Core Post #4

My first impression of Banet-Weiser’s essay was that there is something troubling about her general approach to charting a shift in media representation during what she calls the beginning of postracial and postfeminist discourse. In the second half of her argument, she settles on a rather questionable example to support her claims that representation in TV has followed the transition from the niche-centric market structure towards a global postracial/postfeminist audience. By comparing Nickelodeon’s Dora the Explorer (a show is targeted to preschoolers) to The Cosby Show and a greater history of ethnic TV of the 80s and 90s, she shifts her focus away from a broad demographic to an audience made up entirely of children ages 2-5. Thus, by choosing a network of such a comparatively smaller niche market, she struggles to validate her claim that TV may become less reliant on the niche structure. She merely shifts from one niche to another and provides no evidence for similar modes of representation occurring in other age groups (she even mentions that kid’s TV has “typically been more diverse than prime-time television” [218]). Furthermore, by using this example, her attempt to say something broader about the evolution of the market and “consumer citizenship” is troubled by the fact that Dora’s actual audience is hardly participating in its own market, at least compared to the adult audiences that watched The Cosby Show. The difference is between programs that are chosen as forms of entertainment, as in the latter case, and content that is imposed by parents or producers, as with Dora, which, although it may not be all that different in the end, is still something to consider.

  

Aside from these questions, I am thinking about today’s television, in which there certainly still are niche programs, as well as more universal products, which can exemplify both the ambivalent and the specific categories of identity that Banet-Weiser talks about. She, like the other scholars for this week, is concerned that images of empowerment have replaced the need for feminist and racial discourses. In the postfeminist and urban TV program, the ethnic and the feminine traits are positive, universally accepted, and “cool.” She argues that the diverse world of Dora acts ignorant of persistent racism and sexism, and that it frames “dominant stereotypes” in a way that is “made palatable for a media audience” of both whites and Latinos alike (222). I’m not sure what the alternative would be for a program like Dora, considering that the complexity of social concepts relevant to a preschooler is severely limited, but perhaps in a better example, one could begin to accept her argument. Today, the theme of “empowerment“—driven by consumer culture—certainly continues to wash over platforms that could have the potential for more specific forms of representation. For example, two of the recent superhero blockbusters—Black Panther and Wonder Woman­­—are in a sense guilty of just that. But on the same terrain, a film like Get Out does the opposite by addressing historical struggles of race without any concern for isolating a white audience.