Peripheral Post 3 Ursula

 As many of the others who have posted here, I found Esposito's article on Ugly Betty a clear and interesting, though occasionally redundant, application of theory. A complexity I would love to see addressed is the fact that ABC's Ugly Betty is an international adaption of a Columbian telenovela. It seems as though there may be additional insights into how American media specifically deals with race by acknowledging the US version as a remake with a multitude of international versions to compare and contrast.

Supplemental Post #3 - Lilla

 Both the Gray and the Han readings talk about narrowcasting and niche audiences, practices that on a surface level, I would normally find counterintuitive. Why focus on a specific demographic that only constitutes a fraction of your viewership? At the same time, the Han reading also points out the issue with choosing a niche audience that isn't niche enough, and how the attempt to cater to a pan-Asian American audience led to disjointed programming that interested very few.

This got me thinking about ensemble shows with multiracial casts. Are these written for a white audience by default? How often are they white savior narratives? How often do non-white characters embody a select few, that don't represent the average experience of those communities? How often, even in true ensemble shows, are BIPOC relegated to sidekicks and secondary characters? And is it possible to truly create an ensemble show that caters to people from all racial backgrounds?

Admittedly, I'm not a TV person, so the only show I could think of off the top of my head was This Is Us. I only watched the first season of the show, and it was around the time it came out in 2016, but I do remember discourse around show centering on how This Is Us would finally unite Black and White viewers alike. Again, only having seen the first season, it somewhat felt like a white savior show that reduced its Black protagonist's storyline to a clichéd sob story (admitted, the entire show is a clichéd sob story). The show is intended to be about average people, but nothing about it felt average. It felt contrived, overtly aware of its aim to unite. 

And I think contrived is the key word here. It was an issue with ImaginAsian, and it is an issue with shows that aim to check all racial boxes. When you try to get everyone, you get no one, and that highlights the importance of narrowcasting to me.

Core Response #3 – Max Berwald

“After acquiring the network, Tisch and his advisers set about streamlining, downsizing, and reorganizing all the major divisions at CBS. The frenzy and uncertainty of this activity produced greater fear, suspicion, and public fights, especially in the news division (Auletta 1991; Du Brow 1990; Powell and Alter 1986). (This was the volatile and unstable climate in which the innovative Frank’s Place appeared in the CBS schedule. In this climate, the show proceeded to get lost in the shifting network schedule, where it found little stability or support, and was ultimately cancelled because of poor ratings.)” (Gray, 64) 

It could be because I’m green in industry studies and still figuring out what the bedrock claims are in that subfield, but for me the most provocative moment in the Gray article is the quick parenthetical above. Later in the article, Gray concludes:

“The recognition and engagement with blackness were not for a moment driven by sudden cultural interest in black matters or some noble aesthetic goals on the part of executives in all phases of the industry. In large part they were driven, as most things are in network television, by economics.” (Gray, 68)

Fair enough! And this is what I would assume. But what the parenthetical moment regarding Frank’s Place reveals is that corporations are not necessarily themselves hyper-rational actors that (1) know what is economically in their interest, or (2) mechanically pursue what is in their economic interest. Rather, corporations can more or less overnight become sites of struggle between different self-interested actors, and the resulting struggles can produce media texts that are not perfectly calculated to organize an audience. Over and beyond this possibility for (and I would say the likelihood of) dysfunction, as Gray’s description of a 1980s transition from a lavish corporate culture of “expense accounts, opulent offices, and extravagant parties” to something less expensive illustrates, corporations are also cultural formations. (64–65) 

The legal status of corporations can make this harder to see but it seems important, again because it indicates that we should exercise caution in thinking that a given community or ethnic group can be or has been effectively hailed (organized) on the basis of some cold, calculating, capitalist logic which, having smelled the potential for profit, hunts it out as a matter of course.  

The Han article describes an interesting species of corporate cultural mistake. ImaginAsia believed that on the basis of 1990s “Asian Cool” they would be able to organize, in one fell swoop, both a sizable Asian American audience and an audience of non-Asian Americans with an interest in “Asian culture.” Unfortunately, the fact that non-Asian Americans displayed an interest in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Iron Chef did not mean that there was a stable, knowable formation underlying the same, ready and waiting to be exploited by rational capitalists. (Crouching Tiger is actually a great example. The film itself assembles a sort of unstable, transnational, diasporic Chinese identity, and in the following decades attempts to reproduce its success have met with very checkered results. To me, this suggests that while a given formation may have great appeal there's no guarantee that it is a stable formation that will be ready and waiting when, say, a corporate network goes looking for it.) As it turned out, not even the Asian American audience (which would seem to be the first step in this plan) was sufficiently stable to support ImaginAsia’s designs. 

Core Response #1! - Dan Hawkins 9PM

 

Core Response #1

            The televisual and entertainment landscape is extremely different now than the publication of Gray’s book Watching Race, and obviously the trends he identified are only more pronounced – corporate entertainment structures increasingly see non-white audiences as profitable reserves. I’m still interested in the way representation is commodified and sold to a hungry audience. The way Gray ends his essay, “television programmers… generate profits by identifying and packaging our dominant social and cultural moods” (177), shows a clear consideration of these products as wholly transactional: black, ethnic, and LGBTQ+ representation is a demand that the industry will mechanically supply. My main question is therefore: in an era even more corporatized than ever, what distinguishes the creative from the corporate? By this I mean, in a media environment that is both more corporate and more diverse than it has ever been before, is the value of representation diminished by the cynicism with which it is created? Gray, I think, ultimately argues that corporate programming is merely reflective of an existing cultural demand, the “mood,” but I wish the reading was a little more critical of the products themselves. I suppose I’m just a little underwhelmed with the evaluation that mainstream, corporate producers react to dominant cultural demand, because that seems to be a little less than revelatory of a conclusion.

I hesitate before my other question, which is: does commodified representation diminish its own value? I cringe at the word pandering, because it’s so loaded with a conservative connotation. However, I also think about Call of Duty – Black Ops: Cold War, which allows the player to select their body type independently of their pronouns and includes gender-neutral options -- a realistic-looking Ronald Reagan will refer to the player-character using their preferred pronouns in between missions of committing war crimes and international violence. There’s an extreme incongruity between the textual significance of Call of Duty’s conservative politics and the inclusive representation it affords the player. On the other hand, almost every day on social media I read about how corporate media’s representation is meaningful to a lot of people – fans of The Sims fighting for the game to include more diverse skin tone and hair options of their characters, for example. I guess, the question Gray’s essay left me with was: If there is not an inherent relationship between economic motivation and the positive quality of representation, what distinguishes this understanding of media as production from any other form of corporate production?

Reading over this, I’m afraid I’ve made no sense in an almost profoundly terrible way, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

Core Response #3 - Andrea

Of the readings this week, I gravitated towards Jennifer Esposito's close analysis of Ugly Betty the most as I felt it very clearly and straightforwardly put theory to practice. In Esposito's analysis, the author critiques concepts like “color-blindness” and “post-racial society” for further obscuring racial inequities embedded in institutions like popular culture. Particularly, Esposito emphasizes that this blindness towards racial hierarchies leads to the damaging proliferation of hegemonic ideology, which in turn supports the ruling class ideology (that of white, wealthy, men). While the first half of the article seems like a standard (dare I say basic? rudimentary?) run-through of concepts from critical race theory, putting the article into its historical context helps me understand why it might have been necessary to explicitly and repeatedly call out color-blindness in a “post-racial,” Obama-era America. 

In addition to acknowledging the ways media texts reify “difference” (and therefore, racial stereotypes) through the representations of marginalized/racialized bodies, Esposito also highlights the ways media texts open up audiences to contradictory depictions of race through representations of racialized “others.” While citing Coco Fusco, Esposito writes, “contradictory representations of cultural and racial difference exist to represent anxieties about identity as we, as a society, experience a shift in borders,” leading into a deconstruction of the ways Ugly Betty both critiques and reifies race, particularly relating the discussion to Betty’s experience with affirmative action as a Latina woman (525). I found this discussion of tension and contradiction a nice tie-in with many of our prior discussions in class, especially the ways media encourages and discourages audiences to pry open the cracks within these depictions of gender, race, and class. The writings build off of our lingering question of whether a critical analysis of these representations is encouraged by the media-makers themselves, or whether shows are more concerned with selling us the idea of analysis without actually providing a critical response to social issues. 

I believe that Esposito’s article, particularly her critique of individualistic meritocracy, speaks to this larger theme of neoliberalism that the Herman Gray essay hits on in regards to the packaging of Black culture to Black audiences to maintain profits. Both readings made me think about the ways even social issues are adopted by media texts not out of a sense of responsibility necessarily, but in the words of Gray for television to “negotiate and renegotiate, package and repackage, circulate and recirculate this common sense” (58). It is in this cultural molding of a Gramscian understanding of “common sense” that neoliberal media packages racial struggle while enabling and normalizing racial hierarchies. 

Core Response #3_Ann

Although the readings this week were written in different times—Gray’s in the 90s, Esposito’s in 2009, and Han’s in 2018—they do share similar concerns with race and an inquisitive lens towards television as a medium of representation and a participant of (mostly economic and institutional) hegemony. Gray’s piece, despite being the earliest text, actually gives us a detailed account of television’s shift from network to cable and how this shift reshaped the programming and packaging of race on television. Gray was very clear and conscious that this shift towards more African American programmings on television happened in an environment where “neoconservatives” assault “liberal permissiveness” on television and in popular culture (60). This consciousness allows Gray to point out the proliferation of niche black programming as a result of economic concerns, not institutional change. The networks had to make themselves more competitive in their programming to gain viewership in a post-network environment. Gray writes, “In the end, black programs and the audiences they could deliver were worth the risk because black audiences often have fewer options and therefore depend on commercial television for their primary programming choices” (68). This statement speaks directly to the institutional racism embedded in the US and how it contributed to the development of racial programming, yet at the same time, the networks turned a rather blind eye towards the actual racism in the society. This connection between monetary gain and racial programming can also be seen in Han’s article where he points out that “the increasing spending power of Asian American consumers was a major driving force behind the launch of ImaginAsian TV” (278). 

In my opinion, it is only with this consciousness about minority groups’ economic value in mind that we can move towards a negotiated discussion of television featuring people of color. Among these three authors, I feel like Esposito touches more on the discursive meanings of television by citing Stuart Hall’s theory of representation. She writes: “according to Hall, representations are constitutive, not just reflexive. Thus, representations do not just reflect already determined meanings. Instead, they help contribute to discursive understandings” (524). In some ways, this discussion brings me back to the week on Newcomb and Hirsch and Gitlin. Hall’s understanding of representation leans towards Newcomb and Hirsch’s “cultural forum” and towards his own idea of negotiated decoding. However, in the meantime, Esposito’s brilliant analysis of Ugly Betty demonstrates that representation does not equal diversity. She directs our attention to the “construct of diversity” that researchers often take for granted by writing: “we are taking for granted meanings about race and difference. Before we can declare that race either does or does not matter, we must first investigate the construct of difference and the ways it becomes structured in lived experiences and mediated texts” (532). Esposito’s writing ties nicely with the need of our current media climate where there is a (comparatively) proliferation of minority representations in the media but the audience is not encouraged to look behind their mere images on screen. Are these representations there to promote a genuine understanding of different cultures and racial struggles, or are they there simply for monetary gain and to uphold the already-in-place hegemony? 

This, again, brings me back to Gitlin and his poignant and still relevant awareness of hegemony. Of course, our discussion of race this week has exceeded the complexity of Gitlin’s piece and the time it was written. However, this kind of awareness and a call for awareness in Gitlin’s piece is still pertinent in today’s climate. Gitlin mentions, in the 70s, television “harmonizes with the industrialization of time” (255). In some way, this week’s readings are calling our attention to “the industrialization of race” which started with economic reasons (Gray’s piece) and is still confined within the dominant hegemony (Esposito’s and Han’s pieces). As pessimistic as it sounds, I do think the first step towards an understanding of, in Esposito’s terms, the “construct of diversity” lies in the realization that representation is not just an image, but a whole system of encoding and decoding. 

Lastly, on a somewhat discursive note, I’m really interested in the relationship between women of color and television programs today. This is sparked by Han’s piece and his mentioning of regional television catered towards local Asian households. I wonder how many of those programs are watched by women? We’ve been talking about white women’s (mostly housewives’) relationship with television sets but Asian women—being mostly immigrants and have to work to support their family—do not have the privilege of being at home all day. As a result, I’m highly interested in researches done on women of color and their relationship to television watching. 

Supplemental Response #2- Georgina Gonsalves- Race + Ethnicity

Response to Gray's The Transformation of the television Industry and the Social Production of Blackness

 I especially responded to this reading because I remember growing up watching The Cosby Show, Family Matters, Fresh Prince of BelAir, and other shows mentioned in this analysis. I found it interesting that the very things that made me love these shows for their honesty and speaking of hard topics such as racism and sexism are the same things that made them more successful and prominent in network programming, and that those that did not evolve were no longer profitable or popular. 

I remember watching these shows and episodes of these beloved characters facing racism, these shows helped me learn how to respond to racism and sexism, as a girl in a Mexican family, I always resonated with these episodes and I loved the content of shows like these. I always appreciated how real they were with the audience and that they talked about the things that people are afraid to talk about. In a way, shows like these helped raise me growing up. As Gray says, "most of these shows were set in domestic spaces- the home, and within the family, where they reinforced values of individualism, responsibility, and morality." These were the values that they taught me as a kid watching and it really helped give me a core sense of pride in my ethnicity and my moral values. These shows really helped shape me. Though this was the positive, multicultural content for many networks, many neoconservatives continued to negatively portray blacks and refused to include shows like these in their programming, ridding them of relevance and profits. 

I think that positive representations of blacks and other minorities is essential for the proliferation of programming networks, as proven in Gray's analysis.  It is not only essential for successful programming, but it also increases societal representation; representation without stereotype where we all can see ourselves as the hero. 

Core Response #2- Georgina Gonsalves- Ethnicity + Race

 In Esposito's "What does Race have to do with Ugly Betty?", Esposito went deep into analysis about the idea of race versus 'color-blindness' and how being blind to race is more detrimental to society than to simply address that race does in fact matter. 

As some believe that race shouldn't matter at all, it really does matter in terms of one's foundation, opportunities, adversities, and how one is seen and treated in the world. A key argument made by Applebaum (2005) in Esposito's analysis was that meritocracy "places blame on the marginalized for any failure to achieve." This brings attention to the harm this causes to the marginalized groups. In truth, race affects so many significant areas of basic living that to say it does not matter even further oppresses those who are marginalized by making it seem as if it is their own fault for being in the position that they are. The idea that "anyone can succeed if you work hard enough" is not true for everyone. For example, a white, upper-class male and Latina lower-class woman would not have the same opportunities, experiences, and initial foundation in life, not to mention any racism or sexism the female may have to endure that the white male will never encounter because of his privilege. The idea of meritocracy is harmful because though the Latina female would have to work harder, solely because of her sex and ethnicity she is born with, she will likely face many more obstacles and then be responsible for her own success or failure. In simpler terms, one hand is dealt privilege, while the other is dealt systemic and institutionalized oppression, the ability to succeed or not to succeed is their own fault, regardless of the uneven playing field. It is simply unfair, which is why race matters. As quoted by Omi & Winant in the analysis, "race is a matter of social structure and cultural representation". By relying on 'color-blindness', we would be supporting the discourse of meritocracy and further oppressing the marginalized.

In the episode of Ugly Betty that Esposito analyzes, this is exactly what happens to Betty as she is told she only got a position due to Affirmative Action. I found this very offensive and upsetting that Betty had to face such harassment from Marc, but I found it even more infuriating that he victimized himself with his white-privilege as if it were an act of reverse-racism, then continued to compare his struggle as a gay man (in the fashion industry they are very much accepted), with her struggle of being a Latina woman from Queens who is trying to prove herself in an industry that already treats her inferiorly on a regular basis. This is frustrating because this is unfortunately something that is ever present in our society, struggles I myself have faced as a Latina woman from Stockton. 

I also really irked me that Daniel Meade was made to be the "White Savior" in this situation. What Esposito calls "The GreatWhite Hope", Daniel is the white man who is once again made to gain praise and superiority to simply exercise his white male privilege. 

In conclusion, Betty is a perfect example of meritocracy at work. Because she is handed a position over a white male, it is assumed it is only because of affirmative action, victimizing the already privileged white man, and further oppressing an already marginalized Latina woman, then 'saved' by a white man, falsely labeling him as a hero in society. 

Core Response #2 - Alexandria

I was surprised that Esposito had to do so much work throughout her article to argue that race and representation matters. I wasn’t aware that the discourse around TV and representation when it was published in 2009 had veered so far into a post-racial framework. But I think that the more interesting part of Esposito’s analysis was how Ugly Betty worked to center Marc’s whiteness, while othering Betty’s Latinaness, despite Betty being the main character, and I wish that part of the analysis was explained more fully. 

I found both the Gray and Han articles to be super interesting and helpful in terms of how media producers, companies and conglomerates work to both recognize and construct racialized audiences. It reminded me of Anamik Saha’s book Race and the Cultural Industries in which he argues that media industries actually work to construct race through segmented marketing strategies. Sometimes, as Gray’s analysis of black TV in the 1980s, they can effectively “construct and produce” an audience, and other times, as in the Han article, they fail to do so. ImaginAsian Entertainment was not able to attract their desired audience because they “used English as a marker of transnational Asian American cultural identity and programming strategy” (287). 

Gray’s argument “the sensibilities, choices, and habits of black audiences were becoming far more central to the look, rhythm, and feel of commercial television” in the 1980s reminded me of Ariel Stevenson’s talk last week about viral phrases and dances created by black teens on Vine and TikTok. Stevenson argued participation in the Internet currently requires heavy reliance on black cultural logics. I think Stevenson’s line of thinking has more to do with how black diasporic traditions can operate and spread as a cultural contagion within systems that continue to systematically exploit black people, whereas the state of TV in the 80s seems like something slightly different. Gray says that it was much more about an investment in a black audience out of economic necessity, a realization that many black audiences had not migrated to VCR and cable as white audiences had. I’m still trying to unpack some of the differences between these two examples, but I am really interested in scholarship that identifies when a specific medium begins to be characterized by black cultural logics.

Jensen Core Response #3

The articles this week covered the cultural, sociopolitical, and economic role which race plays in the television industry. To start, the Gray reading analyzed how black audiences and images were used by television networks to improve their financial gains. Gray situates this study within the 1980s and relates how black popular culture (music, fashion, etc.) influenced the success of various shows at this time (such as The Cosby Show and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air). The author ultimately concludes that it is important to note that the network’s engagement with blackness was not due to “cultural interest in black matters or some noble aesthetic goals,” but rather was entirely due to the economic successes these shows were bringing in. 

Next, the Han reading discussed the rise and fall of the television network ImaginAsian, a channel which attempted to target Asian-American audiences. Ultimately, Han argues that the network failed due to a misunderstanding of Asian identity, mistakenly used the English language in their programming, and missed the crucial audience of second-generation English-speaking Asian people. I thought Han’s comparison of ImaginAsian to Latinx television was particularly interesting due to the role language played in the failure of the former, with Asian populations speaking a wide variety of languages meanwhile Latinx populations share the common heritage of the Spanish language. 

Of the three articles, I found the Esposito article particularly thought-provoking. The author breaks down a particular episode of the show Ugly Betty and analyzes the complex racial issues present. Esposito describes a “post-racial” society where decisions are not made on account of race, and argues that America is not a post-racial society therefore the issues surrounding meritocracy and affirmative action still need to be discussed. The author goes on to describe how racial categories have been institutionalized and how meritocracy does not take into account privilege/unequal footing. While, personally, I felt the definition of “meritocracy” used was a bit skewed, overall I thought the arguments presented in the piece were well articulated.

Core Response 1 - Sabina

The readings for this week made one thing clear: there is no longer a need for “representation”, at least not the “representation” that upholds the hegemonic powers being forced onto us now. As Jess Butler notes in “For White Girls Only?” and Jennifer Esposito notes in “What Does Race Have to Do With Ugly Betty?”, much of the conversation around race and ethnicity centers whiteness. If we aren’t talking about a white subject, we are making the white viewer/reader more comfortable by neutralizing the “other”. What I mean by this is that often television uses “non-threatening” racially ambiguous, mixed, light-skin, or straight up white actors and position them as “exotic” and “American” In Butler’s piece, they label Jennifer Lopez (white latina who appropriated Blackness to get her fame and racialized in the US as “latina”) and the Kardashians (white Armenian women) as “women of color”. Jennifer Lopez is visibly “Latina”, yes, but what does that even mean? Twitter user gatx_negrx explains: 

“The discourse we have now about race actually wouldn't work when JLo was on the come up. She was racialized as “Latina”. Proximity to whiteness confirmed, for sure, but even in her rom-com, she was always some strange ambiguous exotic beautiful non white woman of some color. She embodied a white supremacist ideal for what a Latina could look and had to look like in order to be on screen. She was still not white. No one internalized her as such. I’m not saying this to say she doesn’t possess privileges because of her proximity but to remind ourselves that race is a process that is done to us, not a static fact, dependent on context space and history.” 

Here, gatx_nergx explains that racialization changes over time, and in the US context at that start of her popularity, J.Lo was “not white”, but “Latina”. They also explain that this same rationale would not stand today, alluding to whiteness JLo has possessed all along. Why is the American Latinx community so averse to claiming whiteness? Further, what defines “brownness”? Why is American Latinidad obsessed with “Brown representation”? Who does this benefit? If we keep centering Mexican/Mexican-American stories in the discourse around “latinidad” and “brownness”, doesn’t that reproduce white supremacist logic that attempts to erase Blackness and indiginety from existence? I think some of these answers can be found in the ways television and media (de)racializes “latinidad” and props up ambiguous bodies with cultural signifiers (religion, Mexican conchas, language use, etc...). 

The following quote from Butler’s piece embodies some of the frustration I have with talks about “representation”: 

“Such containment does not just apply to black women: as Isabel Molina-Guzmán (2010) shows, mainstream media representations of Latina bodies as inherently exotic, foreign, and consumable work to affirm traditional notions of the United States as a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation (7). Thus, while postfeminism can and does make space for women of color within its boundaries, it strictly regulates and polices the forms their participation may take.” Butler, Jess (50)

Butler is correct in saying that postfeminism creates strict boundaries for women of color, obviously. However, Butler makes an important distinction between Black women and Latina women, but never considers their important overlap: Black Latina women. If we are going to break the analysis down into just “African-American” and “Latina”, you reproduce the same harm that you are warning against: “strictly regulating and policing the forms Black Latina’s may take” and upholding dominant white ideas of Latinidad. 

In “What Does Race Have to Do With Ugly Betty?”, Esposito gives an overview into how Betty Suarez “overcomes” her “looks, class, and race” (529) and explores how she is positioned as a racialized “other” in a world of whiteness (and Whilelmina). Her Mexicannes is described in great detail, her father’s immigration story used as another signifier of Brownness, and Marc’s whiteness is used to emphasize Betty’s non-whiteness. But Betty is a lightskin latina, making her easier to sell to American audiences. Same with her sister, Hilda Suarez (played by Ana Ortiz) and the rest of Betty’s family. The only person of a different RACE is Whilelmina Slater (Vanessa Williams), a Black woman. Now, this makes me wonder - where are the Black Latinas in Ugly Betty? How would Ugly Betty be different if her family was Black and Honduran instead of light and Mexican? 

We must question our conversation around “Latinidad”. I have no interest in stories that continue to reproduce violent stereotypes in the interest of white dominance, or stories that claim to be “representational” yet stick to the same tropes in casting, writing, and production. 

What does race have to do with Ugly Betty? Well, “latino” is not a race, so not much, but ethnicity sure does. 

Core Response #2- Rojeen

     In this week’s readings, I enjoyed Esposito’s piece on Ugly Betty for how it articulated the ways race is constructed and also neutralized through “colorblind” rhetoric, especially in the age of multiculturalism. With more representations on screen, there are still strategic ways in which white Western hegemony is upheld through TV, this episode being one of them. Esposito points out that this episode doesn’t interrogate Marc’s whiteness, but rather spotlights “what it means for Betty to be a Latina,” (530). Not only is the concept of whiteness and white privilege not explored, but the white savior trope is even offered as the equalizer for Betty’s success in the end of the episode. I guess it’s still hard to accept the concept of TV as a public forum or cultural forum when the nuanced issues presented are never fully explored or justly resolved. Esposito’s piece reminded me a lot of Hendershot’s analysis of Parks and Rec, where she argues that Parks and Rec isn’t balanced with a liberal and a conservative perspective as much as “it shows how opposing factions can communicate and collaborate," (Hendershot 208). Granted, I understand that the lack of taking an official stance is often a result of viewership and the network’s politics. But, my issue with presenting opposing factions when it comes to politicized issues is that these opposing factions, whether in Parks and Rec or Ugly Betty, often serve to maintain hegemonic powers. And, isn’t it because they aren’t fully explored or there isn’t a clear tilt towards a just or progressive aim, that hegemony is able to be maintained? So, in that case, don’t these episodes do little to challenge the order and instead preserve it? What good is representation if it doesn’t justly serve the interests of the communities it intends on representing? I also think there is some irony with Esposito’s mention of Obama to introduce the “post-racial” conversation, yet she doesn’t touch on his tenure in which he continued US imperialist/capitalist power. The ability to have a public or cultural forum without fully interrogating and resolving the issues at hand only reinforces that identity politics, whether in politics or within TV, rarely combat existing stereotypes or issues that impact marginalized communities, but rather serve to uphold the status quo. 

Core Response #3 - Kallan

I found it interesting that Gray takes a moment to explicitly note that the networks’ “recognition and engagement with blackness were not for a moment driven by sudden cultural interest in black matters or some noble aesthetic goals on the part of executives” and instead were driven by economics (68). The fact that TV executives are driven by economic rather than cultural or aesthetic aims seems to me to be a given, but perhaps readers in 1995 had different (less cynical) expectations of the industry so that Gray felt the need to state the obvious. If we wait for commercial television to put cultural and/or artistic goals ahead of economic interests in order to produce interesting television (to watch or to study), we will be waiting a long time. As we know and as Gray demonstrates, however, the economy does not operate in a cultural vacuum. Though most of the shows Gray mentions used Black TV-families to promote dominant conservative individualist values, there were rare exceptions, and the pressure to at least “acknowledge the complex and changing realities of race, gender (though not sexuality), and class in U.S. society” (61) opens up possibilities for negotiated readings. The social and cultural conditions that produced economic incentives to speak to Black audiences lead to television that should be approached with suspicion but did open “a discursive space…where black programs, stars, and audiences figured more centrally than ever before” (61).

In a way, Han’s case study of ImaginAsian Television offers an interesting counterexample. ImaginAsian TV was a failed attempt to construct an imagined Asian-American audience that was driven, in part, by the desire to improve representation and seems to have been borne out of a good-faith interest in exploring Asian-American life and culture. While Gray’s analysis suggests that networks were basically forced to finally address Black audiences, ImaginAsian TV took a top-down approach when they tried to construct an Asian-American audience based on their own ideas about what that meant. While this offers a rare exception to my sense that TV executives are never motivated by cultural interests (although Han also notes that increased spending power also played a key role), Hong and co. failed because they fundamentally misread and misconstructed their audience (as only “a transcultural second generation who share collective identity using the English language” (283)). Both pieces examine the construction of imagined audiences and highlight the fact that nobler intentions do not guarantee better outcomes.

Core Response #3 - Daniela

     Being that this is the designated week in which we are looking critically at race and ethnicity as represented on television, I found this week's readings very flat; leaving me wanting something a bit more critical. The Gray and Han readings, I felt, would have made more sense last week where we talked about TV + Audiences, especially considering the lack of discussion we had on race and class within those readings. I can't help but think about the moment in Esposito's article "What does race have to do with Ugly Betty" when they said, "Should a person of color speak of race, he or she is made to feel angry" (Esposito 523). With that being said, I want to focus my response this week on Esposito's piece and recognize that much of what I have to say comes from a place anger and frustration.

    I am obviously biased in my choice of readings to focus on this week because I am a first generation Mexican American.  Despite the fact that I rarely leave the house, I am reminded of this fact every day in my exchanges with my white roommate and even in conversations with my Mexican mother. Although I found Esposito's paper to be redundant at times, one point I am glad they made throughout their paper is the fact that as people of color, we are constantly being reminded of the fact that we are not white. Esposito does this by focusing their discussion on Ugly Betty around the concept of meritocracy, the belief that no matter a person's race or economic standing, one can "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and achieve the "American Dream". Whatever the hell that means anymore.  

     Television shows like Modern Family and really any network show where there are a handful of non-white persons drowning in a sea of white people have followed this idea that being an American is an equalizer (here I am also thinking about Han's argument) and that racial barriers don't exist. Esposito pointed to tropes on how Latinx, particularly Latinx women, are represented on screen. One particular stereotype that has negatively affected myself is the trope of the overly sexualized Latinx woman. Time and again from Carmen Miranda to Salma Hayek, I have been made to feel ugly, inferior, and a "Consuela" (the name is actually Consuelo but I guess Americans cannot handle that concept) or a frumpy maid because my breasts are not causing me major back pain. Not only are brown-skinned (i.e. unable to pass for white) Latinx people made to feel inferior because we are already outside of Western beauty standards: "defined as 'white, thin, upper-class, straight femininity'" (Esposito 527), but if we do not fit into "36-24-36" hot Latina stereotype, we simply fall outside the realm of respectability. Sometimes it feels like we are outside the realm of humanity. 

    I know this response seems less critical of the reading and a bit more of a tangent, but what I have been discussing comes from growing up with these shows being the only representations of Latinx people I had on screen. Even when wanting to escape into novelas, all I saw were gorgeous light skinned Mexicans throwing glass or themselves on screen. I remember watching La Fea Mas Bella (the orioginal Ugly Betty) and just being utterly disgusted at what was allowed to be seen as beautiful on screen. Even though it took place in Mexico, Letty (Mexican Betty) who is supposed to be seen as ugly was dressed in more traditional and conservative attire, while her beautiful foil Alicia had blond hair and a body that could rival Jessica Rabbit. The only acceptable form of beauty Mexican women could achieve seems to be a mix of whiteness tinged with exoticism. All throughout my life I was constantly reminded that I was outside of normality while those within it rarely if ever recognized their privilege of whiteness. Esposito ends her piece by arguing that "this construction was born out of this nation's discourses on race, which are contradictory and ask that we pretend not to see differences even though they have become part of national policies" (Esposito 532). Even as white and non-Black people had a reckoning over the summer wherein they realized racism is in fact real and there are hierarchies even within different shades of Black and brown, I can't help but worry that people will begin to sink back into the comfort they had and have built for themselves regarding race. Will I be writing about race until the day I die, instead of being the Spongebob scholar I dreamed of as a child? Yes. Not because I necessarily can't, but because to ignore the way race envelops my life would be a disservice to myself and to others.

Supplemental Post 2 - Sabrina Sonner

 Flow and Interruption in TikTok’s Brand of Interactivity

 

This is more in response to readings from weeks ago, but I got a TikTok about a month ago, and one of the things that stuck out most to me about the app compared to other social media I’m on is the way that an uninterrupted flow of posts reads differently when the content is video rather than text. The basic idea is similar to something like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, etc. where you see one post for as long as you want to see it and then move on, with the videos on TikTok looping until you swipe to the next one. But the effect of this uninterrupted video content of one looping video to swipe up or down or to the side into the next looping video, without any break unless the user chooses to pause something. The inactive state of TikTok is playing/active/stimulating/on, over the inactive state of a text post being more passive, something I can look away from etc. 

 

Similarly, the process of scrolling through TikTok feels more noticeably interrupted when I find videos I don’t like, see two seconds of them, swipe down, see two seconds of the next video, and so on and so forth with the effect being 5-10 clips of 1-2 seconds as I rush away from something I dislike towards something I’m looking for. I’m actively interrupting a video mid-sentence instead of swiping away when I lose interest in a Tumblr post. These interruptions of swiping away from a video, pausing a video, or even swiping to a profile away from the uninterrupted stream of videos all require user action. Though there are additional positive interactions with the app (comments, like, favorites, follows, etc.), compared to other social media more of my interactions here feel negatively motivated, like moving away from or stopping content. While all social media probably is placed similarly in the hot/cool idea, this makes me feel more like TikTok is a cool media where I’m actively participating and working to make my feed look how I want it to and give me the videos I like with higher levels of interaction on my end. Or at the very least helps me understand why I find TikTok incredibly enthralling and equally exhausting.

Supplemental Post #1 - Brian: This might be an incoherent tangent, sorry.

 I really loved the readings this week. Seiter’s chapter in relation to Andrejevic, I am thinking about audience identity formation with media, specifically television, and ethnographic studies. Seiter highlighted the shortcomings and problematics of ethnographic methodologies. I loved that Seiter said that ethnography is rooted in colonialism. Too few people make that acknowledgment in my opinion. Ethnography tends to be essentialist in nature. The researcher/interviewer is perceived to be gathering information, listening and recording, and then contextualizing data to offer some insight into a culture and/or people. However, in my view, the role of the ethnographer has rarely been about finding a story and more about crafting one. The ethnographer rarely acknowledges their own implicit biases nor do they address that their ambition and desire to “discover” shapes their own perspective. Seiter points this out in her analysis of the case study for The Cosby show. The interviewers wanted to have a discussion around race in post-Civil Rights era America and used the show as a facade to do so. This, in turn, led to a lack of focus on gender in their study.

To complicate this more I am thinking about how (in)effective ethnographic methodologies are in guiding our understanding of modern fandoms? Fandoms are an interesting kind of audience in how they form. It is the transition from passive spectator to an active participant in the medium as Seiter and Andrejevic point out. In order for this transition to take place, it requires, in my opinion, to form an identity that would align not just with a particular film/television series, but with a dominant group as well. It is adopting behaviors and ideologies that are cohesive to some degree with the dominant group. In some cases, race, gender, sexuality are not integrated into that dominant culture which would mean, of course, that white heteronormativity would be what each member of the fandom is integrating into. How can ethnography contend with that? What does it mean to be a fan of franchises like Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek, for example, when race, gender, and sexuality are largely homogenous? How does the non-white, male, cis-gendered heterosexual fan negotiate their own presence in these fandoms? I’m not sure if I am making any kind of sense and I apologize if I am not but I have many questions and thoughts. 

Core Response #2: Julia

This week's readings (especially the one by professor Seiter) helped me formalise some ideas I have been thinking about a lot this semester, specially in regards to the intersection of television and ethnography. Generally speaking, when we think about an ethnographic methodology applied in a media studies context, the obvious first thought goes to documentary work. Documentarians have a certain responsibility to consider an ethical approach to their interviews and their content curation. They are generally trying to create an accurate narrative out of reality, and therefore the tie to ethnographic work is quite clear. On another level, we have the non-ethical documentary practice that is reality TV. While reality TV also grounds itself in a certain measure of reality, the ethnographic practice behind it is less tangible. While the narrative begins in the realm of what is real and naturally observable, this format relies heavily on producer interference to move and manipulate the narrative in new directions. Although it is important to note that this kind of author manipulation is not unheard of in purely anthropological work either. Ultimately in these cases, ethnography seems to rely on a tether to reality and a desire to record a version of said reality.

However, this week helped me push past some of these ideas of ethnographic work based in reality, and led me to consider ethnographic work within the realm of fiction. Frequently, content creators will prepare for film or TV projects by interviewing people similar to the characters they want to depict, or by immersing themselves in the physical context of their narratives for a period of time. This formula resembles a lot of basic ethnographic projects that find their roots in a colonial and relativist anthropological practice. In the past couple of decades, many producers have started to realise the importance of putting people in charge of their own stories when depicting the experience of a certain identity. In this new formula, writers and directors are encouraged to pursue a more auto-ethnographic method, and to offer viewers a perspective into places and communities that they have been a part of. This new ethnographic approach leads to wonder how these projects might affect audiences differently. Indeed, when creators show audiences a part of their world, is the audience also taking part in ethnographic work? Does the experience of watching television become inherently ethnographic? 

In relation to our previous readings, I am also interested in considering the way that the notion of the cultural forum works in the context of ethnographic work. Is this desire to equalise opinions and showcase social tensions technically a part of a greater anthropological framework?

Core Response #1 - Ursula

Supplemental Response #2_Ann

 *this was going to be a core post but I find that I have a lot of discursive things I want to mention so please bear with me. 

I really like the progressive nature of this week’s readings. Ellen Seiter’s reading is more focused on methodologies and theories; Henry Jenkins’ is a detailed and well-researched case study, and Andrejevic’s is a great recent case study on the internet fan phenomenon. I really liked all of the readings and I feel like Jenkins’ and Andrejevic’s articles make me rethink the idea of “flow” by Raymond Williams. Williams was writing in a time where there was no global fan-base, no internet community, and interactive media wasn’t that prevalent. As a result, his idea of “flow” centers around the actual programs aired on television and the curated interconnected relationships between them. What’s interesting to me is that I feel like this idea of “flow” can be applied to both Jenkins’ analysis of written fan-zines and Andrejevic’s online forum. Both the zines and the television site, TWoP, are essentially an extension to the television programs themselves. One of the respondents in Andrejevic’s article says: “If actors and other persons affiliated with shows regularly showed up, I might end up watching much more TV, simply because of the stronger connection, I would feel” (31). This comment is extremely interesting to me because, in this sense, the internet forum plays a decisive role in engaging the audience into watching television. Andrejevic also comments on this by saying: “The show itself can in some cases become merely a precursor to the real entertainment, which takes the form of its online comeuppance: the gleeful dissection that takes place after it airs” (31-32). As a result, I think it could be argued that the “flow” of television still exists in the age of post-network (even post-cable) television. Instead of being the curated flow of ads, news, and shows, the “flow” of television today incorporates the offline and online engagement between the audience. In some ways, the “flow” of television is even more omnipresent today under the age of interactive media and saturated online communities. The audience is always engaged in conversations related to the show, and that conversation in turn becomes part of the flow. 

Andrejevic has already commented on the characteristics of the online fan community, but I think it is also worth mentioning an online version of Jenkins’ fan-zines. Archive of Our Own, shortened as AO3, is one of the world’s largest fanfiction websites. I say "world’s" because as someone who grew up in another language environment, many fanfiction writers (including myself) still use AO3 as the most stable and prominent platform to post our works (even if these works are not written in English). After reading Jenkins’ article I can’t help but notice the similarities between the fan fiction community in the 80s and today’s AO3. What’s more, I was surprised that I’ve never realized the fact that the fan fiction writers are mostly female. This is true on AO3 as well as in China where I grew up. I’ve rarely seen male writers write fanfictions and realizing that was a revelation to me. Another interesting thing worth mentioning is the fact that AO3, as an organization, won the Best Related Work of Hugo Awards in 2019. This was huge news in the fanfiction community back in 2019, and I think there are many cultural and theoretical implications that can be explored in both the award won and AO3 as an organization devoted to fan fiction.

This has already gone very discursive but I would like to mention one last thing. Jenkins writes: “Just as women’s gossip about soap operas assumes a place within a pre-existing feminine oral culture, fan writing adopts forms and functions traditional to women’s literary culture” (477). Then he continues to talk about the letter-writing traditions between 19th-century women. This also reminds me of a dying written language called Nüshu (女书) in Hunan, China. From a similar origin, Nüshu originated because the old patriarchal society prevented women from going to school to learn the written language. As a result, women in the Jiangyong district of Hunan province invented a secret way of writing among themselves to convey information. The similar methods women took to communicate among each other in oppressing societies across different cultures are fascinating to me. In some way, writing has always been linked to feminism and feminine culture. Sorry for going on a long rant, and I truly enjoyed this week’s readings.