Core Post #2 - Brian

 In Sara Banet-Weisers What’s Your Flava: Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture she highlights what I understand to be a sort of cultural cognitive dissonance in how television maps out cultures of particular racial and ethnic groups, mostly Black American, onto other racial and ethnic groups. She writes, “The representation of the ‘urban,’ like the representation of girl power, is associated with the ideological notion that contemporary American society is a multicultural, postfeminist one in which racial difference and gender discrimination are no longer salient. Race, like gender, comes to us in the contemporary context as a commodity, and as such the ideologies shaping these representational politics are necessarily rethought and recast” (204). 

These postracial and postfeminist notions sever culture from the social and political implications which they are formed under and in relation to. “Urbanness” is Black American culture distanced from Black people and mapped out onto white and non-Black people in television and media. This visible invisibility is much like that of how networks like Nickelodeon approach their girl-led tv series. In its color and gender blindness, it ends up perpetuating the same racial and gendered restraints. For instance, iCarly, Zoey 101, and Victorious are all series led by young girls. In their postfeminist ideological production, it is at first glance forward-thinking, progressive. There seems to be no justification or reasoning behind why these series are led by teenage girls at times when similar sitcoms on the television landscape are led by mostly (young) adult men. What lies underneath however is the covert sexualization of these young girls (see: Dan Schneider). The roles become incredibly restrictive and disturbing as the underlying implications of their roles are situated in voyeurism and render them as sexual objects in the pedophilic fantasies of a man.