to me in the Esposito article is “Hollywood as ethnographer.” Contrasting the term Ugly Betty proves the cultural link between television and the viewer; the apparent interaction with brown bodies on screen, representation of immigrants, illegal or otherwise. I think this is a good lens to view a show like Fresh Off the Boat and the inherent issues that surround its exposition. While there’s now an Asian American narrative on network television, the comedic slant used in the show not only stereotypes Asian American culture but links racial difference with sloppy comedy. This connects to Esposito’s mention of comedy’s use of stereotypes via Stephen Neale and Frank Krutnik, “It is hardly surprising that comedy often perpetuates prejudice, or draws uncritically on racist and sexist stereotypes, since they provide a ready-made set of images of deviation from social and cultural norms.” As one of the few depictions of a Chinese American family on television, Fresh Off the Boat does act as a sort of ethnography for viewers; it offers a glimpse into the dynamics of first generation Americans and their subsequent assimilation into the culture. Similar to sitcoms that we’ve seen like Life with Luigi, Mama, or The Goldbergs, the show uses the characters’ ethnic backgrounds as a narrative springboard for episodic themes. Although the show is far from the approach done by The Cosby Show, the discursive construction of characters like Jessica are ultimately superficial, reinforcing stereotypical characterization in the guise of comedy.

Coupling Acham and Esposito’s arguments highlights some of the narrative tropes seen in popular network shows like Grey’s Anatomy. Season one of the show featured several ethnic, minority characters and like The Cosby Show, particularly African American professionals. However, race was rarely discussed despite the overt diverse casting that centered around a majority white cast. What’s interesting is the primetime attention that seems to be paid to shows with racial structures that adhere to “positive” images of African Americans. With “Shondaland” now consisting of three shows on Thursday nights, it’d be interesting to explore the dynamics of race that now encompasses network television.

Goatees — a non-core post

With the current lull of new TV, my partner and I have been catching up on Star Trek: Discovery. We just got to episode 10, "Despite Yourself." The crew finds themselves in an alternative dimension filled with... evil versions of themselves. It's a clear reference to Mirror, Mirror — the Empire's logo is similar, everyone carries daggers, and, yes, there is an evil Vulcan with a goatee. 

I found it fascinating because I was flipping out at the comparisons the whole time, thinking about continuity between the universes, about what it meant that only some of the audience will get the reference, and, combined with the readings this week, the role that economics probably played in the decision.

Core post #2

As previous posters have noted, this week’s readings each examine television’s ways of “representing” race in terms of broader industrial, cultural, and ideological contexts. Acham contextualizes The Cosby Show’s assimilationist narratives within Bill Cosby’s larger career and refusal to engage with the social realities of race, as well as within larger Reaganite policies of social program cutbacks and discourses of bootstrapping, and the show’ valorization by proponents of such policies and discourses. Gray, meanwhile, trains his lens on the broader proliferation of black-oriented sitcoms in the 1980s which The Cosby Show helped to catalyze. While underwritten to some extent by cultural shifts, Gray argues that this proliferation was fueled largely by economic incentives. In an era of increased market competition, black audiences became a key demographic for the big three networks—not just because “narrowcasting” was on the rise, but also because black households were less likely to have access to the networks’ competitors: cable and VCRs.

Finally, Esposito demonstrates how even when seeming to foreground race, a show like Ugly Betty might favor of an ideology of meritocracy and colorblindness which occludes the fact of white privilege and systemic racism. And this brings me to Fresh off the Boat.

I enjoy Fresh off the Boat. I’ve only seen a handful of episodes, but the writing is clever and the joke execution is often genuinely funny. And like Black-ish, the show deserves recognition for the ways in which it, unlike, for example, The Cosby Show, foregrounds issues of race and class, constructing a family of characters with distinct points of view through whom we get to see larger social and cultural discourses rehearsed. There are, I think, myriad reasons to take issue with Newcomb and Hirsch’s model of television as a cultural forum, but Fresh of the Boat does model a kind of forum action that, with the show’s very title and the sort of narrative content we see in an episode like “So Chineez,” might seem to refute the kinds of colorblind discourses Esposito unpacks in her analysis of Ugly Betty.

Yet, I worry that this (or other) series’ discursive problematization of race and class might also be accompanied by affirmations of meritocratic or colorblind ideological positions. Again, I’ve only seen a few episodes, so I’m not going on much. But already, “So Chineez” points to potential lines of critique. The episode opens with voiceover narration from adult Eddie making a series of assertions about the family’s success in “settling into Orlando”: Eddie has become his school’s “first black president” (this rather jarring joke plays off of the series’ broader mode of making Eddie’s appropriation of black popular culture central to his character); his dad, Louis, has “put the restaurant on the map”; and his mom, Jessica, is “assimilating like a fiend.” The A-plot goes on to coalesce around Jessica’s identity crisis in response to a white couple’s remark that they view the Huang family as “regular old Americans.” While there’s more to unpack in how this crisis plays out, the opening voiceover has already made clear the social mechanisms that might “merit” such a remark: Eddie has assimilated by becoming an expert in the dominant culture’s own modes of appropriation; Louis’s entrepreneurial success has earned the family a slice of the bourgeois pie (and, by extension, access to some of the affordances of white privilege); and Jessica’s proficiency in gabbing about Melrose Place further buys them purchase into the “colorblind” meritocracy.

As with Esposito’s discussion of implicit forms of "nepotism" in the Ugly Betty episode she analyzes, we can say that “So Chineez” represents mechanisms of white privilege—grandiosely emplaced in the narrative site of the country club, for example—but it doesn’t articulate the structural mechanisms that make this privilege inaccessible to “othered” bodies and social groups at the level of broader reality. Rather, it narrativizes assimilation as a fraught choice, but a choice nonetheless. Jessica can embrace Melrose Place, or she can forsake it and send her children to Chinese school, or, preferably, she can, by the end of the episode, strike a position of negotiation or “hybridity,” reaffirming her love of the ease of preparing mac ‘n cheese while also rewarding Eddie for his affirmation of his Chinese heritage. In an era in which “identity politics” are buzzy on various ends of the ideological spectrum, perhaps we’ll continue to get ever more sophisticated shows that attempt to navigate terrains of “difference.” My concern is that because the economic and narrative imperatives of television demand resolution, these shows will develop ever more sophisticated terms for evading issues of structural power and oppression.

Core post #5 --- Betty, la fea

I think that this week’s readings are useful for thinking about race as something being represented and constructed by media. In this sense, I very much liked Acham’s point that even if Cosby didn’t want to acknowledge race heads on, the show was still a political product being ideologically used by others to legitimize their agendas. We also know from last week’s readings that the show didn’t do much for blacks or whites but rather reified racial stereotypes. Similarly, I obviously enjoyed Gray’s article because he focuses on the institutional character of commercial TV, approaching it by looking at its political economy and technology.

However, this post is mostly about Esposito’s text. I overall liked it and appreciated the general discussion on notions such as race, “color-blindness”, postracial, etc. I particularly liked her mention of how even the construct of diversity is taken for granted in analyses, and that by remaining unproblematized it contributes to the naturalization of differences.

But, I have to say, after that wonderful discussion on race and a more-than-interesting analysis of the Ugly Betty episode, I was profoundly disappointed that the origins of the show weren’t mentioned at least in one short sentence. “Ugly Betty” is actually an adaptation of the Colombian show “Betty, la fea”, which aired from 1999-2001 in most parts of South America. See here:

(interestingly, the intro song is an old tango popularized by Tita Merello, the most famous female tango singer in the 1950s in Argentina, which also talks about a woman who’s ugly but that, despite that, she still makes do with what God gave her)

I have never watched Ugly Betty but I remember watching some episodes of the original show when I was in elementary school. In Argentina and in Colombia, the show generated enthusiasm because it was presented as progressive and non-discriminatory. This of course was a blatant lie dressed as a PR spin because the show reified all possible gender stereotypes and constructions: the pretty blond assistant was dumb and incapable of performing well, the male boss was a chronic cheater and asserted its power by shouting orders, the ugly and clumsy character was hard working and capable, constantly engaged in humorous self-deprecation, among others. More importantly, as you can catch in the beginning of the video, everybody in the audience was waiting for Betty to turn pretty, because everybody knew that that was going to happen eventually and that she’d end up with the boss then. Normalization 101.

So why am I upset then? I know that Esposito’s point in the article is to demonstrate that popular discourses in the media not only silence racial privilege but help reify notions of race, of which Ugly Betty becomes a case example. And I don’t just want to drop the “cultural appropriation” accusation and leave it there. But, as a cultural product that was created by “brown people” for “brown people” where gender and not race was the main variable (in its original context, this show didn’t oppose “Latinness” against white normalcy) and that, although deeply problematic, was extremely popular and exported to other Latam countries, I find that not acknowledging this origin, even in passing, is problematic. 

Core Response 4

This week’s readings offer contextual approaches to representation on television, and to varying degrees address the limits of textual analysis as a means of understanding the representational power of the televisual apparatus. I am drawn to these contextual approaches to representation; in Film Theory last semester, I examined the apparatus of representation as related to Blackness in American film, but I only considered television tangentially, and exclusively through the lens of a cinematic apparatus of representation. In scrutinizing the industrial and political contexts of The Cosby Show, other black-oriented sitcoms in the eighties and nineties, and Ugly Betty, Acham, Gray, and Esposito signal certain traits of the televisual apparatus that render television as a unique battleground for questions of representation.

Gray explores the positioning of network television in the media landscape of the 1980s in order to dispel the notion that the rise of black-oriented shows at the time was “driven by sudden cultural interest in black matters or some noble aesthetic goals on the part of executives in all phases of the industry” (68). Instead, he attributes the proliferation of these programs to a series of industrial shifts and financially-motivated decisions on the part of networks, who recognized that black audiences watched TV at higher rates than other demographics, were concentrated in network-dominated urban markets, and were purchasing VCRs and cable at lower rates (67). I was reminded of a scene from Mad Men in which Pete Campbell attempts to pitch an ad campaign targeting black audiences to a pair of white television manufacturing executives (clip below). A “cultural interest in black matters” motivated neither Pete nor network executives in the 1980s. Gray’s compelling analysis of the contexts from which these programs emerged suggests that the representational capacity of the televisual apparatus can be more effectively understood through historical/economic approaches than through textual analysis.

Acham and Esposito incorporate textual analysis into more historical frameworks. Acham situates The Cosby Show within the individualist narratives of Reaganomics and Cosby’s own “fantasy of post-racial harmony” (110). Esposito argues that an episode of Ugly Betty that focuses on affirmative action stages a discourse between the postracial imaginary that emerged after the 2008 presidential election and the reality of systemic and structural racism. She makes a case for a historicized, embedded form of textual analysis: “Textual analyses…that examine relations and discursive practices within popular culture texts…confront ways particular conceptions of race are created and sustained. These discursive constructions of race are always structured within particular historical, political, and economic moments” (525).

Gray, Acham and Esposito move away from what Richard Dyer calls “images of” studies that focus on representations themselves, and instead prioritize the contexts and mechanisms through which representations are constructed and propagate. Their work makes me wonder whether television – being episodic, increasingly auteurist, and somewhat interactive – might be the ideal medium through which to analyze representation. As programs air over years or decades, an abundance of “relations and discursive practices” emerge (network/creative changes, advertising strategies, platform shifts, etc) that can be read against “particular historical, political, and economic moments.” “So Chineez” and “Lemons” could be read as individual texts, or singular “representations” of race in the United States, but to consider these episodes in relation to each other, and ABC’s entire slate of 30-minute comedies, and their respective pre- and post-2016 election settings, and their production histories creates a rich contextual landscape in which to situate their representations of race, made possible by the particularities of the televisual apparatus.