Archive - Topic - Gender and Media

Work, play, art, science, literature, sex, education … digitization leaves nothing untouched. Social relations are being transformed by the development of telecommuting, hypermedia systems, and the new world of on-line information. In particular, everything in the vicinity of sex, gender, and sexuality is being dramatically rewired (Plant,Babes in the Net).I...

Where the political terrain can neither resolve nor suppress inequality, it erupts in culture. Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history, it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined. –Lisa Lowe We need to know where we...

[1]Just in case you’ve been living without cable, like an animal, for the past few years, I’ll begin this essay by explaining that Queer Eye For the Straight Guy is a successful show on Bravo where, every week, five gay men make over a straight man: dressing him in a...

[1]The public rehearsal of making over goes back to 1979, the moment when post-war housing began to fall apart and when This Old House, the WGBH home restoration program, was first aired. Making over was never simply the humble process of rescuing, repairing, updating, and revivifying shabby structures or tasteless...

[1] Steven Soderbergh, director of both experimental films and big-budget genre films, has been unusually candid about racism in Hollywood. In a June 2003 New York Times profile of African American actor Don Cheadle, Soderbergh bluntly states that Cheadle would have advanced further at this point in his career if...

[1] The cultural articulation of sexuality to political violence has enjoyed no shortage of scholarly analysis in recent years. Drawing upon libidinal models familiar to readers of renowned German Freudo-Marxists Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Klaus Theweleit, several monographs published since the mid-to-late 1990s forward compelling arguments about the relationship...

“Each week their mission is to transform a style-deficient and culture-deprived straight man from drab to fab in each of their respective categories: fashion, food and wine, interior design, grooming and culture.” —Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Bravo website blurb [1]The recent popularity of Bravo’s Queer Eye for the...

[1] In a 2003 episode of Extreme Makeover, ABC’s makeover show offering transformation through style advice and multiple plastic surgeries, Amy, a “painfully shy 29-year-old cake decorator from Indiana,” exclaims in her post-makeover interview, “I’m me now! I don’t have to listen to what anyone else says” (Season 1- Episode...

The Rise of the Heterosexual Male Adolescent [1] Prior to the twentieth century, male adolescents were often presumed children in affect and interests, and thus excused from heterosexual potential or desire (Maynes, 1992; Stovkis, 1993; Cohen, 1999; Moran, 2000). Even during the first decades of the twentieth century, when industrialization,...

“As we Latinos redefine ourselves in America, making ourselves up and making ourselves over, we have to be careful, in taking up the promises of America, not to adopt its limiting racial paradigms.” Julia Alvarez, “A White Woman of Color” Will Ferrell to Jennifer Lopez during her opening monologue on...